ObamArrogance
Posted on October 21, 2010 by Ben Johnson by Ben Johnson
Barack Obama has a theory about why you do not appreciate him: You’re stupid.
For months, the president has insisted the reason his part is facing an electoral apocalypse is less than two weeks is that the American people fail to properly understand how great he is. The solution, he insists, is more of him. Obama told a campaign stop in Seattle earlier today he could have sold his policies better. He insisted, “We had to move so fast, we were in such emergency mode, that it was very difficult for us to spend time a lot doing victory laps and advertising exactly what we were doing because we had to move onto the next thing.”
He manfully offered, “I take some responsibility for that.” The fifty-cent-piece stops here.
Throughout his push to ram ObamaCare down the collective American throat, he claimed he had not yet made his case. After the summer town hall meetings, Obama gave a mendacious speech before a joint session of Congress designed to sell his bill. He bought off Democratic senators from Louisiana and numerous other states, making this a simultaneous buy-and-sell job.
The bill eventually passed — but the sale has yet to end. As of March 5, Obama had given 54 speeches on health care alone. Yet a Rasmussen poll taken this week shows 55 percent of all Americans want to repeal ObamaCare, 46 percent “strongly favor” repeal. Nearly half the states in the union have sued the federal government to end the legislation.
Instead of listening to the American people, Obama has chosen to double-down on socialism — and call all dissenters imbeciles.
Last Saturday, Obama stood before a “small Democratic fundraiser” where he told those assembled, “Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared.” The trouble is, Republicans are “playing on fear.” If you think you’ve heard this line before, you’re right. Last summer, when ObamaCare seemed doomed, he said August was the month everyone gets “all wee-weed up.” As a candidate for office, jest-plain-folks Obama told a San Francisco fundraiser:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them….And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
This armchair psychology — where economic status creates personality traits — echoes the Marxist line about “the opiate of the masses.” His complaint that “facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day” resembles the old party line rhetoric about the inevitable triumph of “scientific socialism.” His continual (mis)diagnosis of his opposition as somehow suffering from a mental malady calls to mind the Soviet practice of confining dissidents to insane asylums.
But more than anything to Americans, they signal a virtually fathomless arrogance. President Obama looks at most of the American people like this guy:
And he has made clear, no matter how loudly the American people speak, there is no turning back.
President Clinton is remembered fondly, by some at least, because a Republican Congress forced him to compromise or quit, and he famously trimmed his sails to the new political realities.
Obama has replaced triangulation with bloviation.
In his heart, he knows he’s right — that he represents “progress,” that voters have to “guard the change”! He inveighs that “We can go backward, or we can keep moving forward. And I don’t know about you, but I want to move forward.” Democratic pollsters Stan Greenberg and James Carville have found this line drives voters to vote Republican.
But Obama pushes on, no matter the stress it places on his family, his schedule, or his jaw. He keeps talking and talking and talking, and none of you people appreciate him in the least.
The second most powerful woman in the White House, Valerie Jarrett, has some swell advice: “To stay the course and to know that it will get better.”As Keith Olbermann once asked of Republicans: “Is that the lesson…Don’t change the message. Just turn it up to 11?”
The Obama administration is the most ideologically committed presidency in memory, and like its intellectual forebears, it will stop at virtually nothing to enact its agenda. The American constitution presents few problems to agenda — it has been a dead letter for generations, anyway. But the portions still enforced — such as democratic elections, three branches of government, etc — must be worked around.
To the extent the yokels must be motivated, Obama’s Office of Public Engagement keeps the base fire up, ready to go, and the majority of Americans snowed. This administration has emphasized propaganda like no peacetime predecessor.
Jarrett, who heads OPE, uncorked a series of jaw-dropping whoppers in her most recent media haul. Obama, she informed us:
“always keeps an even tone and…he always looks for the better angels in people”…
“I think he is not a slick politician,” Jarrett said. “He doesn’t have the shtick, you know, the way a lot of politicians do. He’s completely sincere and true and I think people are not used to seeing that in their politicians. So it’s taking people a while to realize that he’s actually a real person and he’s not just trying to pretend and fool them and trick them into thinking he’s something else. He’s exactly who he is,” she said. “He doesn’t do the theater.” (In 2008, his aides liked to call him “no drama, Obama.”)
Yes, the man who reads focus-group-tested speeches from teleprompters surrounded by phony Greek columns doesn’t do drama. Not. At. All.
Her “Barack Obama is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life” shtick sounds like all the government-funded propaganda pouring out of the executive branch, lacking subtlety even more than truth. How else is one to interpret Andy Griffith telling seniors, “That new health care law sure sounds good for all of us on Medicare”? Or an administration that erects signs every few dozen feet telling the proles the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” is “Putting Americans Back to Work”? How should we view former OPE flunky (and lifelong fringe leftist) Buffy Wicks telling federal arts grant recipients, “We’re going to come at you with some specific ‘asks’ here” — then instructing them to emulate Obama-centric campaign materials?
The problem Obama’s propaganda is not just its pernicious impact on the nation, its faint echo of totalitarian regimes gone by, or its forced conscription of conservatives’ funds on its behalf — it is the eye-rolling inanity of it all.
Obama has no interest in a democratic republic, the will of the majority, or the rule of law. His plan is to shove through as much “change” as possible in the knowledge some of his schemes may never be undone. Tax rates fluctuate — but new entitlements require a major overhaul of the nation’s economic infrastructure. Economic policies encouraging risk-taking and entrepreneurship only go so far is the national character has been so degraded by long-term unemployment benefits and food stamps that the people are no longer employable. If people become used to turning to government for health care, or get used to receiving money from the government in their paychecks (however tiny a pittance Obama began in 2009), they cease to look to provide for their own needs. Europe’s example also shows us tampering with the military and the family unit could wreak havoc for generations.
Perhaps the most irreversible of Obama’s goals is his drive for permanent demographic change. As a good community organizer, Barack Obama knows the way to promote an agenda is to create large “coalitions of power” composed of groups that agree with your proposal. Since the majority of Americans are proving they will not elect those who share his views, Obama is attempting to “dissolve the people and elect another.” Obama’s policies have followed the same contours I outlined in a September 2009 interview of “The B-Cast” hosted by Scott Baker (currently managing editor of Glenn Beck’s new website, TheBlaze.com) and Liz Stephans. (The relevant portion begins at 55:30.) The only aspect I failed to anticipate was the push for Puerto Rican statehood.
http://www.blip.tv/email/2636149
Until Obama can form the New Soviet Man on our shores, he will continue to advance his agenda by propaganda, by bribery — even, as he has recently speculated, by executive order. Perhaps it is fitting in his most recent assault on the current American people he loathes, Obama made an inadvertent admission: “The country is scared, and they have good reason to be.”
That’s why 54 percent of Americans think Obama should be a one-term president. That term would end in 27 months.
Some of us think that’s too long.
No comments:
Post a Comment