Oh, and Speaking of Puritanical Obama
“I love you, man,” Obama said. “I want you to look after yourself. Eat the salad.”
Kyle Smith of the New York Post on “How the nanny president sees himself — and us”
In “Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside Obama’s White House,” MSNBC analyst Richard Wolffe, a writer sympathetic to the president, reports the prosaic backroom details of the White House struggles from early this year, but occasionally stumbles upon an off-the-cuff revelation that’s much more interesting.
One staffer was conspicuously overweight. The president, in an incident that Wolffe believes proves how caring the man is, took it upon himself to present the aide with a salad for lunch — “then listened to him protest that he could take care of his own health. ‘I love you, man,’ Obama said. ‘I want you to look after yourself. Eat the salad.’ ”
I love you, man. Eat the salad. That is the Obama presidency in a plastic see-through clamshell. (Hold the ranch dressing!) The president loves us. He knows what’s best for us. We should bow to his superior wisdom.
Jimmy Carter obsessed over the White House tennis court schedule. President Obama wants to be your life coach, guidance counselor and spouse, kicking your shins under the dinner table when you order chocolate cake instead of steamed celery.
The president has to deal with transnational terrorism, arms control, unemployment, the deficit, health care and limiting damage from the Joe Biden Gaffe-u-tron. Add in the possibility of North Korea throwing a nuclear tantrum, and it seems unlikely that Obama is going to have time to follow me into Wendy’s. Yet there he is, pushing for all restaurant chains to post calorie counts, as already required in New York. Like much of liberalism, this little nudge isn’t a terrible idea, but it does impose a cost on business with little apparent benefit.
The “eat the salad” command is echoed throughout the book, which finds Obama in emergency mode at all times and always convinced that his combination of charisma, intelligence and moral authority makes him uniquely qualified to solve any problem that has bedeviled humanity for any number of generations. As Obama sees the hapless White House underling — an oaf who has never heard of salad and has been waiting for a visionary to guide him to the land of arugula — he sees the world.
It’s Obama on Your Shoulder — complete with a nascent Elmer Gantry-like purely for public consumption religious streak!
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The Solution is Simple
Many people think that most problems in life are simple to fix, although they are educated and aware of the complexities and challenges in their own work. This explains why hope and change is so attractive, and suggests an evaluation of President Obama’s outlook and abilities.
Here is an excerpt of what Joe Y found in a social conversation.
A friend of Joe Y thought it would be great to have electronic medical records in a centralized government database. Knowing that the answer was easy, she was not curious and had no self-doubt. This changed when Joe mentioned just a few of the problems involved.
It’s worth noting that when Obama tells the fat guy to eat his salad (presumably before he goes out for the press briefing) or when Jimmy Carter sets the times for the White House tennis courts, they do it knowing that the fat guy will eat his salad and the tennis court rules will be obeyed. That’s something Obama definitely thought he was going to also be able to do on a much larger scale when he became president, telling the world how to solve all its problems, only to find out that, unlike political hires, the world doesn’t bend to his well-intentioned desires in order to kept its job.