The first post-American president indeed! Barack Obama does not believe in the greatness of America’s history or in its unlimited potential for the future, nor does he share the values of the American people, including a large portion of those who naively voted for him. He is running this nation as if he was a small town college president.
by Dorothy Rabinowitz
The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president’s earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.
There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama’s pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans’ leader, a man of them, for them, the nation’s voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn’t lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.
Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.
A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.
One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.
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Noemie Emery is detecting some “messiah fatigue” from the Democrats
by Noemie Emery
President Obama is angry at God for making it rain in Chicago, and irked at the oil spill, making him pack up between his vacations and make trips down again to the Gulf. Ideologues argue about over whether corporations or government tend to be the least competent, ignoring the proof that the answer is both of them. And Democrats are having their own kind of crisis, a sort of buyer’s remorse at a very high level, which sounds like Messiah Fatigue.
Messiah Fatigue is what happens when your Messiah turns into a millstone, and the force that was supposed to boost you into divine and deep power seems more of an anchor instead. Democrats are bewildered.
“They are doing a lot of things, but a lot of people do not like what they are doing. Others do not know what they are doing. And hardly anyone likes the way they are doing it,” as the Los Angeles Times now says of the party.
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Apparently they washed back as far as November, when they eclipsed his ability to elect Creigh Deeds and Jon Corzine as governors, not to mention eclipsing his power (in January) to stymie the fast-moving surge of Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass. He has been magic, but for the Republican Party, which now has a slew of attractive officeholders in purple and blue states, and looks to pick up a lot more this November.
“Obama’s mixed [she means losing] electoral record has perplexed operatives who thought his charisma and tactical skill would yield a stronger-than-ever Democratic majority,” reported Anne Kornblut. Instead, it produced a revival among the Republicans, who just a few months ago appeared moribund.
Read the rest Democrats suffering from “Messiah Fatigue”
