Its Origin and Purpose, Still a Total Mystery
At the end of 2006, journalist Froma Harrop, whom five years later would beclown herself on the Daily Show when the show (surprisingly) called her on writing a piece arguing for civil discourse after comparing Tea Partiers to Al Qaeda, wrote a piece at Real Clear Politics titled, “Obama Scores as Exotic Who Says Nothing:”
What Obama really thinks should be done about health care and the terrorist threat remain secrets that his book does not unlock. His two years in the Senate certainly haven’t revealed any bold policy ideas.
This leave-them-guessing strategy slips out in the book’s prologue. “I serve as a blank screen,” Obama writes, “on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He notifies readers that “my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete.” It takes some doing for a politician to write a 364-page book, his second volume, and skate past all controversy.
Two years later, at the end of a presidential campaign in which CNN would spend at least a year of being so deep in the tank for then-Preisdent Elect Barack Obama that the network gave itself a collective case of the bends, network contributor Jonathan Mann wrote a column with a remarkable ending:
Obama hasn’t taken office as president, only glimpsed the Oval Office as a visitor and won’t take over until January 20.
But already, he’s being compared to the most remarkable leaders the United States has ever had.
The way some Americans talk, they’re getting five presidents in one.
After comparing Obama to first JFK, FDR, Lincoln and Bill Clinton, Mann concluded, “The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.”
On the eve of the election in 2008 though, Tom Brokaw of NBC, and Charlie Rose, then with PBS, admitted that they knew very little about President Obama:
CHARLIE ROSE: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.
TOM BROKAW: No, I don’t, either.
ROSE: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.
BROKAW: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.
ROSE: I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?
BROKAW: Yeah, it’s an interesting question.
ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.
BROKAW: Two of them! I don’t know what books he’s read.
ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?
BROKAW: There’s a lot about him we don’t know.
And the mystery continues! “Even After 4 Years, Obama Remains a Mystery,” David Shribman wrote yesterday at Real Clear Politics:
George W. Bush was not an enigma. He had no hidden parts. His father was not mysterious. George H.W. Bush’s life was dedicated to achievement and service. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t unfathomable. Nothing in his presidency — the brilliant highs, the shocking lows — was a substantial, unpredictable departure from his past.
Barack Obama, though, is the most enigmatic president since Jimmy Carter, the most mysterious since Lyndon Johnson, the most unfathomable since Franklin Roosevelt. Political professionals sometimes say of public figures that what you see is what you get, more or less. But with Mr. Obama, what you see is both more and less than what you get. [...]
The gravest warning sign in Mr. Obama’s background wasn’t his spare record in the U.S. Senate (Johnson often ridiculed John F. Kennedy for having accomplished almost nothing in the Capitol), nor his limited experience in electoral office (Lincoln had but one term in the House). Instead, the most troubling aspect of Mr. Obama’s past were the 129 abstentions in his Illinois Senate career. They suggested that Mr. Obama was more interested in getting elected than in doing the work he had been elected to perform.
While much of Obama’s “mystery” can be written off to the reluctance of liberal networks and news agencies to investigate the most radical chic candidate to ever win election to the White House, Orrin Judd suggests that there’s a much more prosaic issue at work: “Having elected such an empty suit, we have a great need to believe that there is more to him than we’ve gotten. But our need does not create substance. Mr. Obama is a classic social climber who believes in nothing but his own advancement.”
But his pants were perfect, and he had a D in parentheses after his name on the ticket. What more did you need to know from the MSM about him?
I remember here on PJM, some Lefties commenting, “These are just the lies he has to tell to get elected.” He was totally down with that.
These guys knew exactly what they were going to get, which is why they were so excited about him. They were going to elect one of their own, and they would have the power in Congress, too. The stars were aligned, and Socialist victory was at hand.
Guess the Change did not work out as they had Hoped.
Four years later, I’m still astonished that Barack Obama could have been elected. He was not vetted, and actively covered for by the MSM — at a level that would have embarrassed Pravda.
However, there were two potential upsides of Barack’s election:
One was that our nation was suffering serious problems that needed to be dealt with in a serious way. While Obama is not a serious person, he could get the MSM to shut up long enough that others could get things done. As unfair as it is, Obama can get away with things that a Republican could only dream of. Thus, Obama pretty much stayed the national security course (for the most part) and our enemies have been confounded. Similarly, with the MSM downplaying the economic crisis as much as possible (instead of highlighting it as much as possible), we entrepreneurs have gotten some breathing room.
Two was that Barack Obama would turn out to be lazy (true), an empty suit (partially true) and inept in dealing with DC (true). Those are all good things. Last thing we wanted was a leftist who could play the DC game. We conservatives can either complain that he’s a would-be dictator or incompetent. If the food sucks, let’s not complain about the portions.
There were two massive downsides of electing Barack Obama.
One is what it meant — it meant that the Democrats had become so full of hatred of all things Republican that they were willing to accept a content-free, megalomaniacal and demagogic campaign and dishonestly ignore his lack of qualifications and cover up and ignore things they would never accept in a Republican candidate. That is, the Democrats are ripe for fascism. They will cheer a dictator if he comes. Thank God it’s not Obama. But it could have been. The country has fundamentally changed. A president with Obama’s record would easily be looking at a massive loss in 2012. But he’s ahead in the polls. The Democrats don’t care — they are hyperpartisan. Power is what matters to them.
Two is Obama has sold us a lot of poison. The Dems sit by as the last two presidents have progressed toward building a surveillance state. Don’t cheer our use of drones. They can be (and probably will be) used against us. Don’t cheer the monitoring and storage of our movements on the Internet — that will be used against us. Every civil libertarian in both parties should be screaming against it from the hilltops. And let’s not forget about Obamacare and it’s destruction of the rights of religious conscience …
And yet most of my liberal friends complain that Obama is too conservative. The problem is Obama compromised with Republicans, that he was too nice, that he didn’t just go full bore to the left. To them, that’s the real problem. I am always speechless with astonishment when they say that.
John Lindsay ran and won re-election in 1969 for mayor of New York after being dumped as the GOP nominee on the state’s Liberal Party line, basically by going before New York’s left-of-center voters and apologizing for his first term, and promising to do better the next time. Which, of course, he didn’t.
Still, it was a slightly humbling moment, and one that likely wouldn’t have worked if it hadn’t been a three-man race, with Lindsay running to the left of Democrat Mario Procaccino. But in terms of PR, saying he was sorry melted the hearts of a lot of disappointed liberals (way faster than the two feet of snow the mayor didn’t get plowed for days earlier in the year). If Obama didn’t have the Rushmore-sized ego he does, he could win back the love of the wavering big media and even some annoyed Democrat regulars in a heartbeat just by showing a little humility and admitting he had failed on some things, not because John Bohener, Paul Ryan and everyone on Fox News are a bunch of poopy-heads, but because of his own errors.