Perception = Reality? Maybe not.

This came in on the overnight Wells Fargo stagecoach from the Midwest to the West Coast, or as my cousin Dan would prefer, the "Left Coast." Dan seems to be digging in during this election season as a deeply conservative antidote to what he views as my unreconstructed liberalism, I suppose. My comments and some new research will follow:

Barack Obama has been making ridiculously self absorbed statements, as though he were "the anointed one". On foreign soil he has berated his country. His message resonates well with those of the far left who wish to see America brought to its knees before the rest of the world, to be punished for its "evil" ways.

It was the "anointed one" who made the self promoting statements of grand and biblical proportion to which the right is responding now.

David, your efforts and the efforts of so many in media trying desperately to prop Obama up are not helping him. Playing him for a race victim, or now a victim of religious extremists, is not being bought by most Americans. You fail to see that the vast majority of Americans want this country to remain strong and prosperous, able to defend itself in a very dangerous world. A "victim" does not make a strong leader.

We will not vote a leftist into the presidency, no matter who he is or what he represents. And try as he might, Barack has not been able to shift out of that left extreme fast enough or convincingly enough to inspire the votes he would need if he becomes the candidate.

You may have trouble seeing this, but believe me, Bill and Hillary are sensing blood in the water now.

Least ways, that's my view from the right for the moment.

During every Presidential campaign I have witnessed (14), this country has divided into false halves of itself, as if the candidates representing the opposing parties are polar opposites.

Most years, nothing could be further from the truth. The only time a true right-winger won his party's nomination in my memory was 1964. His name was Barry Goldwater. I supported him.

The only time a true left-winger won his party's nomination was 1972. His name was George McGovern, and I supported him.

Every other candidate for both parties has essentially been a centrist. Wait, you say, what about Ronald Reagan. Sorry to the bearer of bad news, but Reagan was a big-government liberal when he got elected. Those of us living in California under his reign as Governor can attest that he provided more welfare, food stamps, and other social benefits than anyone who occupied the office before or since.

Reagan was all image, no substance. It's laughable to me to see conservatives who celebrate his memory as if he ever did anything to further their extremist agenda. It is notable that he also was the oldest person ever to run for President until this year's presumptive GOP nominee, John McCain. Many of his speeches were peppered by confused references to roles he'd played in movies as opposed to things that had actually happened in his real life.

Meanwhile, under his absent-minded leadership, this country suffered through one of the greatest series of corruption scandals since Richard Nixon, the only President ever forced from office under threat of impeachment.

I hated Reagan for the empty suit he was, but I could never actually hate Nixon. He may have been a corrupt politician, but he also possessed the kind of mind that perceived the geopolitical balance of power with a clarity (even when I disagreed with him) that we have seldom seen since.

At the current Olympics in China, two of Nixon's proteges have been honored as deeply respected guests: Henry Kissinger and George H. W. Bush. Without delving into the many flaws of those two individuals -- including in Kissinger's case war crimes that even his lifelong sponsor, David Rockefeller, once indicated to me probably were prosecutable, on the issue of China both K & B proved to be prescient.

You know, it fascinates me that in order to actually succeed in the American political system, Presidents and other senior officials need to more or less violate their supposed most-deeply-held principles.

If Nixon's predecessor, LBJ, or the next Democratic President, Carter, had been the one to "open up" China, they would have been branded as Communists by the GOP attack machine.

Fast forward to the '90s. We achieved welfare reform and NAFTA not courtesy of Republicans but from Bill Clinton. The only aggressive military attempt to take out Osama bin-laden before he could hurt us was launched by Clinton, despite the risky political context of his decision.

Republicans accused him of trying to divert attention from his sex scandal with his military strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, but in fact he was trying to hit al-Qaeda before al-Qaeda hit us.

We all know (or should know) what happened next. Despite repeated warnings from the Clinton officials as they turned over the White House to Bush, the new administration that had lost the popular vote in 2000 dismissed this threat, favoring instead Condi Rice's "state-based terrorism theory," bred at a private elite university and so far divorced from reality that the 9/11 families who lost loved ones are fully justified in their attempt to recover damages from the Bush administration's negligence.

So much for the charge that Obama is a "leftist." Dan, you have got be kidding me. He's just another centrist, as is McCain. But the difference is that McCain is a dinosaur, out of touch with the moment, and therefore of no further use to the American population. His record as a corrupt politician is also a huge liability this fall.

Regardless, at the end of the day, despite all of McCain's hate-attack-ads, and the delusional wishes of his racist followers willing to sink to the level of calling a deeply Christian man the "AntiChrist," Obama remains quite comfortably in the lead in the polls, 46.8-42% and according to the best estimates, in the electoral vote, it's all Obama, 309-229, a landslide.

I see nothing for Democrats to be concerned about. This is not an election about left vs. right; rather it's center-hopeful vs. center-fear-monger. That is our true choice. Oh yes, it's also the choice between a young, hopeful person the world doesn't really believe we have the courage to elect and an old cynic who will simply further degrade America's respect in a newly globalized era.

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