Messiah Worshipers Losing Their Religion

Mar 22, 2009 18 Comments ›› Pat Dollard

Newser:

Barack Obama Is a Terrible Bore

by Michael Wolff

Sheesh, the guy is Jimmy Carter.

That homespun bowling crap on Jay Leno, followed by the turgid, teachy fiscal policy lecture, together with the hurt defensiveness (and bad script for it) that everybody in Washington “is Simon Cowell… Everybody’s got an opinion,” is pure I’m-in-over-my-head stuff. Even the idea of having to go on Jay Leno to rescue yourself from the AIG mess is lame. Be a man, man.

The guy just doesn’t know what to say. He can’t connect. Emotions are here, he’s over there. He can’t get the words to match the situation.

This began, I’d argue, from the first moment. He punted on the inaugural. Everybody ran around like crazy trying to praise it because if Barack Obama couldn’t give a speech then what?

But now, at week 11, we’re face-to-face with the reality, the man can’t talk worth a damn.

You can see the fundamental mistake he’s making. Having been so successfully elected, he’s acting like people actually want to hear what he thinks. He’s the great earnest bore at the dinner party. Instead of singing for his supper, he’s just talking—and going on at length. The real job of making people part of the story you’re telling, of having them hang on your every word, of getting the tone and detail right, the hard job of holding a conversation, he ain’t doing.

He’s cold; he’s prickly; he’s uncomfortable; he’s not funny; and he’s getting awfully tedious.

He thinks it’s all about him. That we want him for himself—that he doesn’t have to seduce, charm, surprise, show some skin.

So Jimmy.

It’s instructive and humorous to remember that Carter ran a brilliant campaign that succeeded largely because his voice was new. Simple, direct, basic, human. And then, of course, he turned into a sad-sack twit.

What happens when you move into the White House?

Well, , of course. The true secret of the power of language is in quickness. Barack Obama can’t keep up. He evidently needs too much preparation. And then there’s the organization. He’s undoubtedly got too many people debating what he should say. That’s the other secret of language: You’ve got to just go for it. Can’t think too much about it. It’s like hitting the ball. And then there’s knowing who you want to be—which is different than knowing who you are. You’re on the stage. You’re acting. You’ve got to make yourself believable, cleverly make yourself up as you go along.

This guy is leaden and this show is in trouble.

Real Clear Politics:

Too Clever by Half

By David Warren

It is now spring; the vernal equinox was reached Friday morning. To celebrate, Barack Obama sent a video of himself to Iran.

This was one of several end-of-week media performances, as Mr. Obama went back into “campaign mode” after a break of several months. The message of the polls is that he had better start selling his policies harder, because they are showing signs of not going over very well. Moreover, the unpolled elites, including those within the Democratic Party, have started to ask questions aloud about whether their man is competent; and as we know from painful history, such uncertainties from an elite tend to “trickle down.”

What the polls can’t say directly, and thus perhaps the White House can’t yet hear, is that the policies themselves are diminishing Mr. Obama’s appeal. There are indications of this in the polls themselves, but they are subtle. On one issue after another, from bail-outs to the environment, Medicare, life issues, foreign policy, the polls now tend to confirm what this pundit and a few other incorrigible reactionaries knew from the outset: that a plurality of American voters had embraced Mr. Obama not because of, but despite the policies he was signalling. They most certainly liked the man and his “temperament,” and they most certainly wanted the Republicans out. But it did not follow that they wanted their government to lurch to the left.

To my analytical mind, such as it is, they wanted Obama the man, but not Obama the agenda, except for the uplifting rhetorical bits about “hope,” “change,” and so forth. The idea that the man could not be separated from the agenda never fully fixed; John McCain and company actually avoided riding home on this point, once the media made clear it would be reported as “scare tactics.”

Again, to my mind — and it is the only one I have with which to write this column — we would be wrong to think of Mr. Obama as an ideologue. I think he was perfectly sincere in denying that he was anything of the sort, and in claiming that he would be looking for bipartisan consensus. I also think he is sincere in proceeding with an agenda — on bail-outs, the environment, Medicare, life issues, foreign policy, etc. — that leaves most Republicans, and quite a few of the more conservative Democrats, utterly aghast.

How to explain this apparent contradiction? I’m afraid it is easy. As I mentioned during the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was seriously unqualified for the job of president. He had no practical experience in running anything, except political campaigns; but worse, his background was one-dimensional.

All his life, from childhood through university through “community organizing” and Chicago wardheel politics, through Sunday mornings listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to the left side of Democrat caucuses in Springfield and Washington, he has been surrounded almost exclusively by extremely liberal people, and moreover, by people who are quick and clever but intellectually narrow.

He is a free soul, but he is also the product of environments in which even moderately conservative ideas are never considered; but where people on the further reaches of the left are automatically welcomed as “avant-garde.” His whole idea of where the middle might be, is well to the left of where the average American might think it is. To a man like Obama, as he has let slip on too many occasions when away from his teleprompter, “Middle America” is not something to be compromised with, but rather, something that must be manipulated, because it is stupid. And the proof that it can be manipulated, is that he is the president today.

It is at this point that the phenomenon known as “too clever by half” sets in. Technically, it is indistinguishable from arrogance and hubris, but it is unnecessary to stress the point. Sixty days into his first term (and I begin to doubt there’ll be a second), he would seem already to have dug a hole from which no rhetorical skill can lift him.

The video to Iran is the latest catastrophe. Mr. Obama simply does not understand how his “olive branch” will be received, not only by the mullahs in Iran itself, but wherever else on the surface of the planet the United States has enemies. It “reads” — to people who do not share anything like America’s aspirations — as an unambiguous confession of weakness. He has moved the American position towards Iran from offensive to defensive, for no defensible reason.

Politico:

Friendly fire: NYT hits Obama

By JONATHAN MARTIN

The leading liberal voices of the New York Times editorial pages all criticized—and, in some cases, clobbered—President Obama on Sunday for his handling of the economy and national security.

It’s not unusual for Barack Obama to take a little friendly fire from the Times. But it’s perhaps unprecedented for him to get hit on the same day by columnists Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd—and in the paper’s lead editorial. Their critique punctuated a weekend that started with a widely circulated blog post by Paul Krugman that said the president’s yet to be announced bank rescue plan would almost certainly fail.

The sentiment, coming just two months after the president was sworn in, reflects elite opinion in the Washington-New York corridor that Obama is increasingly overwhelmed, and not fully appreciative of the building tsunami of populist outrage.

Unlike with President Bush, the Obama administration is less apt to dismiss such commentary, at least publicly, as so much carping from an out-of-touch peanut gallery. These are voices that have been sympathetic, and at times gushing toward Obama, during the campaign and in his administration’s early days.

The president and his top aides read the Times closely and react quickly to its reporting and commentary. Tom Daschle, for example, withdrew from consideration as Health and Human Services Secretary amid back tax issues on the same day that the paper ran a tough front-page piece and editorial on what keeping Daschle would mean to the Obama brand.

So it likely caused some consternation this morning at the White House and at Camp David, where the president is staying this weekend, to pick up the Times and find:

—Frank Rich, who made a cottage industry of Bush-bashing, writing that until Obama “addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed.”

Recalling the Daschle episode and the public’s response to the image of a wealthy former senator not paying taxes on a limousine, Rich said that judging from their response to the AIG case “the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.”

Larry Summers, perhaps the president’s most high-profile economic adviser, came in for the worst of it.

“Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy,” Rich wrote.

—Thomas Friedman, the paper’s highly-read foreign affairs columnist, turning his focus home to find the nation lacking “inspirational leadership.”

Friedman’s indictment was not limited to Obama, but he captured some of the concern about the president’s communications skills by writing that the president “missed a huge teaching opportunity with A.I.G.”

Instead of letting Congress react in its usual knee-jerk fashion to overcompensate for what it believes the public wants—what Friedman called letting them “run riot”—the president should have stepped up.

“He should have gone on national TV and had the fireside chat with the country that is long overdue. That’s a talk where he lays out exactly how deep the crisis we are in is, exactly how much sacrifice we’re all going to have to make to get out of it, and then calls on those A.I.G. brokers — and everyone else who, in our rush to heal our banking system, may have gotten bonuses they did not deserve — and tells them that their president is asking them to return their bonuses ‘for the sake of the country.’”

—The paper’s liberal editorial page and a frequent voice of opposition to Bush’s national security policies complaining about “confused and mixed signals from the [Obama] White House” on some of the same issues.

“Some of what the public has heard from the Obama administration on issues like state secrets and detainees sounds a bit too close for comfort to the Bush team’s benighted ideas,” penned the Times editorialists, carping about Guantanamo specifically, detainee policy more broadly and Obama’s reluctance to investigate Bush-era actions on “terrorism, state secrets, wiretapping, detention and interrogation.”

—Maureen Dowd, in her inimitable fashion, citing the take-charge First Lady digging a White House garden to wonder “if the wrong Obama is in the Oval.”

“It’s a time in America’s history where we need less smooth jazz and more martial brass,” wrote Dowd.

—Krugman, who is perhaps the most frequent Obama critic at the paper but also a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose analysis carries considerable sway in liberal circles, not even waiting for the administration’s bank plan announcement this week before panning it.

“It’s exactly the plan that was widely analyzed — and found wanting — a couple of weeks ago,” Krugman wrote on his blog. “The zombie ideas have won. The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank.”

The Princeton economist turned opinion columnist predicted: “This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work. What an awful mess.”

Christina Romer, the Chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, called Krugman’s critique “unfair” in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” and said their plan of partnering with the private sector was to ensure taxpayers didn’t shoulder more of the burden and they didn’t offer “just another hand-out to banks.”

Mark Steyn (NRO) weighs in:

[ ... ] Yes, but the manipulation of “Upper-Middle America” – the Dowds, Riches, etc – was key to that. They’re the beneficiaries, ungrateful though they are, of the boom years. Politics is cyclical so in the fulness of time it may yet deliver up another Reagan. But, if you’re Frank and Maureen’s age, at the rate the Obama-Frank-Dodd crowd are vaporizing American wealth, the new Reagan may not arrive in time to enable you to make back everything Obama’s costing you. But hey, that’s “social justice”, right?

Me: And then there is the “60 Minutes” chucklefest that is sure to divide onlookers Monday morning as either completely repulsive or something to be coddled and taken for all its superior nuance … just like his “Special Olympics” remark.

You want to know what I say?

1.) You sons of b*tches and bastards … You have been butchering this country for well over eight years with your criminal media/journalistic malpractice. You did not vet this unqualified, slick-sh*t salesman bastard (or did and hid the damning evidence from your trusting viewers) because you just knew he was a good guy. Or you felt it was finally your white-guilt obligation met to boost and endorse blindly a man simply based on the color of his skin and the history behind the color of that skin in this country’s history … except, he hijacked that … his blackness did not suffer the history of the color of black skin in this country, either his ancestors or by his own experience.

2.) Own it, you mother f***ers … OWN this scourge you duped half the American voting public into ascending to the highest office not only in this land but in the world … f***! in the f***ing solar system. OWN IT! Just as you own the over 4000 dead and tens of thousands wounded in war. What evil comes in this country in the days/weeks/months/years ahead is, in large part … yours. YOU handed the b*tch your Zippo, fully lit, and watch now as he and his henchmen/women in the Congress hold the flame to our US Constitution.

The blood on the lens, past-present-future, is yours …

Own it …