The Truman Show

In his weekly column, Mark Steyn writes:

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or, as the president called him, “Corpseman Bouchard.” Twice.

Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander in chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest. And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there’s no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it’s revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don’t know that he doesn’t know that kinda stuff, or they don’t know it, either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don’t know what they don’t know.

Which is embarrassingly true. Hence, the awful flop speeches, from the Copenhagen Olympics to the Berlin Wall anniversary video to the Martha Coakley rally. The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they’re the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they’re having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of “The West Wing” they can only conceive of the public – and, indeed, the world – as crowd-scene extras in “The Barack Obama Show.” They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor manager tells you to, but the notion that, in return, he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them.

Today, we’re honoring what would have been the birthday of an actor and broadcaster who spent many years preparing himself to be president, but as Steyn writes above, we’re stuck in 2010 with a president who’s served briefly in the Senate, only to wind up trapped in his own reality show. Obama isn’t the second coming of Harry Truman — he’s the reincarnation of Truman Burbank. To build on what Steyn writes above, Obama and his staff are living out the trapped, fishbowl existence of Carrey’s titular character in The Truman Show.

So who’s Christof?

Related: “You Know, If Al Gore Can Land An Oscar, Why Not BHO?”