And Speaking of our Anthropological President...

Andrew Malcolm describes “The amazing little story that didn’t happen on Obama’s big bus trip” through Iowa:

Can you imagine the media coverage if a president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, actually stopped his important, snaking motorcade on the spur of the moment to buy out a little girl’s pitcher of homemade lemonade? And perhaps demonstrate that one government official at least cares about helping a small business. Think that touching scene might make the news? Over and over and over?

Mitt Romney did just that during last fall’s New Hampshire primary campaign. And you should have seen the TV crews falling over each other for the shot.

As Obama’s huge ominous vehicle neared the little girl’s lemonade stand in Marshalltown, she fell to her knees. Perhaps in awe. More likely pleading.

But the president’s big black bus rolled right on by.

He waved through the tinted windows.

But then, strange things happen to Mr. Obama when he gets out of the bus in Iowa and begins to interact with the people there. Recall this incident from almost exactly one year ago today:

In the otherwise unfortunately Lileks-less new Ricochet podcast, Rob Long mentioned the incident at the president’s non-listening listening tour in Iowa this past week. The president engaged two Tea Party members who reminded Obama that his vice president had recently called them terrorists (a story whose source, very much Obama supporters themselves, still defends). As Rob noted, the president’s distant, aloof reaction sounded more like a cynical Times or MSNBC journalist or elitist leftwing university professor than a man elected to govern all of the people. That also ties in with Steve Green’s recent assessment that our Ivy League president was honestly shocked when his ’30s-era economic policies produced…’3os-era economic results.

To paraphrase what I wrote at time, liberal journalists, historians and Hollywood have all given President Nixon an endless amount of grief and derision for attempting to chat with hippies and anti-war protesters at the Lincoln Memorial in 1970. How will history record Obama’s infinitely greater distance from the American people he chose to govern?