Perhaps never before in American history have two individuals so captured the hearts, minds and imaginations of such a wide proportion of the citizenry as have Sarah Palin and Barack Obama.  Both are charismatic, charming in their own ways, in dramatic, stand-above-the-crowd fashion.  Both have written best-selling autobiographies, which have mesmerized large swaths of the American public.

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There, however, the similarities end.

One has been adored by the leftist-activist media brigade, which gleefully tossed away its fabled “objectivity” in order to get the candidate with whom it was both in love and in sync elected.  The other has been veritably loathed by the same Ivy League-centric mandarin class which long ago forsook its working-class roots and is now actively ashamed of them.

One represents academic elitism.  The other comes from a standard state university background.

One uses a teleprompter for nearly every spoken word, often flailing, repeating sentences due to electronic glitches and mispronouncing even those words that seem simple to the average American:


The other uses a few broad-topic scribbles on her hand for prompts.

One is the darling of Hollywood; the other is the butt of crass celebrity jokes.

Pundits see this pair in purely political dimension of left vs. right.

What we have here, however, is far, far more fundamental than a left vs. right spectacle, performed by two adroit representatives.

It’s far more meaty than the little tit for tats among the leftist literati and their adversaries, the conservative commoners.

No, what we have here are two philosophies fighting to the death for the soul of America, each represented by one phenomenal public figure.

Barack Obama, in keeping with international socialists throughout the last century, has proclaimed himself loudly-and-clearly a “citizen of the world.”  He conducted his entire campaign as a lecture to greedy, over-consuming Americans on the necessity of propping up the lagging third world and the inherent goodness of his redistributive plans for government.

That this message was apparently lost by mainstream American voters in the haze of media sycophancy, is a sad commentary on both our presumed independent press and the attention span of voters.  Nevertheless, Barack Obama’s message was clear to sentient observers from the start of his campaign.

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Whether he was explaining the necessity for putting the coal business out of business for the good of global climate goals or telling people they couldn’t just drive their SUVs anywhere they wanted to go and expect the people in the rest of the world to just go along, he made his message clear.

We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.

To Obama, America is the problem to the world, not the solution.  He hammered away consistently at his intention to divvy up the American “pie” in international-socialist fashion, even while disingenuously peppering his talk with Reaganite calls for lowering taxes on the middle-class.

Even if folks missed some of his intentions, it should have been clear to all but the proverbial ostriches among us that Obama was declaring himself a citizen of the world when he actually made his “citizen-of-the-world” speech in Berlin.  Thronged by ogling, drooling, chanting Europeans on a celebrity campaign tour, Obama took great pains to paint himself as post-American.


And his first year in the presidency has demonstrated beyond doubt that Barack Obama is indeed anything but an all-American president.  From his obsequious bowing, his kumbayah-to-the-world speech at the UN and his magnanimous granting of American civil rights to foreign terrorists, he has demonstrated again and again that America is nothing to him but a member state of the morally superior global community.

Which brings us to Sarah Palin, his arch-foe in the public psyche.

No, Mrs. Palin holds no public office.  She wields no genuine power in terms of armies or bureaucracies.  She is merely a private citizen.

But Sarah Palin has arisen from the ashes of electoral defeat as the embodiment of archetypal American values, beliefs, hopes and dreams.

At present, with a “post-American” president at the helm, Sarah Palin carries the torch of liberty and American exceptionalism in the palm of her lovely hand.  She is the surviving embodiment of the spirit of 1776 and the Reagan reformation.

She is at once the American phoenix and the shining city on the hill, captured in the imaginations of a people still yearning to be free and determined to strive for greatness, even if the rest of the world prefers to drown in mediocrity, corruption and defeatist socialist uniformity.

While it is easy to see Barack Obama and Sarah Palin as nothing but political adversaries in a nation grown weary with partisanship, that explanation defies the reality we see exhibited in the passions of their respective followers.

Whichever side one is on, the stakes are clear.  Nothing less than the soul of America is on the line.

Will we give up forever on the American dream and become nothing more than footnotes in the annals of failed international socialism?

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Or will we see an American reformation that reestablishes individual liberty and ingenuity as moral imperatives worth fighting for and preserving for our progeny?

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The stakes could not be higher.  And the archetypes, Palin and Obama, could not be clearer.

These two torch-bearers define an era in which fence-sitting is beyond the bounds of reason.

Two opposing world views are colliding.

And only one side can prevail.