I’ve tried to leave Obama alone for a while, partly because it is so enervating to think about him. Mark Steyn, however, seems to have the best view of him that I’ve seen. I need to read “Dreams From My Father.” My daughter, a surprise Obama supporter, gave me the other book he is alleged to have written but I had no interest in reading a campaign book by a man who had never done anything but run for office.
I did read a couple of books about him during the campaign and so was not surprised by how he has performed in office. I use the term “performed” advisedly.
Mark Steyn:
Anyway, a couple of years back, Michael Ignatieff, a professor at Harvard and previously a BBC late-night intellectual telly host, returned to his native land of Canada in order to become prime minister, and to that end got himself elected as leader of the Liberal party. And, as is the fashion nowadays, he cranked out a quickie tome laying out his political “vision.” Having spent his entire adult life abroad, he was aware that some of the natives were uncertain about his commitment to the land of his birth. So he was careful to issue a sort of pledge of a kind of allegiance, explaining that writing a book about Canada had “deepened my attachment to the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.”
Gee, that’s awfully big of you. As John Robson commented in the Ottawa Citizen: “I’m worried that a man so postmodern he doesn’t need a home wants to lead my country. Why? Is it quaint? An interesting sociological experiment?”
I think this is a key insight of Steyn’s. Obama has a vision of what he wants to do but it doesn’t exactly fit reality. Since Harvard professors rarely get to run anything more complicated than a seminar, there has been very little testing of Obama’s ideas. A San Francisco County Supervisor, a year or so ago, suggested that entire US Military be dismantled so the money could be spent on social programs. Now, there is a motion for debate. Mr Sandoval is actually a government official, of San Francisco it is true, but still he does have a hand in running something. That is the sort of thing that probably runs through Obama’s mind although he is just smart enough to know not to mention it.
More Steyn:
Many Americans are beginning to pick up the strange vibe that, for Barack Obama, governing America is “an interesting sociological experiment,” too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” But he doesn’t, not really: It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job — that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.
He gives the air of a citizen of the world but, when the truth slips out (How do they say that in Austrian ?), he really hasn’t been anywhere except Hawaii and Indonesia. He speaks none of those languages that he scolds Americans for not speaking. It is all a sort of pose.
No doubt my observations about Obama’s remoteness from the rhythms of American life will be seen by his dwindling band of beleaguered cheerleaders as just another racist, right-wing attempt to whip up the backwoods knuckle-dragging swamp-dwellers of America by playing on their fears of “the other” — the sophisticated, worldly cosmopolitan for whom France is more than a reliable punchline. But in fact my complaint is exactly the opposite: Obama’s postmodern detachment is feeble and parochial. It’s true that he hadn’t seen much of America until he ran for president, but he hadn’t seen much of anywhere else, either. Like most multiculturalists, he’s passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn’t depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world.
Here is the key. Obama has adopted the airs of a cosmopolitan without actually, you know, knowing anything or being anywhere.
You don’t need to go anywhere, or do anything: You just need to pick up the general groove, which you can do very easily at almost any college campus.
This Barack Obama did brilliantly. A man who speaks fewer languages than the famously moronic George W. Bush, he has nevertheless grasped the essential lingo of the European transnationalist: Continental leaders strike attitudes rather than effect action — which is frankly beneath them. One thinks of the insistence a few years ago by Louis Michel, then Belgian foreign minister, that the so-called European Rapid Reaction Force “must declare itself operational without such a declaration being based on any true capability.” As even the Washington Post drily remarked, “Apparently in Europe this works.”
Apparently. Thus, Barack Obama: He declared himself operational without such a declaration being based on any true capability. But, if it works for the EU, why not America? Like many of his background here and there, Obama is engaged mostly by abstractions and generalities. Indeed, he is the very model of a modern major generalist. He has grand plans for “the environment” — all of it, wherever it may be.
Steyn is able to capture the essence of Obama here. We are now being taught that it doesn’t matter if we go places no country has ever gone before. We will stimulate the economy by borrowing. This is a bit like paying a bill with a credit card. It doesn’t get us anywhere but maybe it will keep the bill collector away another month. The BP oil spill is another such example. Obama is all about politics and the next election. He rails on and on about “British Petroleum” years after it changed its name and the British people, our most loyal ally, fume about it week after week. Who cares if their pensions, invested in BP shares, are destroyed? Obama needs a scapegoat. Years from now, the litigation will be settled and it will probably be resolved that it was all an accident and BP has no special liability beyond the usual business and civil liability.
However, our relationship with England will be changed forever. Obama has fantasies about mistreatment of his father in Kenya by the British, fantasies that cannot be confirmed, and so he hates the British. And we are along for the ride, whether we like it or not. His lack of economic understanding, typical of the left who had been kept from governing this country until now, will lead to ruin. Thus images can kill.
Victor Davis Hansen has an excellent piece today on the same topic.