Liar, liar: Why Obama is failing

Obama seems to be failing more completely than any president in my lifetime. Everywhere you turn he is floundering, overreaching, or outright flunking. His only success — health care legislation — was achieved over the will of the people, rarely a good idea. He is manufacturing conservatives and libertarians at an unprecedented clip. The only mystery left for the coming November election is how bad a donnybrook this will be for the Democrats.

Why has this happened?

There are several obvious answers. Obama, too inexperienced for his office, never expected to accede to it so quickly in the first place. The public (correctly) has no stomach for multiculturalist foreign policy. Liberal economics has reached the end of its Ponzi scheme road and we’re in a recession/depression with no end in sight. And, of course, there is that little eco-catastrophe in the Gulf

But there is another reason, perhaps more important than all of them. Obama has been unable to use the Bully Pulpit. No one pays attention to him. The vaunted Demosthenes of the campaign trail disappeared literally upon inauguration. He hasn’t been able to convince anyone of anything. He only succeeds when he acts purely as a bully, muscling through legislation.

Some say this is because he wasn’t such a great orator in the first place. He just read decently off a teleprompter and with the prompter gone the emperor has not clothes.

But I think it is something more complex and deeper. There have been plenty of presidents with limited abilities off the cuff. I think it is because Obama was elected on a lie, a big one that was enabled by the mainstream media, and that by the time he was in office he had spent his credit. Belief was gone. Everyone knew he was a liar, including many liberals, even if they wouldn’t admit it to themselves and even if they had colluded with him in the lie.

I am speaking, alas again, of the Reverend Wright affair. I thought it was serious at the time. In retrospect, I think it was disastrous, probably fatal.

Barack Obama told us on several occasions then that he had not been aware of Wright’s extreme black nationalist views during the candidate’s twenty years in the reverend’s church. That made no sense, since Obama had dedicated his book to Wright, had his children baptized by him, etc. Also, Wright’s separatist brand of black liberation theology was no doubt quite familiar to Obama. It had been to many of us for decades.

Yet the mainstream media paid little attention, or tried not to, certainly did not deign to investigate in any depth. Indeed they went so far that many of them declared Obama’s attendant speech on race a masterpiece of the MLKing sort, when it was no more than an assemblage of clichés and mendacious clichés at that, since they covered up the obvious uncomfortable truth that the candidate knew all about Wright and, unlike Oprah Winfrey who left the Trinity Church years before, chose to ignore it for reasons he could or would not be honest about.

So we were lied to about this by Obama and the MSM winked. Yet it was a far more significant lie than Clinton’s proclamations about Monica Lewinsky, which only peripherally affected affairs of state and were obviously the desperate acts of a man caught cheating. Obama’s prevarication was about the very essence of his political views. Widely desirous of electing its first black president — I felt this myself but did not act upon it — the nation gulped and swallowed the lie, but, consciously or unconsciously, it did not forget.

Now we are where we are. We have a president that no one wants to listen to because we do not fully believe him. His own party is deserting him not just because they know his ideas are unpopular. They also know he is unable to convince anyone. We have shut him off.

And now the revelations of J. Christian Adams have shown that his Department of Justice has a racial bias not entirely dissimilar to those of Reverend Wright. Again the MSM is doing its best to ignore this, but the damage is still there and growing and Obama will not be able, this time, to make a speech in his defense.

It’s over. For all the excitement of his election, having lied his way into office, Barack Obama was essentially DOA his first night at the White House.