Obama: Our First Post-Racial Failure

[Warph]

October 12, 2010
Obama: Our First Post-Racial Failure
by Stuart Schwartz

Barack Obama has become the nation's first post-racial failure...and we are all the stronger for it. After almost two years in office, he is living proof that America has managed to safely cross the racial divide. Failure is no longer the sole preserve of white presidents and Caucasian New York Times publishers. Obama has fashioned what Harvard historians would call a watershed in modern American history, right up there with the creation of MSNBC and the 1978 Star Wars Christmas television special, Happy Life Day. He has failed.

Indeed, Obama has failed so obviously and on such a grand scale that historians will look back in awe from an exceptionally American future and say that his presidency inarguably established as truism that failure knows no color, and fecklessness transcends all races and religions. Generations of schoolchildren will learn that obtuseness is not the sole preserve of the DNA strands that weave their way toward a pale John Kerry or inextricably combine to produce a lighter-shade-of-pale Jimmy Carter.

Barack Obama has failed not because he is black, but, as one PajamasMedia reader put it, because "everything he has done or wants to do is a disaster!" For the country, that is -- Democrat leadership, the faculty lounge, and the Upper West Side of Manhattan view Obama's governance and our misery as success...but that's another story for another day. The rest of the nation, however, sees a decimated free market, out-of-control regulation, shrinking liberty, and historic deficits fueling a descent into what Thomas Lifson terms "progressive feudalism," in which "even the most mundane tasks" will be regulated by government. And we don't like it.


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Marxism, Socialism, Commumism, and Obama: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/marxism-socialism-communism-and-the-president/
Progressive Feudalism:http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/progressive_feudalism_1.html
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The inimitable Rush Limbaugh, asked what is "sinking" the Democrats, put it this way: "It's Obama's Jackassian Policies." Leave it to the Maha Rushie to get to the heart of the matter. He put it in such a way that even the simplest of the simple (MSNBC's Ed Schultz, for example, or a New York Times columnist) can understand: an African-American can be every bit of a "jackass" as a dunderhead of the white persuasion. And, extending the logic, ignorance may now also be associated with brown and yellow skin, with females as well as males, with gays and lesbians...why, the possibilities are endless.

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What's Sinking the Democrats? It's Obama's Jackassian Politics: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_100810/content/01125106.guest.html
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"Stupid is as stupid does" is no longer just white and Forest Gump; it is black and Barack Obama (three months into his presidency, the Philadelphia Bulletin, a mainstream newspaper that also doubles as the Democratic house organ in Philadelphia, whined that he is setting "a record for incompetence"), or brown and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (a Latino whose latest achievement is making the "America's Worst Governor" list, having already achieved fame as one of the nation's worst cabinet members during the Clinton era). Washington has shown us the way, colorblind and brain-dead from the top down. What a wonderful country!


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Obama's Records for Incompentence:http://thebulletin.us/articles/2009/03/23/herb_denenberg/doc49c6f7ccaf164641312510.txt
"America's Worst Gov." List: http://www.examiner.com/democrat-in-albuquerque/governor-bill-richardson-makes-america-s-worst-governor-list
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Traditional media (a.k.a. dying media) helped give us the nation's first black president. A recurring theme in elite insider coverage was that the election of Barack Obama would usher in a new era of harmony, a "post-racial" United States. A defeat would be due solely to "the color of his skin," was the way the Washington Post's Slate put it in 2008. But the nation's voters came through, and on Election Day, "the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal" as American entered its post-racial era -- or so declared Barack Obama and a worshipful media. This is what you get when God occupies the oval office, crowed Newsweek. Chris Matthews' leg tingled, while New York Times columnists saw a cleaned-up Jesus with a "perfectly creased pant leg." The British press hailed "the rise of a new JFK," signaling the end of racism in its former colonies across the pond.


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If Obama Loses: http://www.slate.com/id/2198397/
Obama's Speech "This Is Our Moment": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/03/obama-seals-nomination-th_n_105045.html
Obama Is "Sort Of GOD": http://www.mrc.org/biasalert/2009/20090606031258.aspx
Thrill Going Up My Leg: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/13/chris-matthews-i-felt-thi_n_86449.html
Obama: The Courtship: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-courtship
Hail the Rise of a New JFK: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3137529.ece
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They were right. Barack Obama has shown that the American dream is both accessible and, depending upon the totality of one's work, inaccessible. In a nation which remains largely free, where competence and savvy are prized and appreciated, Obama has shown that, despite the categories and quotas of a half-century of regressive Democrat policies, a black in a position of responsibility can fail as gloriously and ignominiously as a person of the white or brown persuasion.

This is, indeed, good news. In fact, it is worthy of at least a few graduate theses at, perhaps, some of those second-rate state and religious-affiliated universities busily churning out Tea Party members and shapely-but-dead-from-the-neck-up citizen-politicians. Or throw in a few anti-Semitic call-outs and you have a doctoral dissertation at Harvard or Berkeley. America has moved into the post-racial era, and the failure of Barack Obama makes it official: American exceptionalism rides again.

Obama has shown that blacks are like everyone else. Arrogance, ignorance of history, inability to reason, lack of savvy, and self-absorption -- all are ingredients for post-racial failure. You don't have to be white to exhibit what American Thinker publisher Thomas Lifson calls the "shallowness ... of intellect and ... lack of rigor" displayed by the current president. Even actress Janeane Garofalo (a favorite of leftist cable hosts for her reasoned discourses on politics that begin with "you white pig" and end with a Columbia University debating favorite, "shut the f*** up") laments, "I have to say I was surprised how disappointing the Obama administration has turned out to be."


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Is Bill Stealing Obama's Mojo: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-30/bill-clintons-hotter-than-barack-who-wants-obamas-endorsement/
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Except for the usual suspects (the New York Times, Washington Post, etc.), few are blaming the dismal record of Obama's Washington on racism. Indeed, this has become an even more wonderful country thanks to the post-racial failures of Barack Obama. Up until now, the greatest presidential failure of the modern age has been Jimmy Carter, who was so spectacularly poor a president that even the reliably leftist San Francisco Chronicle called his years in the White House a "legacy of failure." But a post-racial America has given even respected academics the freedom to ask, "Is Obama the new Carter?" with little fear of the racist label. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal last month noted that "comparisons between the Obama White House and the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter are increasingly being made...by Democrats."

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Jimmy Carter's Legacy of Failure: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2006/12/13/cstillwell.DTL
Is Obama the New Carter: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/01/04/walter-russell-mead-foreign-policy-carter-obama/
The Carter-Obama Comparisons Grow: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704129204575505822147816104.html
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The consensus is growing that the greatest failure of the modern presidency is no longer a self-absorbed, mean-spirited white guy who embraces dictators and tyrants, can't manage his way out of a paper bag, and blames everything from earthquakes in Pakistan to bedbugs at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York on Israel. Rather, it is a self-absorbed, mean-spirited black guy who embraces dictators and tyrants, can't manage his way out of a paper bag, and blames everything from earthquakes in Pakistan to bed bugs at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York on Israel.

Indeed. Barack Obama has transcended race. He has led America into the post-racial era by failing on his merits -- not his skin color. We are, once again, a wonderful country -- of which even Michelle Obama can be proud!


Stuart Schwartz, formerly a media and retail executive, is on the faculty at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.

[Warph]

Obama's Outsized Ego
By Jonah Goldberg· Wednesday, October 13, 2010

"That's all right, all of you know who I am," President Obama joked last week when the presidential seal fell off his podium during a speech in Pittsburgh.

Even though the incident made headlines for no discernible journalistic reason, it was noteworthy as a succinct example of Obama's arrogance problem. Rather than make a self-deprecating joke, he opted instead to make a self-inflating one, as if to say that the title mattered less than the man.

The good news is that it's apparently not racist to call Obama arrogant anymore. Not long ago, Keith Olbermann and other gargoyles on the parapets of establishment liberalism insisted that if you were to call attention to the fact that Obama ostentatiously holds himself in very high regard, you were really calling him "uppity," if you know what I mean.

Now, what was once taboo has become undeniable. Even the New Yorker's David Remnick, author of a loving biography of Obama, tells Der Spiegel, "Obama has a considerable ego."

And here's Time's Mark Halperin: "With the exception of core Obama administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusion: The White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters."

Halperin's diagnosis was inevitable, given Obama's conviction that he represented a movement that was larger than politics or even the presidency. After all, this was the man who, as a candidate, descended on Berlin as the leader of a worldwide cause that transcended national borders. And when asked in a debate what his greatest weakness was, he plumbed his soul and answered that he was disorganized. "My desk and my office doesn't look good," he said. When a man runs as a national redeemer and says his biggest failing is a messy desk, that should be a warning sign that he likes himself a bit too much.

Of course, all presidents have healthy egos. You cannot become president, or even think you're qualified to run, if you don't think highly of yourself. Obama's arrogance problem isn't a matter of psychology but of strategy.

When Arkansas Democratic Rep. Marion Berry complained that health-care reform felt like a replay of the Hillarycare debacle, Obama explained that the big difference between then and now was "me." In other words, the White House's plan for making everything work out was an unyielding confidence in the power of Obama's own cult of personality. That's why that cult's high priest, David Axelrod, pursued a strategy of greeting every problem as if it were an excuse for Obama to give another big speech.

Now that the strategy has proved catastrophic, the self-pity is pouring out. Joe Biden, in a rare interregnum of lucidity, assailed his own base as whiners. Rahm Emanuel, as he was fleeing for the healthier and more civic-minded political environment of Chicago's backrooms, said, "I want to thank you for being the toughest leader any country could ask for in the toughest times any president has ever faced."

Really? The times have been rough, we can all agree, but if memory serves, the Civil War was no cakewalk either. And that Pearl Harbor thing -- not to mention 9/11 -- might compete with the miserable economy Obama inherited and then ignored as he pursued his own "transformational" vanity projects.

There's an irony to occupying the Oval Office. When presidents think they're bigger than the job they hold, they shrink in office. When they think they're smaller than the honor they've been temporarily bestowed, they grow into it. Obama has done nothing but shrink.

Last week, the president of the United States attacked Karl Rove by name -- twice! -- in a speech. He recently begged a crowd of black supporters not to "make me look bad" by staying home from the polls. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he scolded young voters that if they don't vote, it will be proof they "weren't serious in the first place."

It never dawns on him that were it not for the unseriousness of those voters, he might still be a one-term junior senator from Illinois.



It never dawns on him that were it not for the unseriousness of those voters, he might still be a one-term junior senator from Illinois.

"You know, I actually believe my own bullshit," Obama told the author of "Renegade: The Making of a President." Richard Wolffe.

Exactly. And that's why he's gotten into this mess.

[Warph]

"The President of Fear & Smear"By Michael Goodwin

Published October 13, 2010 | New York Post


Barack Obama's shameful innuendo that the United States Chamber of Commerce might be using "foreign money" has set a new low standard for the presidency. That the White House admits he has no proof means he is asking opponents, "When did you stop beating your wife?"

It's a cheap shot that will cost the president dearly in the area where he can least afford it: his reputation. Already repudiated for his disastrous policies, his turn to rancid fearmongering, even when he knows his claims are false, shows a character defect.

It is also a sudden departure from his "post-American" view of the world. He famously described himself as a "Citizen of the World," but now uses "foreign" as a synonym for "corrupt."

As ABC's Jake Tapper noted, the president's demand that the chamber "prove" it's not using foreign money is like the "birthers" demanding Obama prove he was born in America. Touché.

Obama got into political straits because he ignored public will on everything from bailouts to taxes to health care. Now he tries to get out by raising the specter of a foreign bogeyman.



The old advice about the best way out of a hole is to stop digging should apply. Yet good advice is wasted on him.

The only solution is to give him a Congress that will stand for the American majority. That's the change we need now.

[Warph]

Why Is He Sending Them?
By Charles Krauthammer · Friday, October 1, 2010

WASHINGTON -- From the beginning, the call to arms was highly uncertain. On Dec. 1, 2009, commander in chief Barack Obama orders 30,000 more Americans into battle in Afghanistan. But in the very next sentence, he announces that an American withdrawal will begin after 18 months.

Astonishing. A surge of troops -- overall, Obama has tripled our Afghan force -- with a declaration not of war but of ambivalence. Nine months later, Marine Corps Commandant James Conway admitted that this decision was "probably giving our enemy sustenance." This wasn't conjecture, he insisted, but the stuff of intercepted Taliban communications testifying to their relief that they simply had to wait out the Americans.

What kind of commander in chief sends tens of thousands of troops to war announcing in advance a fixed date for beginning their withdrawal? One who doesn't have his heart in it. One who doesn't really want to win but is making some kind of political gesture. One who thinks he has to be seen as trying but is preparing the ground -- meaning, the political cover -- for failure.

Until now, the above was just inference from the president's public rhetoric. No longer. Now we have the private quotes. Bob Woodward's book, drawing on classified memos and interviews with scores of national security officials, has Obama telling his advisers: "I want an exit strategy." He tells the country publicly that Afghanistan is a "vital national interest," but he tells his generals that he will not do the kind of patient institution-building that is the very essence of the counterinsurgency strategy that Gens. McChrystal and Petraeus crafted and that he -- Obama -- adopted.

Moreover, he must find an exit because "I can't lose the whole Democratic Party." This admission is the most crushing of all.

First, isn't this the party that in two consecutive presidential campaigns -- John Kerry's and then Obama's -- argued vociferously that Afghanistan is the good war, the right war, the war of necessity, the central front in the war on terror? Now, after acceding to power and being given charge of that very war, Obama confides that he must retreat lest that very same party abandon him. What happened in the interim? Did it suddenly develop a faint heart? Or was the party disingenuous about the Afghan War all along, using it as a convenient club with which to attack George W. Bush over Iraq, while protecting Democrats from the charge of being reflexively anti-war?

Whatever the reason, is it not Obama's job as president and party leader to bring the party with him? This is the man who made Berlin coo, America swoon and the Nobel committee lose its mind. Yet he cannot get his own party to follow him on what he insists is a matter of vital national interest?

Did he even try? Obama spent endless hours cajoling and persuading individual members of Congress to garner every last vote for health care reform. Has he done a fraction of that for Afghanistan -- argued, pleaded, horse-traded, twisted even a single arm?

And what about persuading the country at large? Every war is arduous and requires continual presidential explication, inspiration and encouragement. This has been true from Lincoln through FDR through Bush. Since announcing his Afghan surge, Obama's only major speech that featured Afghanistan was an Oval Office address about America leaving Iraq -- the Afghan part being sandwiched between that and a long-winded plea for his economic policies.

"He was looking for choices that would limit U.S. involvement and provide a way out," writes Woodward. One can only conclude that Obama now thinks Afghanistan is a mistake. Maybe he thought so from the very beginning. More charitably and more likely, he is simply a foreign policy novice who didn't understand what this war was about until being given the authority and duty to conduct it -- and then decided it was all a mistake.

Fair enough. But in that case, what is he doing escalating it?

Sen. Kerry, now chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, once asked many years ago: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Perhaps Kerry should ask that of Obama.

"He is out of Afghanistan psychologically," says Woodward of Obama. Well, he may be out, but the soldiers he ordered to Afghanistan are in.

Some will not come home.