Puff, the magic Obama!

Last Thursday evening at the Democratic National Convention, presidential candidate Barack Obama tried to score a political touchdown on the 50 yard line of Denver's Invesco Field stadium. Instead, he won the all-time governmental convention award for the best over-the-top political spectacle of sight, sound, speech and pyrotechnics – complete with superstar performances, Braveheart-like epic music endings and an Olympic-sized fireworks show.

For a week prior to the event, newscasters, commentators and pundits were trying to guess what exactly that Greco-Roman, column-structure was that served as a stage backdrop, and what it was supposed to be representing and stating on behalf of Obama. Hypotheses were strewn across the news and the Internet. Despite that Obama's camp suggested these Athenian pillars were merely representative of the history of democracy, the entire visual felt more like a temple than a tenured politician's presidential platform. Even his podium looked more like a lectern or pulpit, which raised and lowered at will and out of sight beneath the stage. One thing is certain – the backdrop was politically correct and globally friendly. In fact, outside of a splattering of a few American flags, both DNC stages at the Pepsi Center and Invesco Field were uncharacteristically unpatriotic.

When a political convention turns into a Super Bowl half-time show, Democrats should be crying out in disgust, but they're not. Instead, they and others are praising Obama and the entire extravaganza, labeling it a monumental moment in history. But, with giant Trinitrons broadcasting his image from the flanks of the stage and the tops of the stadium, I felt like he was running more for emperor of the world than president of the United States. Liberal media was even questioning if it wasn't over the top. Similarities can be drawn between JFK addressing the DNC at the L.A. Coliseum or Martin Luther King Jr. standing before the Greek pillars at the Lincoln Memorial, but neither Kennedy nor King rebuilt the Parthenon for their presentation. Is this the simple, substance-oriented, budget-cutting Obama we can expect as a president?

Obama's introduction video paraded him as a man for all seasons with a poor, rural, urban family background, and one who is an all-around loving father, romantic husband, inspirational speaker, humanitarian sage, compassionate senator, constitutional lawyer and supreme political leader of the free world. At the end of this glorifying biography, Obama glided onto the stage to address the nation (or world?) as the fulfillment of the civil rights movement on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's hallmark "I have a dream" speech.

Sadly, throughout Obama's message, he never once used the term "patriotic," and the only time he used "patriotism" was in a negative comment against John McCain. And not once did Obama mention America's founders, our Constitution or even the word "liberty," but he did mention gays, lesbians and the Kennedys and Clintons three times each.

There was not one reference to the "God" of our forefathers in his speech, except for a token "God bless America!" in conclusion. His speech writers also milked down attempts to reach across the aisle to evangelicals with the unfinished reference, "in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess." (For the record, the biblical verse to which Obama referred is Hebrews 4:14, which uses the word "faith" not "hope," and the object of that faith in which we are to profess is not America but the "great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God.")

As I listened to Obama's speech, which mentioned "change" roughly 15 times, I thought, "I wonder how many of those 80,000 in attendance (and millions more watching by television) realize what type of change is really coming with Obama?" I'm not saying change isn't needed. It is.

I want change in government, but not the type that will increase its role in our lives. I want change for our government to better adhere to and follow the Constitution, but not the type that appoints liberal judges and justices who legislate from the bench. I want change with America's relationships with the rest of the world, but not the type that further compromises our national security. I want change with America's role in the Middle East, but not the type that creates instability and gives al-Qaida the upper hand again. I want changes in our medical care, but I don't want more big government and billions of dollars in new taxes. I want change with America's deficit, but not the type that increases it. I want change at America's borders, but not the type that creates more holes for terrorists and other illegal transport. I desperately want change in the tax code, but not one that ultimately raises taxes (only a Fair Tax eliminates most).

But all those types of changes are exactly what Americans will experience if we elect Barack Obama as president: More government, more taxes, more fluid borders and boundaries, more globalization and more risks with terrorism. Let there be no doubt about it – we will have change with Obama, but, America, I assure you it is not the type of change we need or want.

Hillary Clinton once mocked and ridiculed the depth of Obama's experience and message. Bill Clinton called Barack's candidacy the "biggest fairy tale" and even recently still couldn't tell an ABC News correspondent that Obama was yet qualified or ready. Even Obama's own VP choice, Joe Biden, echoed the same sentiment just a short time ago by saying about Obama: "The presidency is not something that lends itself to on the job training." Biden and the Clintons are still correct. Obama is in reality nothing more than an inexperienced, liberal radical. He can trumpet a campaign of change, but all the political pomp and circumstance can't change his insides or lack of leadership experience.

As with so many of you, I realized months ago Obama could unfortunately get away with just about anything because too many Americans seem to care only about charisma and the term "change." It doesn't matter if Obama plagiarizes speeches, who his pastor and spiritual mentor is for 20 years, that he's got the most liberal voting record in the Senate, that he refused to wear the American flag as a pin, that he didn't place his hand over his heart during the national anthem, that his wife has just recently become proud of her country or that he is sympathetic to Muslim terrorist groups, etc. Even a decade ago most could have never imagined appointing such a person to be county supervisor, let alone the president of the United States.

So maybe those Greek pillars just may represent something after all, because, in ancient Greece, people were more enamored by rhetoric and passionate presentations than by principled truths and pragmatic solutions. In modern America, these few millennia later, nothing seems to have changed. I might not be the smartest man on the political block, but I know fluff when I see it (or is it Puff?). Last Thursday night, Obama conducted his version of a political David Copperfield magic show. Will Americans really not see beyond his illusory performance?

America, we are being duped again by fluff and folly, glitz and glamour, and hype and Hollywood. It's time for us to wake up before it's too late! Now, more than ever, is the time to join the NObama-nation revolution. No way. No how. NObama.

Reawakening our country and making necessary societal changes is the very reason I've fully engaged in the culture wars with my new book (released in one week on Sept. 7), "Black Belt Patriotism," available for pre-order from Amazon. It is my battle plan for winning back America – and not just mine, but our founders too, as I also turned to them for their old solutions to our new problems.

Bottom line: Obama's big government solutions will cost us big money through increased taxes and increased national debt. And in the third chapter of my book, "Stop America's Nightmare of Debt," I cite Thomas Jefferson, who gave some timely advice for just such a prospective approach to government:

What we need now more than ever is smaller government and lower taxes. Thomas Jefferson was particularly eloquent on the problem of government debt and taxes: 'To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers. [A prophetic statement?]