House of Eratosthenes

Johns Hopkins University prof conducts an autopsy in WSJ on the bloated putrid corpse that is the Obama Presidency. Conclusion: It was stricken by a terminal but subtle disease, which spread like wildfire throughout the host, even though that host was the very picture of health.

Obama’s Summer of Discontent
The politics of charisma is so Third World. Americans were never going to buy into it for long.
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The man was elected amid economic distress. Faith in the country’s institutions, perhaps in the free-enterprise system itself, had given way. Mr. Obama had ridden that distress. His politics of charisma was reminiscent of the Third World. A leader steps forth, better yet someone with no discernible trail, someone hard to pin down to a specific political program, and the crowd could read into him what it wished, what it needed.
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The Obama devotees were the victims of their own belief in political magic. The devotees could not make up their minds. In a newly minted U.S. senator from Illinois, they saw the embodiment of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
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Now that realism about Mr. Obama has begun to sink in, these iconic figures of history had best be left alone. They can’t rescue the Obama presidency. Their magic can’t be his. Mr. Obama isn’t Lincoln with a BlackBerry. Those great personages are made by history, in the course of history, and not by the spinners or the smitten talking heads.

In one of the revealing moments of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama rightly observed that the Reagan presidency was a transformational presidency in a way Clinton’s wasn’t. And by that Reagan precedent, that Reagan standard, the faults of the Obama presidency are laid bare…At no time had Ronald Reagan believed that the American covenant had failed, that America should apologize for itself in the world beyond its shores. There was no narcissism in Reagan. It was stirring that the man who headed into the sunset of his life would bid his country farewell by reminding it that its best days were yet to come.

In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the “Yes we can!” mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land.

Whether you still hold hope for the Obama administration or not, whether you think these criticisms are valid or not — it is a rather scathing indictment that Obama’s flaws are defined most starkly, in August, when He is contrasted against the historical figures He thought would be making Him look good back in January. Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy, Reagan.

But Lincoln’s task was to restore the union. Lincoln believed in the union.

FDR performed poorly with regard to the Great Depression; he did not believe in capitalism. FDR is the only one of the four to whom Obama is a worthy successor. But FDR also steered the country through a war, and FDR wanted us to win that war.

Kennedy confronted Kruschev — and did a mediocre-to-poor job of it. But he wanted to win.

Reagan believed in victory over the “Evil Empire,” down to the marrow of his bones. And he made it happen.

Obama is going to fix the economy?

That’s a little bit like having a mechanic fix your car, when the mechanic’s been a lifelong advocate of hitchhiking and public transportation. Obama cannot be great, at least in the respect of reviving our troubled economy, because His heart isn’t in it.

It isn’t because He’s a communist. There is some of that…but the real weight to His unsuitability for this task, is that He is first and foremost a politician. Every single failure, every single disappointment, every single setback — in His world, these things are opportunities. And so, on some virtual Mount Rushmore full of the faces of Presidents whom we wanted to succeed at something, and subsequently delivered, His face will not be going there. It simply cannot happen. Because as wonderful of a salesman as He is, He doesn’t know how to sell anything to people who are fulfilled. His sales pitch only works on people who are suffering, so it is against His programming to end suffering in people He sees as His core constituency. Their suffering cannot ever dissipate, it can never diminish, because that is an indispensable part of His arsenal.

A leader steps forth, better yet someone with no discernible trail, someone hard to pin down to a specific political program, and the crowd could read into him what it wished, what it needed.

Clinton, you’ll recall, tried to co-opt the GOP platform, especially during his re-election bid. During his initial campaign all we heard was what a disaster “the last twelve years” were supposed to have been.

Didn’t John Kerry spend a lot of time talking about “values” back in the 2004 presidential campaign? I noted that he never talked much about the specifics on that note or exactly what values he’d carry into the Oval Office. This way, people could simply fill-in-the-blank with their own personal values, making the assumption that whatever they were, Kerry would share them and govern by them. (Well, that and his service in Vietnam. You knew Kerry went to Vietnam, right?)

Obama is no different. He spent a lot of time talking about “change” without telling us much about what he had in mind or what that meant. As in 2004, about half of the American people had bought into the MSM lies about Bush and were ready to throw caution to the wind by voting for a candidate they knew next-to-nothing about. I just shook my head and said, “Thing about Bush is this – love him or hate him – you at least know exactly where he stands. He once said, ‘My job isn’t to nuance.’ Couldn’t agree more.”

This empty-suit mentality from Democrats is nothing new, Morgan. Obama was just a lot better at it than the other guys who tried out for the job, including all the Dem candidates who never made it past the primary process.
- cylarz | 08/26/2009 @ 22:53

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Politics of Charisma, Reminiscent of the Third WorldWednesday, August 26th, 2009

Politics of Charisma, Reminiscent of the Third World
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009