As Mickey Kaus writes, “Uh-oh. President Obama seems to have learned nothing from the disaster of the ‘cling-to-guns-and-God’ talk that almost derailed his campaign in 2008. He’s back at it—blaming voters for failing to ‘think clearly’ because they’re ‘scared’ about the economy:”
Insulting voters is rarely a good way to win them over. But usually the “blame the customer” approach, as Mark Shields calls it, takes hold in the wake of an election defeat. Obama has broken new ground by moving it up to three weeks in advance of the vote.What if he’s right? In two years, the economy will have recovered and voters will feel better about his policies. But the election is in three weeks, when—according to his own theory—voters will act out of scared, hard-wired confusion. Why make them angrier? (‘You poor, scared, confused people, I know more “facts” and “science” than you do.’) Always Be Condescending! It’s a form of political malpractice—making yourself look good to supporters, and to history, and to yourself, at the expense of the fellow Dems who are on the ballot.
But Obama’s talk Saturday night wasn’t as bad as his San Francisco lecture. It was worse, in this sense: It’s one thing to say those poor people in Pennsylvania are hostile to gay rights, say, because all their “jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them”—and that they’ll change when they get the jobs back. It’s another thing to say those poor people will change when they get their jobs back when you’ve had two years to get them their jobs back and have conspicuously failed. At that point, blaming “false consciousness” becomes a semi-delusional way of dancing around your own inability to remove the root of that false consciousness. A little humility is in order. If true humility is unavailable, false humility will do.
A few days ago, Jonah Goldberg diagrammed the Hindenburg-sized excesses of “Obama’s Outsized Ego:”
Last week, the president of the United States attacked Karl Rove by name — twice! — in a speech. He recently begged a crowd of black supporters not to “make me look bad” by staying home from the polls. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he scolded young voters that if they don’t vote, it will be proof they “weren’t serious in the first place.”
It never dawns on him that were it not for the unseriousness of those voters, he might still be a one-term junior senator from Illinois.
“You know, I actually believe my own bull—,” Obama told the author of Renegade: The Making of a President, Richard Wolffe.
Exactly. And that’s why he’s gotten into this mess.
Why would someone who actually believes the shovel-ready manure he tossed on the campaign trail in 2008, and went along with the charade that he’s the second coming of Lincoln be expected to find humility — fake or otherwise — at this point in time?
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