Category Archives: Barack Obama

Hero worship?

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I posted below what I labeled three parts of a four-part response to Doug Hagler’s comments on my post “The self-esteem presidency.” Those parts were, respectively, a post noting mistakes Sarah Palin has made, one listing positive things about Barack Obama, and one listing positive things about the overly- and unfairly-vilified Dick Cheney. Being all of the same kind, detail posts, they quite properly went together. There is, however, a broader response that I think needs to be offered. Doug kicked the conversation off not just with a challenge, but with an assertion:

See, my theory is that hero-worship is just part of politics, and my guess is that it is just as operative with Palin supporters as it is with Obama supporters.

I think the best that can be said of the first part of this statement, the general theory Doug propounded, is that to the extent that it’s true, it’s not meaningful. On the one hand, I don’t know that we can rule out all hero worship for any significant politician—heck, I can think of one or two people who could be accused of that with respect to John McCain, though not for anything he’s done in politics. (Come to think of it, though, that same qualifier could be applied to most of Barack Obama’s adoring fans.) On the other, however, and more significantly, large-scale hero worship for politicians is a very rare thing. Take John Kerry, for instance (I’m tempted to say, “Please!”): he certainly tried to create an heroic image for himself, but I don’t think even Democrats bought it on a visceral level. They staunchly supported him, but for ideological reasons—and for emotional reasons that had nothing to do with Sen. Kerry, on which more in a minute. Hero worship of Ol’ Long Face was simply not in evidence.

If you look at the major politicians out there, at recent presidents and presidential candidates, Sen. Kerry was in that respect the rule, not the exception. Granted, Sen. Kerry was at the uncharismatic end for a politician, and thus unusually unlikely to inspire adoration—but not even Bill Clinton, the most charismatic of a remarkably unappealing set of presidential contenders over the last quarter-century, never inspired anything remotely approaching true widespread hero worship, let alone anything one might think to call a cult of personality.

This past campaign was the exception. Under normal circumstances, Hillary Clinton would have run away with the Democratic nomination, because she came into the campaign generating far more passion than any non-incumbent Democratic presidential candidate of the preceding 45 years; in some cases, I think you could fairly call that hero worship, of a purely ideological sort. As it was, though, she got blown away by somebody who could also generate that ideological sort of hero worship, but who also had the charisma and political skills to create much more—and took full advantage of them, even amplifying them by using quasi-messianic language of himself in his speeches.

This, of course, created a hunger in the Republican base for a candidate of their own who could do the same—and when Sen. McCain found one to be his running mate, the base went through the roof. There were a couple things, however, which mitigated against the development of the same sort of personality cult around Gov. Palin that had developed around Sen. Obama. The first, of course, was the fact that the McCain campaign didn’t want any such thing to happen; indeed, once they realized just how big a tiger they’d gotten by the tail, their main concern the rest of the way appeared to be keeping Gov. Palin from upstaging Sen. McCain. I wouldn’t say the GOP candidate was actively trying to squash support for his running mate, but he and his staff were definitely working to prevent it from developing in ways that wouldn’t benefit him directly.

The second, on the evidence of her own writings and speeches since the campaign, appears to have been that Gov. Palin wasn’t interested in any such thing happening either. Not only did she not make any “elect me and everything will be wonderful” types of statements during the campaign, she hasn’t made any since, or indeed done anything close. She has not adopted a strategy of offering herself to the nation, and there seems to be no reason to think that will change. Nor has she tried to organize, or indeed offered any support to, the community of online communities that have developed around her; in fact, the only acknowledgements I can recall from her staff of sites like Conservatives4Palin and TeamSarah have been vaguely unflattering.

The upshot of all of this is that, while there are no doubt a lot of people out there who could be fairly accused of hero worship with regard to Gov. Palin, whose view of her is unreasonably positive, there’s none of the fawning over her that one gets over the President, even from her most prominent supporters. There are no clergy offering prayers to her, no celebrities making music videos offering prayers to her, no school districts teaching their students to sing worship songs about her, no “Palin Youth” to match the “Obama Youth”—none of that, nothing of the kind. And certainly there’s no other politician, now or in living memory, who’s ever gotten that sort of treatment. The Obama phenomenon (Obamanomenon?) is and remains sui generis—at least outside countries like North Korea that can compel it.

Now, I can understand Doug’s desire to argue otherwise, since I know the personality cult of the Obamessiah doesn’t make him any happier than it does me; I can understand why he would want to be able to argue that this is just par for the course in politics, not something of which the Left has become uniquely guilty. In the end, though, the facts just won’t sustain that argument; this is in fact something unique to the Left in American politics. I continue to believe that there’s good reason for that, that this is no accident but rather is the result of the secular Left’s search for a secular messiah to replace the one it has decisively rejected. For all the temptation to political idolatry on the Right (something I’ve certainly written about often enough), that particular temptation doesn’t exist there, as religious conservatives already have a Messiah and non-religious conservatives tend to be quite consciously anti-messianic. Here’s hoping that doesn’t change.

10 positive things about Barack Obama

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This is the second part of a four-part response to cyberfriend Doug Hagler; I’m putting up the first three all together, posting them in reverse chronological order so they’ll be in the right order going down the page. In his collection of (mostly) positive statements about George W. Bush—for which I give him credit despite the ridiculous hyperbole of describing Bush 43 as “perhaps the worst presidency in American history”; sorry, Doug, James Buchanan and Warren G. Harding say hello—he made the following statement:

I imagine praising Obama is at least as painful for Rob as the following was for me.

The truth is, it’s nothing of the sort. I like praising Barack Obama, for a couple reasons. One, I’d always rather believe the best of people, if they give me a chance; two, my optimistic side delights in the opportunity to tell my pessimistic side that things are better than I think they are; and three, as great a disappointment as he’s been to me, I can’t help liking the guy and wanting to be able to respect him and think well of him. And for that matter, four, he’s my president, too, and the more that can be said well of him, the better for the country. So, herewith and forthwith:

  1. He’s a loving, devoted husband.
  2. He’s a loving, devoted father. Those are two separate things, but they go together; and lest anyone try to dismiss them, I think they’re profoundly, profoundly important. My biggest problem with Bill Clinton was that he showed himself repeatedly to be a man who would betray his nearest and dearest and his most important vows for the sake of the needs and desires of the moment; that, in my book, called into question his right to be his country’s greatest servant. I cannot believe we will ever have that question about Barack Obama.
  3. He had the guts to tell the Left that we need to make room for religious faith in our political conversation. That was the point when I really began to have high hopes for him; it was a critically important message that still needs to be reiterated.
  4. He prevented the character assassination of Cambridge Police Sgt. Jim Crowley. He may well have had ulterior motives involved in that, but regardless, that bespoke a personal nobility that I appreciate.
  5. He authorized the use of force against the Somali pirates, which was the right and necessary thing to do. (Side note: Doug tries to only give me half credit for this, because in that post I also pointed out something with which I disagreed with. So, what’s the deal, Doug—only uncritical cheerleading counts? A trifle inconsistent, aren’t we?)
  6. He clearly wants to build support for America in the Muslim world. I disagree with a lot of his assumptions in this and the way he’s going about it, but even so, the goal is an important one. It would be too easy for American foreign policy to lapse into a simplistic “Muslim = enemy” equation—so far, we haven’t had any leaders who wanted to go that way, and here’s hoping that doesn’t change.
  7. He’s not afraid to dream big. If he were, he wouldn’t be in the White House.
  8. He would make a wonderful dinner guest. Or so, at least, is the sense I get. Don’t dismiss this—it’s a more important statement than you probably think.
  9. He has overcome a great deal. Abandoned by his father at a very young age, dragged off to Indonesia when his mother remarried a man from whom she would also end up divorced, then shipped back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents . . . I’ve said more than once that his record of real accomplishments is paper-thin, but the truth is, given his personal history and the damage divorce does to children, it’s nothing short of amazing that he is where he is.
  10. He appears to have come through the Chicago machine without becoming personally corrupt. I’ve faulted him in the past for being a go-along-to-get-along politician, a creation of the machine, and someone who wanted reformist credentials without actually confronting the machine that made him; but whatever my concerns about him as a politician, though I think he stained himself somewhat with Tony Rezko on the house deal, it seems clear that he managed to stay out of the corruption in Chicago. After all, you can bet that if Rod Blagojevich had anything on Barack Obama that qualified as dirt, he would have used it. This might sound like faint praise, but it’s really not; when all is said and done, President Obama may well be the only major politician to come out of Illinois during his time there of whom that can be said.

Thoughts on the President’s Olympian effort

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So, the President and his wife flew to Copenhagen (spending, I might note, a fair bit of money, and producing quite a lot of greenhouse gases) to lobby for Chicago for the 2016 Olympic Games; the IOC was so impressed, they awarded the 2016 Games to Rio (which, I think, was absolutely the right move, for all sorts of reasons). There has been much gnashing of teeth in some quarters, and a fair bit of schadenfreude in others; I can’t remember ever seeing this much commentary on an Olympic decision, which of course is all due to the participation of the Celebrity-in-Chief.

The question is, does this actually hurt him? After some reflection, count me in with those who think it does. Granted, the matter was relatively trivial in the geopolitical scheme of things, but the fact remains: President Obama injected himself into the competition, trying to use his influence to bring the Olympics to Chicago, and that influence was rejected. Decisively. That’s why the Times of London opines, “Obama’s Olympic failure will only add to doubts about his presidency.”

There has been a growing narrative taking hold about Barack Obama’s presidency in recent weeks: that he is loved by many, but feared by none; that he is full of lofty vision, but is actually achieving nothing with his grandiloquence.

Chicago’s dismal showing yesterday, after Mr Obama’s personal, impassioned last-minute pitch, is a stunning humiliation for this President. It cannot be emphasised enough how this will feed the perception that on the world stage he looks good—but carries no heft.

If they actually meant “grandiloquence”—which means “pompous or bombastic speech or expression”—rather than “eloquence,” that’s a remarkable slap. In any case, the perception to which the Times refers is clearly not just its own creation, judging by French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent comments at the UN; and its conclusions echo Fred Barnes’ observations in the Weekly Standard:

When an American president voluntarily takes up a fight and loses badly, it’s a big deal. Obama could have stayed out. Having the summer Olympics in Chicago doesn’t involve the national interest. But he thought the matter important enough to fly to Denmark and make the pitch for his hometown in person. He put his prestige on the line, only to be slapped down. He can’t blame George W. Bush for this one, though his minions may try.

We know the world loves Obama. What the action by the International Olympic Committee demonstrates is that being loved isn’t the same as being influential or taken seriously or respected or feared—the traits of many of Obama’s predecessors in the presidency. If he can’t deliver on a vote of the IOC, does he really have the clout to pressure the mullahs in Iran into giving up their nuclear ambitions? Maybe not.

Along with this, Barnes asks a pointed question:

Where was the charisma, the skill in persuading people to see things Obama’s way? The media has built Obama up as a communicator who’s the equal of Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt. True, he’s delivered several fine speeches, but all of them before he became president. Now he’s either lost his touch or never was the orator the press said he was.

A persuasive president is one who can move people and poll numbers his way. Obama hasn’t managed this as president. Last month, he spoke in prime time to Congress on health care, appeared on five Sunday interview shows, and showed up on the David Letterman show. The result: zilch. Support for his health care policy rose ever so slightly, then settled back to where it had been.

The biggest question I have is, why did he put his prestige on the line like that? Barnes suggests that the White House “thought the IOC was poised to ratify the president’s bid for a Chicago Olympics”; I suppose that’s possible, but if so, it argues for a remarkable degree of poor judgment on their part (which is exactly Barnes’ conclusion). If that’s the case, it also suggests a fair bit of cynicism, that the President and his staff thought he could swoop in and cherry-pick the credit for a Chicago win.

The other suggestion I’ve seen—which, to be honest, seems more likely to me—is that he was doing it as payback for support received from the Chicago machine. Chicago has done a lot to push him to the top of the political heap, after all, and turnabout is fair play; from their point of view, they helped him get there, and now it’s his job to help them out. Didn’t work, but that’s the way Chicago does business.

The amazing thing to me is, judging by the reaction shots, Chicagoans really thought the President had put it in the bag for them; which makes me wonder, could this be the first real crack in the Obama mystique here in the States? Sure, the White House is saying “it’s only the Olympics,” but people can be funny about sports sometimes; and after all, if the President doesn’t get a health care bill passed this year, there’s always next year, but Chicago only got one strike, and they’re out. It will be interesting to see if people really buy the “no big deal” line from the White House on this one, or if they end up holding it against him.

The self-esteem presidency

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Those of us who support Sarah Palin are fond of, among other things, pointing out the various predictions she made during her RNC speech which are being realized during the Obama administration. There are a number of them, including her warning of higher deficits and her invocation of a candidate who couldn’t bring himself to use the word “victory” when discussing Iraq and Afghanistan, but only when talking about his own campaign—that’s why the speech makes such good material for Palinites now. Of all the things she said, though, I think the most important was this:

The American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of “personal discovery.”

I think that was an important line because whether that was Gov. Palin’s insight, that of the scriptwriter with whom she worked, or came from someone else, it was the sharpest and most pointed insight offered during the campaign as to what we were really in for with an Obama victory. It was a fair shot from the McCain campaign; like him or loathe him, there’s no question that along with arrogant ambition, Sen. John McCain is driven by a deeply-ingrained desire, even need, to serve this country. I don’t question that President Obama wants to do what’s best for the country, but I think he operates out of a very different spirit.

Back before she herself succumbed to the infatuation, Kathleen Parker dubbed Barack Obama “the Messiah of Generation Narcissism.” In the process, she made a couple good points about him and what his ascent says about our culture—points which she would no doubt deride now were they to be made by, say, Gov. Palin, but hey, you gotta pay for that seat on Air Force Won.

To play weatherman for a moment, [Obama] is a perfect storm of the culture of narcissism, the cult of celebrity, and a secular society in which fathers (both the holy and the secular) have been increasingly marginalized from the lives of a generation of young Americans.

All of these trends have been gaining momentum the past few decades. Social critic Christopher Lasch named the culture of narcissism a generation ago and cited addiction to celebrity as one of the disease’s symptoms—all tied to the decline of the family.

That culture has merely become more exaggerated as spiritual alienation and fatherlessness have collided with technology (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) that enables the self-absorption of the narcissistic personality. . . .

Whatever the Church of Obama promises, we should not mistake this movement for a renaissance of reason. It is more like, well, like whoa.

One factor Parker didn’t mention in that column was the emphasis of the last few decades on artificially inflating the self-esteem of children, which has led to such things as grade inflation (including school districts that, as a matter of formal policy, forbid giving children Fs) and the philosophy that children should not be allowed to fail. This has been a crucial contributing factor to the culture of narcissism that Lasch identified, and has produced a great many chronological adults who believe success is a birthright which they should be able to achieve without trying too hard.

In light of that, consider this telling insight from a piece in the New York Review of Books:

It’s apparent that Obama is still learning the differences between campaigning and governing. And sometimes his inexperience shows. His speeches on health care on Labor Day and before Congress a few days later drew on his old rhetorical skills and finally showed some passion, and the one before Congress was his most effective so far in combining both rhetoric and explanation. But it was of interest that Chuck Todd of NBC reported that before he gave those speeches Obama’s staff had had to get him “fired up” to take on his critics. Obama, whose high self-esteem is well known among close observers, had previously assumed that a “following,” a “movement,” would be there without his having to do much to stimulate it.

We have a President who doesn’t think he should have to work in order to achieve political victory. This might be why the only political victories achieved to this point under his administration have been the ones Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid could achieve largely without his help.

This really shouldn’t be surprising, though; up through this past January, Barack Obama has been able to achieve most of what he wanted without really working all that hard. As Ed Lasky writes,

Barack Obama has displayed a disturbing pattern of work ethics: shirking work; claiming success when he was not entitled to do so; hiding his failures; and claiming the work of others as his own—when it was successful. These are not character traits that we should associate with Presidents.

This is, of course, a serious charge; but read the article, because Lasky substantiates it from case after case. Of those, the most speculative but perhaps the most revealing is the case of Dreams from My Father, the memoir (published when he was but 34) which has been used as one of the main pieces of evidence for President Obama’s supposed superior intelligence. As I noted some time ago, there’s good reason to doubt that he in fact wrote the book; the Anchoress captured it well when she pointed out that writers write, it’s what they do—the demands of life have their effect, but when they can, what they can, they write—and that aside from that book, Barack Obama’s life shows little evidence that he’s truly a writer. Indeed, what we have of his writing from his time at Columbia and Harvard Law (what little we have) ranges from workmanlike to dismal.

That’s why Jack Cashill of American Thinker has been arguing in increasingly greater detail, with mounting evidence, that in fact Barack Obama did not write Dreams from My Father—Bill Ayers did. Cashill’s argument has now received unexpected support from Christopher Andersen’s biography, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. As Ron Radosh lays it out,

Andersen writes in his book that after Obama finally got a new contract to write a book, Michelle Obama suggested that her husband get advice “from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.”

Obama had not as yet written anything. But he had taped interviews with family members. Andersen writes: “These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers.” . . .

Andersen also writes, quoting a Hyde Park neighbor of Obama: “Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together. It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both.” . . .

Finally, Christopher Andersen concludes: “In the end, Ayers’s contribution to Barack’s Dreams From My Father would be significant—so much so that the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’s own writing.”

Now, it is of course true that (like everyone else these days), Andersen is working from unnamed sources (though he has said that he confirmed this information from two independent sources in Hyde Park); this could prove to be as bogus as the claim last year that George W. Bush had the CIA fabricate evidence justifying the war in Iraq. That said, Andersen is only substantiating an argument which can already be made, and made quite well, from evidence in the public domain; “the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes” do in fact “bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’s own writing.” As such, while we cannot take the point as proven, it’s entirely reasonable to conclude that the balance of the evidence supports the conclusion that Barack Obama probably was not the primary writer of Dreams from My Father—that this is, rather, yet another case of him taking credit for someone else’s work in order to make himself look good.

What we have here, I think, is a man who does what he likes to do and just never really gets around to buckling down to do what he doesn’t like to do. He does what makes him feel good, but doesn’t have the appetite for the hard, grinding work that is usually necessary to produce real accomplishments. As such, the only real accomplishments he has to show are the ones he can produce by doing what he likes. He likes going around and talking to people, he likes kicking ideas and arguments around with people who agree with him, and so he’s an effective and energetic campaigner; as such, he has the accomplishments that can produce—namely, election to various offices. If people question his résumé, he embellishes it. When it comes time to do the work for the offices to which he’s been elected, he “works from home,” takes credit for the accomplishments of others, votes “present” to duck the tough questions—and when things go badly, covers it up or finds someone else to blame.

The end result of all this is someone who’d rather campaign for President than be President; and since he was elected nearly eleven months ago and took office eight-and-a-half months ago, this is a problem. Even liberals are starting to complain about it. But no one should be surprised; this is a man of high self-esteem who expects success to come to him because he’s wonderful, not because he’s worked hard for it. Maybe the light will come on and he’ll rise to the demands of the office yet, who knows; but for now, given his résumé, what other sort of presidency should we have expected?

We should have seen it coming. Gov. Palin certainly did.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

Update: Add SNL to the list . . .

On the liberal use of racism

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Lloyd Marcus writes,

I am so sick of the Left being allowed to make the rules. Imagine the absurdity of a competition in which one side is allowed to set the rules against their opponent. The Left tells us what is racist. The Left tells us what we can and cannot say. The Left published a cartoon depicting former black Secretary of State Condolezza Rice as an Aunt Jemima; another depicted Rice as a huge-lipped parrot for her Massa Bush. Neither were considered racist by their creators or publishers, or even widely condemned on the Left.

In opposition to black Republican Michael Steele’s campaign to run for U.S. Senate, a liberal blogger published a doctored photo of Steele in black face and big red lips made to look like a minstrel. The caption read, “Simple Sambo wants to move to the big house”. Not one Democrat denounced these racist portrayals of black conservatives.

And yet, a sign seen at a tea party depicting Obama as a witch doctor is considered by the Left to be beyond the pale and obviously racist. Why is the Left, given their track record of bias, granted final authority to determine the intent of the sign? Why do we conservatives so quickly and easily allow ourselves to be put on the defensive?

The rules set by the Left are extremely clear. Racist images of black conservatives and negative images of Bush are fair game. Even a play about murdering President Bush was called “harmless art”. Meanwhile, all unflattering images of Obama are racist, and constitute dangerous, potentially violent hate speech.

Now, before you dismiss Marcus’ critique as sour grapes, consider this:

I am a black conservative singer, songwriter, entertainer and columnist. Liberals have posted comments all over YouTube and C-SPAN freely using and calling me the “N” word. Because they are libs and I am an uppity, off the liberal plantation, run-away black, all tactics to restore me to my owners are acceptable.

The truth is, in the current political environment, “racist” actually has no concrete, objective meaning. As all derogatory terms eventually are, it has been debased from a meaningful descriptive term to a mere swear word, one which only has one true significance: to denigrate anyone who opposes liberal dogma. “Racist” is to a liberal fundamentalist what “heathen” is to an old-style Christian fundamentalist, and nothing more; it means only the Other, the hated Them, They Who Must Be Condemned.

Now, in one sense, this is a normal linguistic process; but it has been accelerated for the sake of political expediency, and that isn’t a good thing at all. In fact, this sort of tactic carries serious consequences for our society, which its practitioners should carefully consider. Cornell law professor William Jacobson put it well:

While the false accusation of racism is not a new tactic, it has been refined by Obama supporters into a toxic powder which is causing damage to the social fabric of the country by artificially injecting race into every political issue. . . .

Not surprisingly, the pace of racial accusations has picked up as opposition has grown. Just in the past few days the usual and not-so-usual suspects have been seeking to out-do each other in making accusations of racism including Eugene Robinson, Maureen Dowd, Jimmy Carter, Rep. Hank Johnson, Chris Matthews, a wide range of Democratic politicians, and of course, almost all of the mainstream media.

The effect of these accusations is poisonous. Race is the most sensitive and inflammatory subject in this country. By turning every issue, even a discussion of health care policy, into an argument about race, liberals have created a politically explosive mixture in which the harder they seek to suppress opposing voices, the harder those voices seek to be heard. . . .

We are seeing for the first time a strong push-back against the race card players. And that reaction is visceral, much like an allergic reaction, from people who have been stung before.

What’s more, as Mark Steyn points out, the real racism and sexism here isn’t what the Left is saying it is:

Nobody minds liberal commentators expressing the hope that Clarence Thomas “will die early from heart disease like many black men,” etc. Contemporary identity-group politics are prototype one-party states: If you’re a black Republican Secretary of State, you’re not really black. If you’re a female Republican vice-presidential nominee, you’re not really a woman. What’s racist and sexist here is the notion that, if you’re black or female, your politics is determined by your group membership.

There are, it seems to me, two main points to be drawn from this mess. The first is that whatever they might say, the Democratic leadership is worried about a conservative resurgence; to quote Steyn again,

What does the frenzy unleashed on Sarah Palin last fall tell us? What does Newsweek’s “Mad Man” cover on Glenn Beck mean? Why have “civility” drones like Joe Klein so eagerly adopted Anderson Cooper’s scrotal “teabagging” slur and characterized as “racists” and “terrorists” what are (certainly by comparison with the anti-G20 crowd) the best behaved and tidiest street agitators in modern history?

They’re telling you who they really fear. Whom the media gods would destroy they first make into “mad men.” Liz Cheney should be due for the treatment any day now. . . .

The media would like the American Right to be represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. Last time round, we went along with their recommendation. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that’s the way to go. If you want to win, look at whom the Democrats and their media chums are so frantic to destroy: That’s the better guide to what they’re really worried about.

The second is that the Democratic leadership in D.C. cannot win the battle of ideas, or at least don’t think they can. Now, there’s an important distinction to be drawn here: that does not mean that their ideas are wrong; the most brilliant ideas and the most basic truths can still be made to sound utterly unconvincing in the mouths of defenders who don’t really know how to argue for them. I happen to believe their arguments are wrong, but their competence or lack thereof in presenting them is no proof of that either way. The point is, rather, that whether they ought to be able to win the argument or otherwise, the leaders of the Democratic Party cannot, and so they feel the need to try to win by rhetorical thuggery what they cannot win by rational appeal. Dr. Jacobson’s summary is apt:

The increasingly hysterical use of the the race card by liberal columnists, bloggers and politicians reflects the last gasps of people who, being unable to win an argument on the merits, seek to end the argument.

In the last analysis, all of this is a blot on Barack Obama. No, it isn’t reasonable to expect him to fulfill the post-racial promise of his campaign; the only thing that was unreasonable was him using that to help sell himself as a candidate. However, he is allowing this to happen, and he could stop it if he wanted; and Jules Crittenden is right, he needs to make it stop.

Obama can let a growing chorus of prominent Americans call his failure racism and his opponents racists, a development which is itself driving a deeper partisan wedge and heightening the rancor and bitterness. He can let it further demean our national dialogue and intimidate speech. He can let it be his excuse, a smear in the history books. Or he tell America and the world firmly that in this country, political dissent does not equal racism. He will then have shown himself to be a statesman, who is worthy of respect no matter whether you agree with his politics and policies or not.

It is time for President Obama to take the race card off the table.

Here’s hoping—for his sake, for the country’s sake—that he does. Soon.

Caesar worship is alive and well

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It’s interesting to me how people who screamed bloody murder whenever George W. Bush used a phrase that was even vaguely religious have no problem with religious ceremonies, led by clergy, wearing clerical robes, using the traditional forms of the Christian liturgy, to pray to Barack Obama. When I talk about personality cults and political idolatry and the messianic temptation of the Obama campaign, this is the kind of thing I’m thinking of—except a lot worse than anything I’ve thought of to this point.

The great political temptation from which Judaism and Christianity delivered us was the worship of human beings; during the medieval period, whoever came up with the idea of the “divine right of kings” brought that partway back, but never all the way. Now, in their reaction against Christian faith and their denial of their need for a divine Messiah, folks on the Left are trying to turn a Chicago machine politician into a secular messiah. It will never work. Put not your trust in princes.

HT: Kevin Carroll, via Toby Brown

Can you say “personality cult,” boys and girls?

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One of the things I missed last week was the creepy little story of New Jersey elementary-school kids being taught songs in praise of Barack Obama. I’m sorry, that’s just un-American; in this country, we don’t venerate our leaders until they’re safely off the stage, and usually dead. This sort of engineered adulation belongs in places like North Korea, not here. I’m with Tyler Dawn—I’d find this just as creepy and just as nauseating if it had been for President Bush, or President Reagan, or anybody else.

Incidentally, for all the folks who were having hysterics and mocking conservatives for their reaction to the President’s school speech—granted that that reaction was in many instances excessive—stuff like this is the reason for it. It wasn’t that the President was speaking to our kids, it was the suspicion that he wanted to politicize them and turn them into Obamabots—and that the public-school system would, in large part, gladly go along with that agenda—that sent so many people up in flames; and garbage like this only reinforces and aggravates those concerns.

Now, obviously, it’s not likely that this was directly orchestrated by the White House; but it’s all of a piece with the politics-by-personality-cult approach Barack Obama and his campaign have taken all along. It’s the sort of thing that prompted even a liberal like Doug Hagler to complain about the messianic tone of the Obama campaign, which went along with the candidate’s apparent messianic view of his own leadership. This isn’t even the first creepy video this has produced—not by a long shot.

The endpoint of overreaching

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One could say many things about Barack Obama’s speech last night, and analyze it from a number of angles, but in the end, it’s a political speech—only one thing really matters: did it move the needle? From everything I can see, it didn’t; people pretty much are where they were. Those who thought he was wonderful think he’s wonderfuller, those who were already convinced are more so, those who had doubts and questions still have them, those who were opposed haven’t left their positions, and the great debate on the Right seems to be whether the outburst from Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) was inappropriate. (I find it somewhat disturbing that so many people don’t think it was—for his part, Rep. Wilson has quite properly conceded that it was and apologized. I guess the abuse the Democrats gave George W. Bush has skewed some folks’ idea of appropriate behavior.)

There were a number of responses from the GOP which were more constructive, beginning with the official one by Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA), a colleague of Rep. John Fleming both in the Louisiana congressional delegation and in the medical profession. Rep. Boustany hit all the key points clearly and concisely, and did a good job of presenting a positive Republican alternative, not just criticizing the President’s plan.

Perhaps the most important GOP response, unofficial though it was, came from Sarah Palin, who by virtue of her unofficial position was able to go beyond the necessary points and respond with greater freedom (and who didn’t have to cover them, since Rep. Boustany did his job so well). In particular, she continued to press on a couple key issues:

Many Americans fundamentally disagree with this idea. We know from long experience that the creation of a massive new bureaucracy will not provide us with “more stability and security,” but just the opposite. It’s hard to believe the President when he says that this time he and his team of bureaucrats have finally figured out how to do things right if only we’ll take them at their word. . . .

In his speech the President directly responded to concerns I’ve raised about unelected bureaucrats being given power to make decisions affecting life or death health care matters. He called these concerns “bogus,” “irresponsible,” and “a lie”—so much for civility. After all the name-calling, though, what he did not do is respond to the arguments we’ve made, arguments even some of his own supporters have agreed have merit.

In fact, after promising to “make sure that no government bureaucrat . . . gets between you and the health care you need,” the President repeated his call for an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of bureaucrats charged with containing Medicare costs. He did not disavow his own statement that such a group, working outside of “normal political channels,” should guide decisions regarding that “huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives. . . .” He did not disavow the statements of his health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, and continuing to pay his salary with taxpayer dollars proves a commitment to his beliefs. The President can keep making unsupported assertions, but until he directly responds to the arguments I’ve made, I’m going to call him out too.

You may agree with Gov. Palin or not, but the fact remains that she clearly didn’t see anything new in the President’s speech, and in particular that she didn’t see any sign of a significant overture to folks on the right; from her perspective, it was just more of the same, and more of the same isn’t going to make a difference in a high-stakes debate like this one. That’s why Jay Cost opened his analysis of the speech by saying,

In my judgment President Obama’s address last night was little more than a campaign speech with the Congress as the set piece. Evaluated from that perspective, it was a success. But from the perspective of finding a policy solution—i.e. actual governance—it contributed nothing to health care reform.

In Cost’s stark evaluation, the speech was a flop and an opportunity lost because the President was unwilling to actually act:

However, it failed to address the reason for their doldrums. Democrats need rallying because of internal divisions over actual policy disagreements. President Obama did not deal with those divisions. When you strip away the setting, the soaring rhetoric, the poetic cadences, and all the rest, you’re left with the criticism that both Hillary Clinton and John McCain leveled at him through all of last year: he voted present. . . .

What did last night’s speech contribute to finding a solution [to the divide over the public option]? I’d say that the answer is nothing. The President (once again) refused to get his hands dirty on this issue. He praised the public option to the hilt, rhetoric intended for the progressives, then he hinted that it could be ditched, rhetoric intended for the moderates. At some point in the policymaking process, a choice will have to be made. It was not made last night, which means that this was a governing opportunity lost.

Absent a firm belief in the genius of Barack Obama, it’s hard to dispute Cost on this one. President Obama overreached himself here, trying to load too much freight on his speaking ability and make rhetoric carry a load it simply cannot carry unaided. This was a moment demanding real leadership, not merely exhortation, but the President tried to win it with exhortation alone. The result appears to be that he’s right where he was 24 hours ago, but with one more bullet spent. That doesn’t bode well for his presidency.

Barack Obama opposes education funding for poor students

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Jennifer Rubin comments on the story from the Washington Times:

School-voucher proponents confronted police Tuesday morning outside the U.S. Department of Education, where the protesters demanded that federal officials restore scholarships taken away from 216 D.C. students. . . .

“You may not lock us up, but we’ll be back,” Mr. Chavous said. “We will make sure that we do everything in our power to give our children the education they deserve. I am disgusted by the fact that they can go to great lengths to stop or muzzle the voice of freedom.

“It is fundamentally wrong for this administration not to listen to the voices of citizens in this city.”

The protest against President Obama’s refusal to reauthorize the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program came the same day that Mr. Obama addressed the nation’s classrooms in a televised speech about the importance of taking personal responsibility for one’s education.

There is, of course, legislation with bipartisan sponsorship to restore the funding. In late July, Sens. Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins, Diane Feinstein, George Voinovich, Robert Byrd, and John Ensign introduced the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results (SOAR) Act, which would provide reauthorization for the program for five years. So it seems that the only thing standing in the way of giving D.C. parents what they want—funding for a successful program for kids trapped in one of the worst school districts in the country—is the Obama administration. And the teachers’ union, of course.

Had the Bush administration killed a program like this, the OSM would have been howling about “racism” and “not caring about our children” and whatever else they could think of. But in fact, this was a Bush-era program killed by the Obama administration in partial repayment of the debt they owe the teachers’ union, and so Big Media says nothing. It doesn’t change the fact that a number of poor minority students are now getting a much worse education because the Obama administration cares more about political payback than it does about them.

The President’s problem: hubris

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That’s not exactly how Charles Krauthammer puts it, but that’s the problem he’s identified:

Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one’s own image.

Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.

Obama’s reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grass-roots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob—misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest—from drug companies to auto unions to doctors—in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged.

“Get out of the way” and “don’t do a lot of talking,” the great bipartisan scolded opponents whom he blamed for creating the “mess” from which he is merely trying to save us. If only they could see. So with boundless confidence in his own persuasiveness, Obama undertook a summer campaign to enlighten the masses by addressing substantive objections to his reforms.

If you don’t believe Dr. Krauthammer, consider this from the Politico article on Barack Obama’s speech to Congress tonight:

2) He will not confront or scold the left. “This is a case for bold action, not a stick in the eye to our supporters,” said an official involved in speech preparation. “That’s not how President Obama thinks. The politics of triangulation don’t live in this White House.”

3) He will make an overture to Republicans. “He will lay out his vision for health reform—taking the best ideas from both parties, make the case for why as a nation we must act now, and dispel the myths and confusion that are affecting public opinion,” the aide said.

You cannot do both of these things at once. You just can’t. You cannot “make an overture to Republicans” without promising to actually consider Republican ideas and integrate them into your program—and to do that, you would have to confront the Left, to tell them that they’re going to have to give up some of the things they really want and to allow the Right to get some of the things they really want. You have to actually follow through on “taking the best ideas from both parties,” which would require actually forcing the Left to compromise, and scolding them for their dogmatic refusal to do so to this point. It’s not triangulation (and when did that become a dirty word, anyway?), it’s recognizing that you can’t eat your cake and still have it.

That the President doesn’t realize this is clear from the fifth point in Politico’s list:

5) Obama will try to reassure the left about his commitment to a public option, or government insurance plan. Aides said they are rethinking what he will say about this. He wants to thread the needle of voicing support for a public option, without promising to kill health reform to get it. But liberal congressional leaders were unyielding in their support for it on a conference call he held from Camp David yesterday, and he’s going to meet with them at the White House early next week.

Again, if he actually wants to make a serious overture to Republicans, the public option has to come off the table; that’s completely unacceptable to folks on the Right, and meaningless “concessions” that make no substantive difference won’t be enough to win any meaningful Republican support. But of course, to take that off the table, he’ll have to confront the Left, in a big way, and so far, he’s shown no stomach whatsoever for doing that (if in fact he’s ever actually wanted to). President Obama has a choice: reach across the aisle, or continue to appease the Left. He’ll have to pick.

As a result, the inestimable Jay Cost (who has to be one of the three or four best political analysts going right now) comes to this conclusion:

I think this will be little more than a change in tone—perhaps from cool/slightly mocking Obama to angry/forceful Obama. From the looks of it, the President is still planning to make all the same points he’s been hammering for months. He’ll ask for bipartisan cooperation while remaining cagey on the public option (a deal breaker for 99% of the Republican caucus). He will again insist the time for debate is over and the time for action is now. He’ll make a not-terribly-compelling case about how this somehow relates to the current economic morass, even though the benefits do not kick in for years. He’ll fearlessly stand up to Republican straw men, who never offer anything except disingenuous attacks.

Which, if that does indeed to turn out to be the best he can do—and if it isn’t, then why haven’t we seen something better well before now?—raises a critical question: what’s the point of this speech? Why is the President doing this? Cost suggests two related reasons:

First, it has begun to believe its own spin that the President is good at giving game changing speeches. But he isn’t really. Nobody is. If the game could change because of a speech, the game would constantly be changing because lots of people can give a decent speech, especially when they have a TelePrompTer. President Obama is a compelling speaker to a relatively narrow segment of the country—namely, African Americans and white social liberals. He inspired them to support his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton—but other voters (including many in his own party) were harder to win over. His Philadelphia speech on race was no Cooper Union; it merely distracted attention from the main question of why he spent so many years in that church. His numbers still fell, and he struggled through the rest of the primaries, even losing South Dakota on the day he declared victory. He then gave big speeches in Europe and Denver, but it was only thanks to the financial panic of last September that he had a breakthrough.

Still, his speechifying seems to give some people a thrill up the leg—and the idea that he’s not just a good speaker, but a game changing speaker, has become conventional wisdom. I think the White House believes that this is actually true.

Second, it does not know what else to do. It looks like Congress is at something less than square one. There is no passable compromise that has been proposed—nothing that can win enough votes in the center without losing the left flank. But now the “Gang of Six” has basically broken up, public approval has tanked, moderates are scared, and if there isn’t bad blood on the Democratic side of the aisle there is at least a lot of finger pointing. If Humpty Dumpty breaks and you don’t know how to put him back together—why not give a speech and boldly proclaim how important it is to put him back together?

Cost believes, and has been arguing, that the administration needs to scale its plan way back and go for incremental health-insurance reform rather than trying to revamp the whole system on the fly; I think Cost is right. If President Obama were to take that tack, he could keep the moderates in his own party and pick up the moderates from the other side of the aisle; with a little creativity, he might even come up with something that could attract support from some conservatives without losing liberals, which would be a huge accomplishment. While he would probably still emerge from this whole fight weakened, producing an actual bipartisan reform package would allow him to recover a lot of face and a lot of his prestige—as well as some of his “post-partisan” image—and thus to salvage a fair bit from an initiative that so far has been a complete fiasco for him. As Cost concludes,

If the President scaled back his ambitions, the final bill would not be as far to the left as the liberals like, but since it is not comprehensive they could at least plan to fight for the public option another day. Then, Obama could pick up enough moderates to pass it, and he could declare victory.

Incidentally, this is how most legislation gets passed in the Congress.

Which suggests, yet again, that Barack Obama would be a more effective president if he’d spent enough time actually doing his job as a legislator to actually understand things like that. As it is, all he can do is give (yet) another speech. If Allahpundit is right and the purpose of this address to Congress is really to push hardliners on the Left to compromise without admitting he’s doing so (which would alienate his base a fair bit more than he already has), then the President may actually accomplish something almost despite himself. We shall see.