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The Times - Obama: is America ready for this dangerous leftwinger?
Listen to the rhetoric of Barack Obama… by Gerard Baker

It [Michelle Obama's never-been-proud speech] was instructive for two reasons. First, it reinforced the growing sense of unease that even some Obama supporters have felt about the increasingly messianic nature of the candidate’s campaign. There’s always been a Second Coming quality about Mr Obama’s rhetoric. The claim that his electoral successes in places like Nebraska and Wisconsin might transcend all that America has achieved in its history can only add to that worry.

Secondly, and more importantly, I suspect it reveals much about what the Obama family really thinks about the kind of nation that America is. Mrs Obama is surely not alone in thinking not very much about what America has been or done in the past quarter century or more. In fact, it is a trope of the left wing of the Democratic party that America has been a pretty wretched sort of place.

There is a caste of left-wing Americans who wish essentially and in all honesty that their country was much more like France. They wish it had much higher levels of taxation and government intervention, that it had much higher levels of welfare, that it did not have such a “militaristic” approach to foreign policy. Above all, that its national goals were dictated, not by the dreadful halfwits who inhabit godforsaken places like Kansas and Mississippi, but by the counsels of the United Nations. …

America is certainly moving left in the post-George Bush era. The long period of conservative ascendancy is clearly over, buried by a Republican Party of recent years that has preached intolerance and practised incompetence. That a new era in American politics is beginning is not in doubt. But are Americans really ready to leap all the way across in one go to embrace a European-style Left?

It’s funny he mentions France, this morning. I think I fell asleep fretting about France, for some reason. Probably because this, which Peter was reading excerpts of to me last weekend:

TechCrunch - Ex-Apple Team To Launch Stealth Startup Fotonauts

Hullot and much of the Paris engineering office was let go from Apple in 2006 after Hullot reportedly lost an internal political battle over the direction of the iPhone. But under French law, laid off workers can receive 80% pay for up to 18 months after losing their jobs, directly from the government. Hullot kept five of his top engineers to work on fotonauts, while the French government paid their wages.

Which led to some interesting comments.