Barack Obama: Teetering at the Top
April 2010
Whether Congress enacts, and the President signs, or not, the health care bill that is scheduled to be rammed through the House of Representatives a few days from now as I write, Barak Obama stands to become the most unpopular, even hated, figure in American political life today.
He has already earned a reputation as the most incompetent Chief Executive ever to sit in the Oval Office. Several mornings ago, the local paper here carried an editorial cartoon that showed Nancy Pelosi shrieking from behind a battery of microphones, “We should just vote for health care reform legislation NOW—and LATER find out what it’s all about….It’s like--you know--electing a president!” Now that hits home—right through the roof of the West Wing, in fact. And the Laramie Boomerang is a liberal newspaper.
Obama has been in office for fourteen months and already his presidency is a shambles, resting amid a junk pile of (fortunately) broken promises and failed initiatives pertaining to foreign and domestic policy, from the administration’s Middle Eastern strategy to its health care push—which, if it succeeds in becoming law through a reconciliation maneuver combined (as rumor has it) with an unconstitutional anonymous vote, will end by damaging the president even more than its defeat could do. The president, after absorbing the shock of Scott Brown’s election to the Senate in January, has responded by redoubling his efforts to pass a bill whose supporters themselves have not grasped its content, signaling that he is prepared to turn next to passing a bill to amnesty as many as 20 million or more illegal immigrants and add them and their shortly-to-arrive relatives to the health care rolls (newly increased by some 30 million American citizens), and vowing to foist climate legislation in the form of “cap-and-trade” upon a resistant nation. As I write (March 15), Obama’s popularity has just registered its lowest levels yet in the polls (46 percent). Would any honest pollster dare predict what that level might be a year or so from now, should the president persist on his current course? (I hazard a guess: somewhere around the 19 percent positive rating that Vice President Cheney posted toward the end of the Bush administration. Blacks are 12 percent of the population, after all.)
There was much speculation in Washington last week concerning who calls the shots in Obama’s White House: Rahm Emmanuel, the Chief of Staff, or David Axelrod, the White House Senior Advisor. Indeed, there appears to be an ongoing battle between the partisans of the two men, one that has played out partly in the newspapers. The contest is said to be between a pragmatist (Emmanuel) and an ideologue (Axelrod), who persuaded the President to commit himself to pushing a wave of radical, and radically unpopular, legislation in Congress at the outset of his administration. Rumor has it that Axelrod is presently on his way out, Emmanuel on his way up. At this point, it may not make much difference to Obama which man leaves his side, and which one stays.
Barak Obama is famous for his “professorial” demeanor and personal coolness. For years, he has managed to keep the mask in place without letting it slip, save in a few instances. But today the man is under such pressure as he has never have experienced in his life before. To judge from his actions, as distinct from his words and his manner, Obama is not bearing up under that pressure well.
Dwight Eisenhower remarked that one ought never to lose his temper, except on purpose. President Obama behaves today like an angry man, if indeed he hasn’t been an angry man all his life, as his autobiographical writings suggest. Until now, as a stellar beneficiary of the new, inverse-racialist society, he has pretty much had life his way. All along, his skids have been greased by people offering him scholarships, admissions to prestigious institutions, praise and recognition as a writer and speaker, and, finally, success at the polls due, in part, to bad white liberal consciences. Now that he is President of the United States, and struggling under his own insufficiencies, Obama no longer enjoys a free pass, either from politicians or from the public. For the first time in his experience he faces withering criticism, contempt, and even derision, for which he is entirely unprepared.
Most likely the president believes, and is assured by his handlers and friends, that he is a victim of racial prejudice—which is probably true, in part. What of it? American blacks in their numbers made it overwhelmingly clear that they prefer a black man to a white one in the White House, and it would be unsurprising if many white people have a similar prejudice when it comes to choosing and supporting a president, as other white voters displayed a reverse prejudice in 2008. Yet Obama must by now be too sophisticated to suppose that racial prejudice is the sole motive for the political rancor he faces today. Race has been a lifelong obsession with him, but so has leftist ideology. And so too has the principle of success, of winning. Barak Obama came to power through one of the maddest sequences of unimaginable luck by which any U.S. president ever reached the White House, and at a time of national crisis. Surely he must have concluded from these circumstances that his star was in the ascendency, the planets miraculously aligned in his favor. Now he is being mocked by a cartoonist who implies that he was elected by a country that had no idea what it was letting itself in for, which in fact is only the plain truth of the matter.
Barack Obama prepared for the presidency by reading up before his inauguration on Lincoln and Roosevelt II, who also inherited the office in critical times. Obama saw an opportunity to exploit the latest crisis and to succeed where a series of presidents, both Democratic and Republican, had failed--health care, immigration “reform” –while shining in arenas they never had to fight in, such as climate control and perceptible national decline on every front. But today he is not, in fact, succeeding, and he is certainly not shining. Much, if not all, of Obama’s luster is gone. Fate seems prepared to confound this tarnished hero, rather than to crown him with a very un-republican crown. And Obama resents fate, and is angered by it.
If he really cared about the quality of health care in this country, the President would, as the Republicans have demanded, scrap his party’s incomprehensible bill and start over. But he no longer cares, if in fact he ever did care. What he wants now is to win, or win the appearance of winning, and then move on to take some other hurdle that no champion before him ever succeeded in clearing. Behind the competitive instinct, however, one can perceive a purely punitive one. Obama is angry with the Republican Party but he is also angry with the country, and his anger makes him dangerous to himself, as well as to the nation. With or without Axelrod, he is liable to attempt dangerous things, unless he comes to his senses in time. If he actually does tackle immigration reform in the wake of the health care debacle, his presidency will in all likelihood be finished, and his party swamped in the next election. “We are all crazy when we are angry,” said Philomen. And anger, in politicians especially, always begets anger. Barak Obama, who as a politician came out of nowhere, is presently in danger of being returned to nowhere—rather sooner, perhaps, than later. ###
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Chilton Williamson, Jr.