Now We Know Who Was Right about Obama
By Karin McQuillan
Now we know. After three years in office and the launching of his second election campaign, we have experienced President Obama's leadership. We can see whom we elected president -- the mystery man of 2008 revealed.
Democrats were in ecstasy over the great healer, the multiracial candidate who would bring together red states and blue states, black and white, coasts and flyover country. Republicans saw the man with the most leftist, least bipartisan voting record in Congress being installed in the White House. We now know who was right.
Democrat professionals Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen this July pleaded with Obama in a Wall Street Journal column, "Our Divisive President," not to run for a second term. They describe his leadership as toxically divisive to our country. According to Gallup, Obama's approval gap after one year was the most polarized in history, with an average approval of 88% among his own party and 23% among Republicans.
Obama's disdain and hostility to opponents has been quite visible. He dissed the Supreme Court to their faces, dismissed Congressman Ryan's efforts to work together on the deficit with a "you lost, we won" crack, and told Republicans to shut up and go to the back of the bus. He rammed through the biggest changes to health care in history by chicanery, to avoid having to make compromises with Republicans through the normal conference process. He ignored the recommendations of his own bipartisan commission on controlling debt and deficit. His favorite activity (next to golf) is class warfare. Obama is indeed the great divider, and the country shows it.
What else do we know? To the surprise of many, we now know that Obama does not pay attention to the black community -- he doesn't visit them, talk to them, encourage them, propose policies to benefit them. He hasn't helped this suffering community, and when he does go to speechify, this is what he says:
Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes. Stop complainin'. Stop grumblin'. Stop cryin'. We are going to press on. We have work to do.
What work is Obama referring to -- jobs for the black community? No, the work is the re-election work he feels blacks owe him!
Look at black teenagers' 40% unemployment rate. Our president's "stimulus" package was not targeted to create private-sector jobs for them or anyone else. Eighty percent of the almost trillion dollars went to teachers' unions, Obama's re-election army, the very teachers who are failing those black teenagers so spectacularly.
In the words of Congressional Black Caucus leader Maxine Waters, "We're supportive of the president, but we're getting tired. We're getting tired. The unemployment is unconscionable. We don't know what the strategy is. We don't know why on this trip that he's in the United States now, he's not in any black community." Actions speak louder than words. The black community is right to feel abandoned.
What else do we know about our president? We now know that the elites were half-right: Obama is an intellectual. He surrounds himself with Ivy League economic advisors and follows their formulaic prescriptions. He believes them despite the evidence of his own eyes. He was told that there exists a "multiplier effect" by which $1 in government spending on anything -- government salaries, a bankrupt solar power company, aid to the states for Medicare or food stamps -- automatically creates $2 worth of jobs. Instead of creating jobs, the Democrat stimulus policy set our recession in stone, made unemployment skyrocket, and has pushed federal government spending to a crippling quarter of our GDP. Obama the intellectual is still a believer, still wants to spend more. He believes in the Ivy League elite's brilliance, not common sense.
On intelligence, sadly, the Democrats were completely wrong. Democrats swooned over Obama's suave self-presentation. They constantly cited his position as editor at the Harvard Law Review as an impressive qualification to be president of the United States. (Strange, but true.) Republicans who did their homework knew that Obama was not the first black, but only the first affirmative action Harvard Law Review editor. He did make history at the Law Review: he was the only editor never to write an article for the Review. Indeed, Obama has never written a law article on anything. Despite being given a job as lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago, he is unpublished.
Journalists proclaimed him the most intelligent man to ever hold the White House. What does this great brain do with his free time? According to the New York Times, his favorite activities are playing Taboo, Wii video games, and basketball. It seems that the Republicans were right who wondered about a mediocre high school student who smoked dope and drifted through his early college years at Occidental and was an "unspectacular" student at Columbia. As Donald Trump asked, "I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" Percy Sutton, former borough president of Manhattan, in a TV interview, gives one possible answer: Islamic supremacist Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, an advisor to a wealthy Saudi, paid for Barack Obama to go to Harvard Law School.
We now see the lazy student, the charmer in the White House, busy at what he likes best: golf, basketball, vacations, parties, speeches, and raising money. He has not been the policy wonk Democrats dreamed of, President Clinton redux. Obama doesn't do hard work. He farmed out his health reform to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, showing no interest or capability in formulating the details of the policy or even working the politics to get it through Congress. He famously didn't lift the phone to call Capitol Hill and get his signature policy passed. Obama's only contribution was nonstop speeches, which failed to win over the country. He doesn't seem interested in or capable of formulating an intelligent economic policy or foreign policy. He doesn't care enough to even try.
Progressives saw Obama as worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize, before even taking office. Republicans warned that Obama was a psychologically troubled man who deified his anti-colonial father, resented American power abroad, and had a troubling history of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel relationships (think Reverend Wright and Rashid Khalidi), never outgrowing an adolescent idolization of Castro and Che Guevara.
Tragically, once again, the Republicans were right. We now can see that Obama doesn't understand what it takes to support stability in the Middle East. He and Hillary Clinton have overturned the hard work of decades that created a neutral Egypt, key to the forty-year hiatus since the last Arab war against Israel. He's furthered Iran's nuclear ambitions, thrown all the gains made in stabilizing Iraq down the drain, and even managed to turn Libya over to the jihadis, losing track of Gaddafi's weapons caches on the way. Obama cares about happy headlines about the Facebook Revolution and the "Arab Spring," not about the hard work of supporting our allies and defeating our enemies. He and the State Department do not care about the spread of the Nazi Muslim Brotherhood, Hitler's living legacy.
To everyone's surprise, Obama doesn't care about some very important hot-button liberal issues, such as closing Guantánamo or protecting the rights of terrorists. Unlike the typical liberal, he's happy to use drones to kill individuals, even American citizens, without trial. It's more important to our president to avoid Guantánamo interrogations because the headlines would cause him electoral headaches. (He doesn't care about national security all that much, or he'd make sure we got those interrogations.) He's "still working" on his position on gay marriage.
We now know that Obama doesn't care about seniors. He took $500 billion out of Medicare to redistribute via ObamaCare to the uninsured. His payroll tax holiday is gutting our Social Security fund; he used that "solution" rather than working on bipartisan reforms to keep the next generation of seniors safe. Obama cares a great deal about scaring seniors to get them to vote Democrat. He does not care about fixing the safety net's serious problems.
Our law professor president doesn't care about rule of law. He and his attorney general and his Cabinet prefer government by fiat and by exemption -- the government of favoritism, not equality before the law. This is very important issue not written about enough. George Marlin's comments on the ballot box apply equally well to laws already passed:
If you look at the extreme left elites, they really don't have much use for democracy anymore because they're afraid people will not vote their way. So they bite away at the democratic process by imposing upon us a managerial state where agencies and bureaucracies basically rule things by going around the ballot box.
The most dangerous thing the Obama administration is doing is filling up government agencies all over the United States with like-minded people who will be running the administrative state. What Obama cannot get done through the Congress, through a democratically elected Congress, he's trying to do administratively.
We now know that our charming president has a narcissism problem. Like all narcissists, he likes people's adulation, but actual people, not so much. His most avid supporters complain that he is a cold fish. He is an empty suit, the famous narcissistic false self, in the words of one Democrat, a "Where's Waldo" president, or in the words of another, "Members of Obama's own party ... wonder who he really is." He takes criticism badly, has little empathy for others, and suffers from envy. In fact, envy is his one great leadership ambition. He wants the whole country to operate on envy instead of hard work.
A pathological narcissist, Obama has no capacity to learn, because he cannot admit mistakes. This grandiouse self-evaluation, from a December 2011 60 Minutes interview, is typical of the man:
I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president -- with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln -- just in terms of what we've gotten done in modern history.
Which brings us to the persistent question of who Obama really is. He is not a traditional liberal, not a great help to the black community, not interested in protecting seniors or safeguarding our safety net. He doesn't care about jobs, or he'd change from a failing policy. He doesn't care about working-class Americans, or he wouldn't kill oil and gas development, a one-two gut-punch which jacks up gas prices -- meaning the price of everything -- and kills jobs. He doesn't care about rule of law or clean government, but he does care about all the power he can grab.
The only constituencies he has worked for are government unions and the greens, his radical base. The two policies he focused on were ObamaCare and cap and trade -- two policies that promise to destroy American prosperity and power, permanently. He does not act like a normal liberal politician, such as Clinton, who backed off from the unpopularity of attacking our health care system. A normal politician would have made economic recovery a priority. Obama did not.
Conservative Republicans believe that Obama stands not for a failed presidency as much as for a malevolent one. He is unknown even to his own party, because he is hiding his true goals and values. He does not act like a typical liberal, because he is actually a radical. He's not interested in crafting good laws and policies or working with the opposition, because his goal is destruction. He is following the exact prescription of "the late American socialist Michael Harrington's 'socialist realignment strategy' -- deliberately dividing Americans by class 'with Republicans marked out as the aggressors,' forcing the 'have-nots' to act as a unified, pro-socialist - and electorally dominant - force."
Stanley Kurtz describes how Obama found his vocation as a community organizer at the 1983 Socialists Conference.
The socialist conferences Obama attended were filled with talk of community organizing as the key to socialist strategy. Every socialist faction at those conferences was entranced with the idea that African-American political leaders could emerge out of socialist-run community organizations and move the country to the left.
In 2008, Americans didn't know what a community organizer was, and most still don't -- they think of it as something like a social worker, an aura of compassion for the poor. They don't know that community organizing is the modern spearhead and training ground for the present-day American radicals' dream of destroying capitalism.
Obama has been implementing the teachings of America's leading socialists. One of their proposed strategies was to use ACORN pressure tactics on the banks, by false accusations of racism in their lending practices, to force a mortgage/finacial crisis that would ultimately bring down capitalism.
Peter Dreier, one of the speakers Obama heard at the Socialist conference, worked for Obama in 2008 as a campaign advisor. Dreir proposed to bring down American capitalism from below by swamping governments with entitlement programs. Dreier claimed that "the process leads to expansion of state activity and budgets, and ... to fiscal crisis in the public sector. In the longer run, it may give socialist norms an opportunity for expansion[.]"
In the words of the Wall Street Journal's New Year's Eve editorial in 2011:
For today's left, the main goal of politics is not to respond to public opinion. The goal is to impose the dream of an egalitarian entitlement state whether the public likes it or not[.]
The dream of an egalitarian state -- we now know that we did elect a socialist for president.
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