The Weekly Standard relates the remarkable news that President Barack Obama is only 7 points ahead in the Arkansas Democrat primary, in a poll taken after his announcement of support for gay marriage.
Obama’s opponent in this race is not Keith Judd, the Texas prison inmate who drew a startling 42 percent of the vote in the West Virginia primary, but rather John Wolfe Jr., a lawyer from Tennessee who has been running a shoestring campaign. He’s on the ballot in both Arkansas on May 22, and Texas on May 29.
He earned a respectable 12 percent in Louisiana last weekend, where President Obama drew 76 percent against three challengers. Interestingly, since Louisiana awards delegates by parish, and Wolfe cleared the 15 percent threshold in several of them, he also became the only candidate besides Obama who will have delegates at the Democrat convention in Charlotte. Arkansas has an open primary, so he has a chance to attract some "crossover" support.
Unlike his primary opponent, who likes to roar into town with a million-dollar taxpayer-funded motorcade, Wolfe cited the cheap parking meters near the Arkansas capital as one of the reasons he can afford to mount a strong campaign there: “It’s $2 to park all day,” he told the Times-Picayune in Louisiana.
He also offered some policy criticism:
Wolfe, a lawyer, is a white Southerner, but contrary to stereotype, his disappointment with Obama comes from a left perspective. He calls Obama a "pantomime populist," who has bedazzled his progressive constituency into accepting his betrayal of their principles on both domestic and foreign policy.
He said Obama has been a captive of Wall Street and banking interests at home, and, on foreign policy, he recalls a recent cartoon in which a hippieish girl is saying, "I hated those bombs that Bush dropped but I love those drone missiles that Obama is sending into Afghanistan."
He also told the Weekly Standard he supports the repeal of ObamaCare, because “he says it doesn’t lower health care costs, even if the White House claims otherwise.”
