George Rebane
Have you noticed how Democrat candidates across the land have been nowhere in sight when President Obama swings through their neighborhoods? It may have something to do with his plummeted approval ratings, or that the nation is beginning to take a second look at the fast track to EU socialism he has laid out for us, or … .
Fouad Ajami, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is one of the most astute observers of the international scene, and has published a series of cogent and on-the-mark analyses of the American scene of the past several years. Today he continues with the 11aug10 WSJ piece ‘The Obsolescence of Barack Obama’.
The magic is definitely gone – “A broken link with the public, and a war in Afghanistan he neither embraces and sells to his party nor abandons—this is a time of puzzlement for President Obama. His fall from political grace has been as swift as his rise a handful of years ago. He had been hot political property in 2006 and, of course, in 2008. But now he will campaign for his party’s 2010 candidates from afar, holding fund raisers but not hitting the campaign trail in most of the contested races. Those mass rallies of Obama frenzy are surely of the past.”
What has become obvious to all but the last stalwarts of this Alinsky Administration is that
“(the) vaunted Obama economic stimulus, at $862 billion, has failed. The “progressives” want to double down, and were they to have their way, would have pushed for a bigger stimulus still. But the American people are in open rebellion against an economic strategy of public debt, higher taxes and unending deficits. We’re not all Keynesians, it turns out. The panic that propelled Mr. Obama to the presidency has waned. There is deep concern, to be sure. But the Obama strategy has lost the consent of the governed.”
Of course, the consent of the governed was lost very quickly after the secretive community organizer took office. Everyone knew the hokum with which ARRA was passed in February 2009, and that set the stage for the follow-on legislative throat rams of Obamacare, financial reform, and the now churning cap n’ tax end run.
The essay is a tight mid-term synopsis of a presidency gone wrong. The comparisons to the transition from a JFK to a Lyndon Johnson are telling. But the contrasts to Reagan are perhaps most revealing since both men felt they “were handed a broken nation, (and) that it was theirs to repair.”
Dr Fouad concludes that “There remains the fact of his biography, a man’s journey. Personality is doubtless an obstacle to his recovery. The detachment of Mr. Obama need not be dwelled upon at great length, so obvious it is now even to the pundits who had a “tingling sensation” when they beheld him during his astonishing run for office. Nor does Mr. Obama have the suppleness of Bill Clinton, who rose out of the debris of his first two years in the presidency, dusted himself off, walked away from his spouse’s radical attempt to remake the country’s health-delivery system, and moved to the political center.
It is in the nature of charisma that it rises out of thin air, out of need and distress, and then dissipates when the magic fails. The country has had its fill with a scapegoating that knows no end from a president who had vowed to break with recriminations and partisanship. The magic of 2008 can’t be recreated, and good riddance to it. Slowly, the nation has recovered its poise. There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.”
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment