Excellent article that dismantles the myths liberals have created about Obama.
âWhen the Legend Becomes Fact, Print the Legendâ
Obama Mythologos
Barack Obama is a myth, our modern version of Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan. What we were told is true, never had much basis in fact â a fact now increasingly clear as hype gives way to reality.
âBrilliantâ
Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, on no evidence, once proclaimed Obama âprobably the smartest guy ever to become president.â When he thus summed up liberal consensus, was he perhaps referring to academic achievement? Soaring SAT scores? Seminal publications? IQ scores known only to a small Ivy League cloister? Political wizardry?
Who was this Churchillian president so much smarter than the Renaissance man Thomas Jefferson, more astute than a John Adams or James Madison, with more insight than a Lincoln, brighter still than the polymath Teddy Roosevelt, more studious than the bookish Woodrow Wilson, better read than the autodidact Harry Truman?
Consider. Did Obama achieve a B+ average at Columbia? Who knows? (Who will ever know?) But even todayâs inflated version of yesteryearâs gentleman Cs would not normally warrant admission to Harvard Law. And once there, did the Law Review editor publish at least one seminal article? Why not?
I ask not because I particularly care about the GPAs or certificates of the president, but only because I am searching for a shred of evidence to substantiate this image of singular intellectual power and known erudition. For now, I donât see any difference between Bushâs Yale/Harvard MBA record and Obamaâs Columbia/Harvard Law record â except Bush, in self-deprecation, laughed at his quite public C+/B- accomplishments that he implied were in line with his occasional gaffes, while Obama has quarantined his transcripts and relied on the media to assert that his own versions of ânucularâ moments were not moments of embarrassment at all.
At Chicago, did lecturer Obama write a path-breaking legal article or a book on jurisprudence that warranted the rare tenure offer to a part-time lecturer? (Has that offer ever been extended to others of like stature?) In the Illinois legislature or U.S. Senate, was Obama known as a deeply learned man of the Patrick Moynihan variety? Whether as an undergraduate, law student, lawyer, professor, legislator or senator, Obama was given numerous opportunities to reveal his intellectual weight. Did he ever really? On what basis did Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan regret that Obama could not be lured to a top billet at Harvard?
That his brilliance is a myth was not just revealed by the weekly lapses (whether phonetic [corpse-man], or cultural [Austria/Germany, the United Kingdom/England, Memorial Day/Veterans Day] or inane [57 states]), but in matters of common sense and basic history. The error-ridden Cairo speech was foolish; the serial appeasement of Iran revealed an ignorance of human nature; a two-minute glance at an etiquette book would have nixed the bowing or the cheap gifts to the UK.
In short, the myth of Obamaâs brilliance was based on his teleprompted eloquence, the sort of fable that says we should listen to a clueless Sean Penn or Matt Damon on politics because they can sometimes act well. Read Platoâs Ion on the difference between gifted rhapsody and wisdom â and Socratesâ warning about easily conflating the two. It need not have been so. At any point in a long career, Obama the rhapsode could have shunned the easy way, stuck his head in a book, and earned rather than charmed those (for whom he had contempt) for his rewards. Clinton was a browser with a near photographic memory who had pretensions of deeply-read wonkery; but he nonetheless browsed. Obama seems never to have done that. He liked the vague idea of Obamacare, outsourced the details to the Democratic Congress, applied his Chicago protocols to getting it passed, and worried little what was actually in the bill. We were to think that the obsessions with the NBA, the NCAA final four, the golfing tics, etc., were all respites from exhausting labors of the mind rather than in fact the presidency respites from all the former.
âHealerâ
Take away all theââno more red state/no more blue state,â âthis is our momentâ mish-mash and what is left to us? âReaching across the aisleâ sounded bipartisan, but it came from the most consistently partisan member of the U.S. Senate. Most of the 2008 campaign was a frantic effort on the part of the media to explain away Bill Ayers, ACORN, the SEIU, Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger, the clingers speech, âget in their face,â and the revealing put downs of Hillary Clinton. But those were windows into a soul that soon opened even wider â with everything from limb-lopping doctors and polluting Republicans to stupidly acting police and âpunish our enemiesâ nativists. The Special Olympics âjoke,â the pig reference to Sarah Palin, the middle finger nose rub to Hillary â all that was a scratch of the thin shiny veneer into the hard plywood beneath.
The binding up our wounds myth had no basis in reality, but was constructed on the notion (to channel the racially condescending Harry Reid and Joe Biden) that a charismatic and young postracial rhetorician seemed so non-threatening. The logic was that Obama took a train from Springfield to DC; so did Lincoln; presto, both were like healers. The truth? The Obamites â Jarrett, Axelrod, Emanuel, etc. â were hard-core partisan dividers, who had a history of demonizing enemies, suing to eliminate opponents, and leaking divorce records, in addition to the usual Chicago campaign protocols.
If one were to collate the Obama record on race (from Eric Holderâs âmy peopleâ and âcowardsâ to Sotomayorâs âwise Latinaâ and Van Jonesâs racist rants), it is the most polarizing in a generation. The Obama way is and always was to create horrific straw men: opponents of health care reform are greedy doctors who want to rip out your tonsils; opponents of tax increases jet off to Vegas to blow their childrenâs tuition money; skeptics of Solyndra-like disasters want to dirty the air; those against open borders wish to put alligators and moats in the Rio Grande as they round up children at ice cream parlors. There were ways of opposing Republicans without the demonization, but the demonization was useful when followed by the soaring, one-eyed Jack rhetoric about reaching out, working together, and avoiding the old politics of acrimony.
âWhen the Legend Becomes Fact, Print the Legendâ
Obama Mythologos
Barack Obama is a myth, our modern version of Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan. What we were told is true, never had much basis in fact â a fact now increasingly clear as hype gives way to reality.
âBrilliantâ
Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, on no evidence, once proclaimed Obama âprobably the smartest guy ever to become president.â When he thus summed up liberal consensus, was he perhaps referring to academic achievement? Soaring SAT scores? Seminal publications? IQ scores known only to a small Ivy League cloister? Political wizardry?
Who was this Churchillian president so much smarter than the Renaissance man Thomas Jefferson, more astute than a John Adams or James Madison, with more insight than a Lincoln, brighter still than the polymath Teddy Roosevelt, more studious than the bookish Woodrow Wilson, better read than the autodidact Harry Truman?
Consider. Did Obama achieve a B+ average at Columbia? Who knows? (Who will ever know?) But even todayâs inflated version of yesteryearâs gentleman Cs would not normally warrant admission to Harvard Law. And once there, did the Law Review editor publish at least one seminal article? Why not?
I ask not because I particularly care about the GPAs or certificates of the president, but only because I am searching for a shred of evidence to substantiate this image of singular intellectual power and known erudition. For now, I donât see any difference between Bushâs Yale/Harvard MBA record and Obamaâs Columbia/Harvard Law record â except Bush, in self-deprecation, laughed at his quite public C+/B- accomplishments that he implied were in line with his occasional gaffes, while Obama has quarantined his transcripts and relied on the media to assert that his own versions of ânucularâ moments were not moments of embarrassment at all.
At Chicago, did lecturer Obama write a path-breaking legal article or a book on jurisprudence that warranted the rare tenure offer to a part-time lecturer? (Has that offer ever been extended to others of like stature?) In the Illinois legislature or U.S. Senate, was Obama known as a deeply learned man of the Patrick Moynihan variety? Whether as an undergraduate, law student, lawyer, professor, legislator or senator, Obama was given numerous opportunities to reveal his intellectual weight. Did he ever really? On what basis did Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan regret that Obama could not be lured to a top billet at Harvard?
That his brilliance is a myth was not just revealed by the weekly lapses (whether phonetic [corpse-man], or cultural [Austria/Germany, the United Kingdom/England, Memorial Day/Veterans Day] or inane [57 states]), but in matters of common sense and basic history. The error-ridden Cairo speech was foolish; the serial appeasement of Iran revealed an ignorance of human nature; a two-minute glance at an etiquette book would have nixed the bowing or the cheap gifts to the UK.
In short, the myth of Obamaâs brilliance was based on his teleprompted eloquence, the sort of fable that says we should listen to a clueless Sean Penn or Matt Damon on politics because they can sometimes act well. Read Platoâs Ion on the difference between gifted rhapsody and wisdom â and Socratesâ warning about easily conflating the two. It need not have been so. At any point in a long career, Obama the rhapsode could have shunned the easy way, stuck his head in a book, and earned rather than charmed those (for whom he had contempt) for his rewards. Clinton was a browser with a near photographic memory who had pretensions of deeply-read wonkery; but he nonetheless browsed. Obama seems never to have done that. He liked the vague idea of Obamacare, outsourced the details to the Democratic Congress, applied his Chicago protocols to getting it passed, and worried little what was actually in the bill. We were to think that the obsessions with the NBA, the NCAA final four, the golfing tics, etc., were all respites from exhausting labors of the mind rather than in fact the presidency respites from all the former.
âHealerâ
Take away all theââno more red state/no more blue state,â âthis is our momentâ mish-mash and what is left to us? âReaching across the aisleâ sounded bipartisan, but it came from the most consistently partisan member of the U.S. Senate. Most of the 2008 campaign was a frantic effort on the part of the media to explain away Bill Ayers, ACORN, the SEIU, Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger, the clingers speech, âget in their face,â and the revealing put downs of Hillary Clinton. But those were windows into a soul that soon opened even wider â with everything from limb-lopping doctors and polluting Republicans to stupidly acting police and âpunish our enemiesâ nativists. The Special Olympics âjoke,â the pig reference to Sarah Palin, the middle finger nose rub to Hillary â all that was a scratch of the thin shiny veneer into the hard plywood beneath.
The binding up our wounds myth had no basis in reality, but was constructed on the notion (to channel the racially condescending Harry Reid and Joe Biden) that a charismatic and young postracial rhetorician seemed so non-threatening. The logic was that Obama took a train from Springfield to DC; so did Lincoln; presto, both were like healers. The truth? The Obamites â Jarrett, Axelrod, Emanuel, etc. â were hard-core partisan dividers, who had a history of demonizing enemies, suing to eliminate opponents, and leaking divorce records, in addition to the usual Chicago campaign protocols.
If one were to collate the Obama record on race (from Eric Holderâs âmy peopleâ and âcowardsâ to Sotomayorâs âwise Latinaâ and Van Jonesâs racist rants), it is the most polarizing in a generation. The Obama way is and always was to create horrific straw men: opponents of health care reform are greedy doctors who want to rip out your tonsils; opponents of tax increases jet off to Vegas to blow their childrenâs tuition money; skeptics of Solyndra-like disasters want to dirty the air; those against open borders wish to put alligators and moats in the Rio Grande as they round up children at ice cream parlors. There were ways of opposing Republicans without the demonization, but the demonization was useful when followed by the soaring, one-eyed Jack rhetoric about reaching out, working together, and avoiding the old politics of acrimony.
