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Obama: Our Perpetual Adolescent
George Will has the irritating trait of saying something that causes me to then think, “That’s exactly how I feel; why didn’t I say it first.”
Writing today at NRO (and in many other places), Will writes:
Recently, Barack Obama — a Demosthenes determined to elevate our politics from coarseness to elegance, a Pericles sent to ameliorate our rhetorical impoverishment — spoke at the University of Michigan. He came to that very friendly venue — in 2012, he received 67 percent of the vote in Ann Arbor’s county — after visiting a local sandwich shop, where a muse must have whispered in the presidential ear. Representative Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) had recently released his budget, so Obama expressed his disapproval by calling it, for the benefit of his academic audience, a “meanwich” and a “stinkburger.”
Will then suggests a thought experiment: “Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan talking like that. It is unimaginable that those grown-ups would resort to japes that fourth-graders would not consider sufficiently clever for use on a playground.”
Quoting the great and recently late conservative thinker Kenneth Minogue, Will describes Obama as “a pyromaniac in a field of straw men.”
Yet Obama can be effective before an audience of millenials talking about “meanwiches.” The far left, so long as he continues to stand in the way of Keystone XL, won’t abandon him.
But Obama seems to be wearing a bit thin among all but the naive and the true believers. A majority of independents have gotten very tired of Obama’s very tired act. All the major polls show his approval hovering in the low to mid-40s.
Perhaps I woke up this morning with my rose-colored glasses on, but it seems to me that the Republicans should make the central themes of the upcoming midterms Obamacare and issues like Keystone XL (in other words, a referendum on Obama and his willing Democratic dupes trying to be re-elected).
Published in General
Now that the Millenials are wising up, he’s reduced to pitching his case to the Captain Underpants demo.
The President should be careful not to run afoul of the legal precedent set in the famous case of Rubber v. Glue.
A petulant little man who never got the beating as a child he needed.
It’s appropriate – Mr Obama was elected (twice!) by perpetual adolescents.
Will further writes in that article:
This certainly isn’t a new thing with the Democrats:
Instead of telling Americans to shut up, maybe Obama should read a history book that wasn’t written by Howard Zinn and reflect on where he’d be if the Democrats had gotten their way in silencing dissent in the past…
Will missed the bigger point: Obama regards himself as a King. What the King says is truth simply because the king speaks it.
All the major polls show his approval hovering in the low to mid-40s.
You might want to head on over to RCP and check out the latest.
Will doesn’t take his analogy far enough. The adolescent rhetoric reveals an adolescent thinker. Obama is a semi-educated ideologue with a critical deficit in areas we used to refer to as common knowledge. His philosophy is nothing more than a grab bag of leftist tropes grafted onto a persona that is more media hype than genuinely intellectual. He is, in addition, personally lazy by his own admission. “Fairness” is a word he throws around with abandon like a whiny teenager without any deeper consideration that his particular brand of “fairness” might have unintended consequences. In short, the man is a complete intellectual lightweight with an inflated belief in his own greatness. I’m surprised he only rated himself as one of the four best presidents. His lack of self-awareness is stunning in its level of arrogance.
Everything Will wrote is true. But to your point, Mugwump, I’ve long thought that one of the dirty little secrets about Obama is that he just…isn’t that bright. He is half-educated, and even at that, he’s half-educated in the rot of campus radicalism. But my suspicion is that the underlying substrate isn’t all that great. This is not a point much worth making to anyone beyond our echo chamber; we gain nothing by making the argument that “Obama is dumb.”
For that matter, it is nowhere written than a man must be a genius to be a good president. An above average IQ is probably necessary, but nothing more.
Still, there is something satisfying in the knowledge that (I bet) Obama’s mind ain’t all that. I would be surprised to learn that his IQ is any higher than, say, George W. Bush’s. I am sure that he knows less history than W. does. But that’s a function of W.’s curiosity and wide reading compared with Obama’s insularity.
Even more so. I’d say that a genius accepting the office of the President of the United States would be a massive waste of human potential.
For example: I get really upset when I see surgeons leaving medicine for a career in politics. We have a shortage of doctors in my country!
Does Obama really believe a single word he utters? What a strain it must be to constantly disguise your true feelings. His wife seems to have figured him out though—that’s why she no longer travels with him.
Thanks for an excellent quote from a most excellent conservative. I was fortunate to hear him speak at Heritage in his later years and his hilarious, spot-on gripe du jour was “the immature impulse to introduce oneself sans surname.”
I find Will to have a few irritating traits as well, but oddly not this one so much.
I second Mugwamp’s observations, and would only add that it seems like President Obama’s life experiences never allowed him to build a bridge between the world as he thought it should be and the world as it really is or to understand the dreams and difficulties of everyday Americans. His lack of introspection and the inability to accept data that contradict his shallow but firmly held beliefs has resulted in a failed presidency that has significantly hurt citizens as well as friends and allies of the United States.
The polls are beginning to indicate that except for the true believers, people are now tuning him out. His remaining years in office will be difficult ones for him and for the United States. I sincerely hope our next president will govern as an adult.