Left Drags Down Obama
To the Editor:

Contrary to Michael Gorman's assertion (June 27 letter), "racism" isn't Barack Obama's biggest opponent, not by a long shot.

His biggest opponent is the platform he's running on. Running with a failed and pernicious left-wing ideology in a country where conservatives outnumber liberals by better than two to one is a poor strategy, even in the wake of a President as unpopular as this one.

Moreover, that ideology has been tried here before, starting with LBJ, who followed up Kennedy's pro-business and pro-worker tax slashing with the advent of "Keynesian policies." Nixon, Ford and Carter all followed that ill-conceived path (Nixon once said, "We are ALL Keynesians now") until it all imploded in stagflation under the star-crossed Jimmy Carter.

Recently Europeans have grown equally tired of Keynesianism's poor results. Germany replaced the left-wing Schröder regime with Angela Merkel's administration and Nicolas Sarkozy ("Sarko the American") won a lopsided victory over Segolene Royal in France last year, despite the unpopularity of fellow center-right UMP leader Jacques Chirac.

One saving grace for America is that the left here can be counted on to fail because it's filled with people who like to claim they'd "die for their beliefs," apparently not in actual action, but at least in thought.

The world isn't often changed by people "who'd die for their beliefs" (and NEVER by those who use that as an empty claim); it's changed by people willing to kill for them. The capitalist ranks tend to be filled with people who'd "kill for their beliefs." That's probably a large part of the reason why America's Founders were able to forge a nation with the support of only 12 percent of the people living here at the time.

JOSEPH M. KEARNEY