Liberals love to suggest that Bristol Palin getting pregnant shows that abstinence education doesn’t work. In similar manner, given the over the top, nutsy tone of the Obama base online,  people are taking an anything to win attitude? If he can’t sell post-partisanship to his base (heck, according to him, he can’t even get his campaign to lay off its “hair trigger”), good luck actually achieving it in Washington.

Of course, there is more evidence of this than just out of control supporters. Obama going after McCain on abortion is really an extreme partisan act. John Kerry didn’t go there with George W. Bush, neither did Al Gore. Both were smart enough to know the issue is radioactive with a lot of voters who otherwise vote Democratic, but have got some serious issues with the party on abortion. After the 2004 election, Democrats identified that they needed to tone down the pro-abortion image and they took over Congress with the help of pro-life Democrats like Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), and Congressmen Heath Shuler (D-NC) and Brad Ellsworth (D-IN.)

With this ad, Obama has opened himself up. If you were to define a centrist position on abortion, it would be that abortion ought to be available only early in pregnancy with reasonable restrictions in place such as parental consent/notification and informed consent, and there’d be no taxpayer funding of abortion outside the limited cases covered by the Hyde Amendment. The problem with Senator Obama, the first thing he’s promised to do as President is sign the mis-named Freedom of Choice Act, which will effectively remove all restrictions on abortion. Yeah, bringing that up first thing is the way to bring our country together. If McCain’s smart, they’ve got an ad in production already.

In the end, Obama can’t be Mr. Post-Partisan because his rhetoric is either very naive or very cynical. Obama pretends the issues that divide Americans are quite small, when in many cases, they amount to huge worldview issues over things like the role of government and the role of God in society. Acting like solutions to these problems can be solved by a three word mantra, “Yes, we can” is over-simplification that’s really quite disrespectful to the honest issues Americans are debating.

Obama stands full bore on the left side of the political perspective, and his policies rather than transcending left and right, are the epitome of the left. He’s just trying to wrap far leftism in a “post-partisan” package. This facade will fail. The only question is whether he’ll be able to trick enough Americans to get the presidency before it does.

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