Re: Obamanation here today
Dr. Hunt is a social and cultural anthropologist.. He has had
nearly 30 years experience in planning, conducting, and managing
research in the field of youth studies, and drug and alcohol
research. Currently Dr. Hunt is a Senior Research Scientist at the
Institute for Scientific Analysis and the Principal Investigator on
three National Institutes on Health projects. He is also a writer
for American Thinker.
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An article from American Thinker by Geoffrey P. Hunt
Anatomy of a Failing Presidency
Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed
presidency since Woodrow Wilson. In the modern era, we've seen
several failed presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed
presidents have one strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in
the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp
early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party.
Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a
statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture
to China 20.
But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And
failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most
importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The
incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her
finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the
American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the
Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of
his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American
Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is
failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate;
his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack
of shame.
But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new
president riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill
have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in a year?
His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting, the
Republicans have now seized a five point advantage. This truly is
unbelievable. What's going on?
No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a
narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it
fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But
this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He
doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us.
All successful presidents have a narrative about the American
character that intersects with their own where they display a
command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their
personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the
majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives
not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter
than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even
those whose politics don't align exactly with our own: Teddy
Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, and Reagan.
But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony,
knows nothing about economics, and is historically illiterate and
woefully small minded for the size of the task--all contributory of
course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his
profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout
made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't
command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common
sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things
work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions
of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with
our experience.
In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a
measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us-- financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police
officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office
workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job.
Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For
those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were
not offended, you just didn't give me enough time; if only I'd had
a second term, I could have offended you too."
Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in
1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered
terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive. An
equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a
new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock until we
vote for president again two short years after that.
Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them. The
coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps rolling along.
Margaret Thatcher: "The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or
later you run out of other people's money."
"When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of
both." - James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." – Tacitus
"A Liberal is a person who will give away everything he doesn't
own." – Unknown
