The Changing Face of Change

As Mark Steyn quips, “How dazzling is President Obama?”

So dazzling that he didn’t merely give a dazzling inaugural speech. Any old timeserving hack could do that. Instead, he had the sheer genius to give a flat dull speech full of the usual shopworn boilerplate. Brilliant! At a stroke, he not only gently lowered the expectations of those millions of Americans and billions around the world for whom his triumphant ascendancy is the only thing that gives their drab little lives any meaning, but he also emphasized continuity by placing his own unprecedented incandescent megastar cool squarely within the tradition of squaresville yawneroo white middle-aged plonking mediocrities who came before him.

There’s more than one? I think for most of the Obaboosters, the “President 2.0” phrase du jour is surprisingly close to the mark. There’s Bush, there’s Obama. History began on 9/11–which itself is rapidly plunging down the Memory Hole.

But then, Mark is among the few of us contrarians who haven’t drunk the Obakool-Aid. Another is > Blog Archive >> The Changing Face of Change” href=”http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/greenwald/52002″>Abe Greenwald of Commentary’s “Contentions” blog. He mines the fawning legacy media coverage of those who have imbibed deeply for hidden gems, finds them, and then jokes, “Funny, I don’t remember Obama running on a platform of refreshing ignorance, but I guess I’m just disoriented from being stuck in the age of Old Politics.”

Old Politics? That’s so 2008.