Why millions won't be voting for Barack today

ONE of the things that most amazes people about Barack Hussein Obama is the suddenness of his rise. Barack who? A year ago, most people didn't know his name. The conventional wisdom on all sides was that Hillary Clinton, beneficiary of the mighty "Clinton machine", was certain to snatch the nomination and then march triumphantly to the White House. It was one of those certainties that was inevitable until it didn't happen.

An important point to grasp about Obama's success is that his obscurity, far from being a handicap, has been a tremendous asset. And I do not mean only the adventitious obscurity of Obama's birth, in reduced circumstances, to a black father from Kenya and a white American woman. I mean also the anonymity he has assiduously cultivated throughout his adult career.

There are many advantages to being a cipher. For one thing, it is a powerful goad to re-invention, not to say dissimulation. If people have no idea who you are, where you come from, what you believe, a canny campaign manager with lots of cash Obama has outspent McCain 20-1 on television advertising can pass you off as anything he likes.

"Who is Barack Obama?" That is the biggest unanswered question of the 2008 Presidential campaign. Even now, on the day of the election, the electorate doesn't know the answer.

Obama's original birth certificate has not been released. His records at Occidental College, where he started college, are not available. His records from Columbia University, where he was a student in the 1980s, are sealed. His Selective Service Registration? Not released.

If he wrote anything when head of the Harvard Law Review, it has yet to turn up. During his 12-year stint teaching law at the University of Chicago, he published no scholarly work. His list of law clients? Not released.

When he was a state senator in Illinois, he voted "present" 130 times instead of casting a vote. As a first-term US Senator, he has sponsored almost no legislation. The Los Angeles Times possesses, but refuses to release, a 2003 video tape of banquet at which Obama dilated on his friendship with Rashid Khalidi, a radical PLO sympathiser.

Is it surprising that some commentators have compared Obama to Jay Gatsby, the charismatic anti-hero of F Scott Fitzgerald's novella?

Then there are Obama's friends and associates. There's Bill Ayers, for example. As a member of the Weather Underground, Ayers was responsible for some 20 bombs at government buildings and banks in the 1970s. When asked about Ayers, Obama said that he was just "a guy in the neighbourhood". But his first political fundraiser, in 1995, was held in Ayers's living room. Obama was chairman of the board of a foundation that Ayers's started and guided. For a decade, they worked hand in glove on several Left-wing initiatives in Chicago.

It's easy to see why Obama is (as Colin Powell put it in his endorsement) an "electrifying" figure. Leave aside the $650 million his campaign has raised (you can buy a lot of "electricity" for $650 million). Obama is young. He is suave. He exudes energy and confidence. He is the anti-Bush: a first-term Senator who has already distinguished himself as the most Left-wing inhabitant of that august chamber.

Above all, he is (at least in part) black. What better receptacle for the hopes and dreams of liberal, guilt-infatuated America? What prodigies of expiation might be accomplished were this young, charismatic, half-black apostle of egalitarian change elected President of the United States?

And how might a President Barack Obama govern? The media has trodden gingerly, but we've had some clues. At a rally a couple of months ago, Obama called for the creation of "a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the military. That bit is not in the official transcript, but you can hear it on the video clip.

Then there is his famous off-hand comment to "Joe the Plumber". His tax plan, Obama said, wasn't intended to stifle ambition, it was merely meant to "spread the wealth around". Lest there be any doubt about what that might mean, a radio interview from 2001 surfaced a week ago in which Obama advocated breaking free "from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers and the Constitution" in order to address "issues of the redistribution of wealth". Because he regards the American people as essentially "selfish" (a sentiment memorably reinforced by Michelle Obama when she described America as "just downright mean"), Obama cannot help regarding success as a form of failure.

The bottom line is that, on domestic issues, Obama would govern as the Nanny-in-Chief, enforcing a Left-wing, politically correct, big-government agenda on everything from health care and energy to free speech and welfare policy.

What would an Obama presidency mean for the rest of the world? Two points are revealing: Obama's professed willingness to sit down with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "without preconditions" and his three-step response to Russia's attack on Georgia earlier this summer. His first response on Georgia was to say that there was "fault on both sides". Then he suggested handing the problem over to the UN. And then, noting how well John McCain's categorical condemnation of Russian aggression was playing, he quietly signed on to a toothless version of that.

There is every reason to agree with his Democratic running mate, Joe Biden, that Obama, were he elected, would be quickly be "tested" by a serious international crisis. What Biden didn't say, but what is also true, is that Obama's response is likely to be one of accommodation if not capitulation.

The polls and pundits are nearly unanimous in telling us that Obama's victory is inevitable. Of course, he may win. But it wouldn't be the first time that something was proclaimed inevitable until it didn't happen.

* Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion magazine and publisher of Encounter Books.