84 Trash Bags of American Flags: The Obama Campaign’s Newest Chunk of Ineptitude

I had thought until this past week that John Kerry’s 2004 campaign was the most inept and tone-deaf Presidential run I had ever seen. Barack Obama and the Democratic Party seem to be doing their best since last Wednesday to outdo the snobbish Brahmin and his band of bumbling, out-of-touch pols.

Today provides a great example of just how disconnected the Obama campaign really is from the average American. Let’s say you’re way up there in the Obama campaign. You’ve already seen your guy get stung hard for seeming to look down his nose at even mildly overt displays of love for America such as wearing an American flag pin. It took him a couple months to put that story down. Then you saw it flare back up as his wife said that watching him campaign for President was the first time in he adult life she had ever been proud of her country. Then she turned right around and said that America was “downright mean”. Add to that the fiery sermons from your guys spiritual mentor for twenty years and the pastor of the church he embraced who said, among other things, “God damn America”.

Given these stories, and others, that indicate your candidate’s love for America is, well, let’s call it conditional, based on America becoming what he wants it to be instead of what it actually is, wouldn’t you pay some extra bit of attention to the symbolism the campaign puts out?

For instance, 12,000 American flags handed out to the crowd at Invesco Field to wave during Obama’s big speech is a powerful symbol and redounds well on him. That’s a good call for his team. A cheering crowd waving American flags speaks to the heart of every American who has even a tiny amount of honest love of country. It’s cheap and it works, which is why every campaign has done it for decades upon decades.

Oh the other hand, 84 bags of bundled American flags in the trash bins of Invesco Field a week after his big speech is also a powerful symbol. It brings back every single disparaging thing he’s ever said about America and her flag. It resurrects every “Obama hates America” story that he had worked so hard to slay in the past year and puts them smack in front of him at the worst possible moment. That’s a colossally stupid oversight.

It’s even more stupid and amateurish to leave them there for a vendor to find and deliver to John McCain’s campaign so that he can use them in a campaign stop in Colorado today. And believe me, he’s going to use them to the hilt. Military veterans who have fought and bled for that flag and what it represents will haul every one of those trash bags to the stage. The outrage over the mistreatment of thousands of American flags will be palpable. The one thing the Obama campaign can’t afford right now, given that a good-sized chunk of America is already angry at him for the scurrilous attacks on Sarah Palin and her family, is to make voters mad.

What’s going to really tick people off is that the flags weren’t haphazardly tossed into trash bags. If they were, the Obama campaign could at least say that throwing them away was careless and a bit foolish but merely an oversight. The bundled flags say that there was some care taken to collect the flags in an organized way, which strongly implies that putting them in trash bags and shoving them into a dumpster, or wherever they were found, was also done in an organized way.

I’m being charitable in calling this an oversight. I think a more realistic explanation is that the Obama campaign has no earthly idea what our flag means to most Americans. They, being rock-ribbed progressives suckled at the breast of radical activists and leftist politicians, see the flag as an anachronism whose time has passed. Their transnationalism tells them that the flag really isn’t important at all, since borders and national identity aren’t really important, and they can’t quite understand that it really does matter to millions of poor, dumb yokels who are in desperate need of reeducation. They have this huge blind spot that prevents them from empathizing with patriotic Americans in any way at all and they seem to have no interest in growing out of their closed view of this country.

The message the McCain campaign is going to bring today is that Barack Obama doesn’t give a rip for there America where we all live because he’s too busy trying to mold America into a country of his own imagining for which he might some day feel a faint smidgen of pride. You’d better believe that message will resonate, especially after his speech last Thursday.

There’s also more than a hint of eco-hypocrisy in this story as well. Ed Morrissey reminds us of that.

Remember when the DNCC was supposed to be the “greenest convention ever”? How they worried about the color of the food and using organic materials in their merchandise? I guess we can see where the “green” concern ends … at red, white, and blue.

Yeah. Just more from the “Do as we say, not as we do” party.

I seriously doubt we’ll see 84 garbage bags full of American flags coming out of Minneapolis/St. Paul. You can bet that there are Democratic operatives crawling through the dumpsters at the Xcel Center today, though. Bet your bottom dollar. But they won’t find such disregard for the flag of the United States of America. Not from John McCain’s campaign. It’s not even plausible.

Tags: America, Barack Obama, Ed Morrissey, John McCain, Progressives