Distance

In one of the best pieces I’ve read about Barack Obama, Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal addresses the uneasy feeling that many Americans (including yours truly) get when they observe the Obama administration’s approach to this country and the world. The article, aptly entitled “The Alien in the White House” has “nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.” Rather, it considers Obama’s ideological roots. She writes:

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 [Gulf] 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.

From the beginning of his successful campaign for the presidency, those of us who took the time to examine his few real accomplishments, his very thin political record, and his questionable associations viewed Barack Obama for what he is: an ideological partisan who believes fervently in the far Left image of Amerika—a hegemonic superpower, an oppressor of people of color, and environmental outlaw, a corporatist society in which a privileged few hold sway over those who are "less fortunate.”

And now, some of those who swooned when he gave soaring speeches about “hope and change” are beginning to get uneasy. Does a competent leader, when faced with a serious environment and technological crisis, suggest that he’s meeting with experts to better understand “whose ass to kick.” Does a true leader send his attorney general to prosecute those who are in the middle of trying to fix the problem. That’s a recipe for CYA on the part of everyone at BP, and CYA is not the attitude that a experienced leader wants to inculcate at the moment. Could Obama really be that stupid? Or is he so ideologically driven that he believes that these horrid corporate criminals must be taken down even as they try mightily to fix the problem they caused.

I regret to state that Barack Obama is a far worse President than I though he’d be. Early on, I thought he might grow into the job. Instead, he seems to be growing away from it. To many Americans, he is an alien.

During his world tour of European and Arab capitals (a visit to the little satan, Israel, was out of the question) our President, in tone and in substance, in speech after speech, castigated his own country for its arrogance and insensitivity. Rabinowitz comments:

They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.

Unless Barack Obama begins to understand that this “distance” represents his fatal flaw, he will be defeated in November, 2012—and based on his first 18 months in office, that will not be a bad thing.