Falling out of love with Obama, Part Many
Obama has sunk so low that even previous supporter Richard Cohen of the WaPo is wondering why the president sounds so lost and listless lately:
…[Obama’s] eloquence has been replaced by petulance and he has lost the power to persuade, which is something of a surprise. You can speculate that if the Barack Obama of today and not Winston Churchill had led Britain in World War II, the Old Vic Theatre Company would now be doing “Hamlet” in German…
To a large degree, Obama became president on the strength of his eloquence. To a large degree, that is what has deserted him. He is out of words because he is out of ideas. Consequently, he ought to listen to others. They’re not the ones who are popping off. He is.
Let’s get one thing straight: those liberals who feel as Cohen does right now will almost certainly vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Their disillusionment with Obama is not disillusionment with any of their previously-held political beliefs, it is personal to him.
Cohen thinks Obama has changed, but that’s another illusion of Cohen’s. Obama is mostly the same as always, minus a little bit of pizazz. He was never eloquent He never had good ideas. Nor is he “out of ideas”; he retains the same belief in the very same ideas. The only things that have changed about Obama are that more and more of the consequences of his presidency are piling up in the real world, plus he is a bit less smooth in delivery, and familiarity breeds contempt—even in the Richard Cohens of this world, who did not have the insight and perceptiveness to understand that they were looking at a smooth-talking BS-artist leftist narcissistic con man in the first place, even though it was pretty obvious.
I wrote about this back in November of 2009, in an article entitled “Obama the heartthrob: the end of the affair?” I saw some people as having fallen for a con, and as possibly starting to desert him (there were some, but it turns out not nearly enough to make a difference). Almost exactly five years ago I wrote another post on a related subject: “Falling out of love with Obama: a midfall night’s dream.” In it, I discussed an article I’d noticed by Tom Junod that seemed to indicate disillusionment, and it turns out that it is so similar to portions of the current one by Cohen that’s almost uncanny. The two are describing the same process, and so I’m going to reproduce some of that earlier post of mine here, slightly shortened.
Read as Tom Junod tries to puzzle it out in Esquire:
Though many Americans didn’t know very much about him, there was one thing that was never in doubt when we saw and heard Obama on the stump: his ownership of his gift. By the way he carried himself, we could tell that he had always had it, and because he always had it, we could be sure that he always would have it. How could we resist a man who simply by opening his mouth could move mountains ”” and who had ascended all the way to the presidency by staking his political life on his own eloquence? How could we resist a man who seemed so sure that we could not resist him?
Now his gift has all but deserted him, and all that prevents the story from becoming tragic is his own apparent refusal to be affected by it…In less than two years he had gone from sounding like a man who could always count on his ability to strum the mystic chords of memory to a man who, no matter what he said, sounded like a politician, and one in over his head at that. Now he sounded like a man who had already realized that he had lost more than he imagined he could but was just starting to understand that he was never going to get it back.
Junod is right, and he’s also wrong. He’s describing what he perceives to have changed about Obama, and it’s true. Rather like Dumbo when he lost his magic feather, Obama has lost some of the belief in his own invincibility that carried him along, and it shows.
But Junod thinks he is describing something that mainly has its locus in Obama himself, and that it is Obama who has changed. Not really, except for a slightly lower confidence level. Junod is actually describing the process of falling in and then out of love on the part of the viewer.
Obama never was a great communicator. It’s been said before, but it bears repeating now: he rode on a stump speech and a vague promise, and the fervent hope in people’s minds that he would be whatever they happened to want him to be. He was never articulate off the cuff. He was always condescending and cold once he left the confines of that set speech. He had a terrible and/or nonexistent political record. He had never run anything except the Annenberg Challenge (and that was done poorly) or the Harvard Law Review. He had no sense of humor.
They fell in love nevertheless. Love is great. It feels good, but it tends to be blind. And when you fall out of it, you wonder what happened. You can explain it by saying that it’s the love object who has changed. Or you can wonder whatever you were thinking of in the first place.
Junod and many Obamaphiles (is it premature to call them ex-Obamaphiles?) are doing the former. In one of my favorite Shakespearean plays, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Titiana does the latter:
Shakespeare’s play is an exploration of love and its mysterious qualities. When Shakespeare has the character Puck observe to the Fairy King Oberon, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” he’s talking at least in part of their propensity to be fooled—in the case of the play, by his own magic machinations, among other things. The play has the lovers manipulated in a curious way: Puck puts some drops in their eyes that alter their perceptions and make them fall in love with the first being who comes their way.
Thus, the locus of the change is placed in the beholder, where it often belongs. The object of love remains the same person, whether adored or despised. When Puck places the drops in her eyes, Fairy Queen Titania falls in love with an ass (that is, a rude laborer, Bottom, who has been transformed by magic into a man with a donkey’s head, but let’s not get too technical). When Puck later applies the antidote and she falls out of love, she can’t believe she ever liked Bottom in the first place.
Junod, on the other hand, doesn’t doubt that Obama originally possessed the sterling characteristics his admirers perceived in him. Junod sees the main locus of change as being in Obama, not in himself as Obama-watcher. When Junod writes, “How could we resist a man who simply by opening his mouth could move mountains?” he’s being hyperbolic (at least I hope he is). But Obamalove came close to being just that irrational and just that emotional.
Substitute “Cohen” (or Peggy Noonan, or any number of people) for “Junod,” and you have the present situation. In the ensuing years, however, Obama has done incalculable damage. He has changed this country and the world, but for the worse. And his Titanias don’t understand that it isn’t Obama who changed, but that it’s they who have finally gotten a bit of the antidote squeezed into their eyes—a bit, but not enough to understand and go forward to make better choices in the future.
Obama was the one they had been waiting for, he was going to fix everything with hope and change. Only now it turns out that hope and change aren’t working out very well and he wasn’t really the one they had been waiting for.
Interest. Contrast the 2010 Junod article on President Obama with his famous Esquire article on President Bush from August 2004:
The Case for George W. Bush
What if he’s right?
https://web.archive.org/web/20090119064408/http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0804-AUG_BUSH
* I’m posting the original link via web.archive.org because the article at the Esquire archive is behind a pay-wall.
The basic theme of the 2 articles is similar but it’s flipped on an axial bias.
Interesting. Contrast the …
For background, Junod’s August 2004 article on Bush refers to this June 2004 speech by Bush:
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040602.html
Upon looking over 2004 Junod’s article on Bush again, I’m reminded that Junod is yet another one who miscomprehended the why of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a widespread phenomenon that was exploited by the enemy propagandists who planted the false narrative of OIF as the cornerstone piece to turn America’s domestic and foreign affairs.
Its the same old same with the left; their ideology ultimately fails in the real world, but they convince themselves the failure resides in the dear leader and not in the ideology.
I agree the disillusionment has been mostly in the eye of the beholder. But I also perceive an increasingly nasty aspect in Obama’s behavior.
We all knew that as a narcissist and Alinskyite, Obama had a rotten core lurking just beneath the polished veneer. After over 8 years of effort (as candidate and president), King Barack, I suspect, is weary of keeping his inner jerk on a leash; hence the increasingly frequent and obnoxious outbursts from The One.
Hubby & I told the 30 something kids that he wasn t cool,
he had zero accomplishments, & he was all about evening the score against the boogeyman White Race!
The only one that listened was the oldest.
What Parker said, times exponentially.
Marxism, Communism, Utopianism, Statism, Collectivism, whatever you want to label it, is a religion, with all the trappings minus the FSM, with rewards of wealth and power to reinforce your beliefs in the here and now. It allows its adherents to believe the vision of the perfect human being, but you don’t have to wait for the afterlife (which they don’t believe in anyway) to attain it, you’re told you can have it right here in the physical world, in your lifetime, and it will happen because of your own superiority over the subhuman masses, if they will only see your magnificence and adhere to your wonderful ideas.
When of course they don’t, you might have to give them little “nudges”. When that doesn’t work, the nudge becomes a push, then a shove, then criminal sanctions, and eventually the land is littered with broken eggs.
If they had only listened to me!
Bill Ayers is quoted by an FBI informant saying, matter of factly, that 25 million Americans would have to be killed before Communism would work here.
This sense of superiority is a powerful drug. If they had to give it up, the withdrawal symptoms would be feelings of worthlessness and utter hopelessness, so they simply must find external causes for their failures. These can be pretty much anything and everything they can think of, starting with those they perceive to be their biggest threats. That it might be the poverty of their own ideas is not possible.
Remember, it’s less the man than the movement.
His supporters were in love with themselves. That hasn’t changed. Obama now plays the useful role of repository for their disappointments.
Sandcastles look amazing when you build them. But it’s hard to maintain them. Some kids will topple them, or the waves will, or just the wind and gravity will bring them down. It’s easier to go make a new one. You always feel like there’s something new coming, and you never have to focus on the old ones that are crumbling because they’re just made of sand.
W had a good heart, a less good brain though better than Kerry’s or Gore’s. He turned Iraq over to Bremer, didn’t defend his AG, tried Miers for SCOTUS, gave us only temporary tax cuts, took his shoes off in the mosque and told us Islam was a religion of peace, did next to nothing about unfunded Federal liabilities, and would not stoop to the effective Obama tactic of demonizing his enemies. Ultimately, his presidency was not good for us.
He was replaced by an evil-doer.He is not the only one. Merkel is another.
Leftist pacifists now run the national shows on three continents. Pope Francis is in their number. It is a tsunami.
Hollande drops 20 bombs on ISIS after the murder of 130 French citizens, and probably didn’t kill 20 of the enemy. Iran and Russia are an unholy but powerful, savvy anti-Israel alliance.
It is unlikely we will be able to pull ourselves out of the morass into which we have been thrust by our enemies both foreign and domestic, the same morass into which we have by passivity allowed ourselves to sink.
Until its 10,000 of them for everyone one of us, we are merely pretending to fight the folks who engage in work place violence.
“he has lost the power to persuade” When did Obama ever have this power? His whole manner has been frustration with those who don’t recognize his genius and fall on their faces in worship. When did he TRY to persuade his opponents? I have only seen him berate them, put them down, tell the world how terrible they are. It is only because they never saw Obama before for what he is, a petulant child who has tantrums when he doesn’t get his way.
I saw this when he flipped off his opponents and claimed he was just scratching his face. The pause when he did it and the chuckle gave it away. It won’t end after he leaves office. I am not looking forward to a worse version of Jimmy Carter on the world stage.
The libs in regret will be all….”Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, but but Hillary will really get it right finally.”
“Remember, it’s less the man than the movement.”
The leftist movement eventually marches over the ledge. Along the great march they create carnage with tens of millions of human carcasses littering the roadside . They repeat ground hog day into infinity. Why? Because they need a dear leader, and thousands are waiting off stage to strut like a stalin, hitler, mao, obama, fidel, etc.
It should be blindingly obvious that Obama has been the worst president in the history of the universe.
Start with a simple metric. He doubled the national debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in seven years. That is an additional $75K per taxpayer. Some of us could write that check but not enough of us to make much difference.
This could turn into an extremely long post, so I’ll just mention that almost everything wrong in the ME can be traced back to his tacit support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots.
I go with the “this is a feature, not a bug” theory. Obama is attempting to reduce American power and he has succeeded beyond Bill Ayer’s wildest dreams.
I don’t think Barry will ever find Bottom.
PLEASE Neo, tell us what you really think!
re: “…and familiarity breeds contempt–even in the Richard Cohens of this world, who did not have the insight and perceptiveness to understand that they were looking at a smooth-talking BS-artist leftist narcissistic con man in the first place, even though it was pretty obvious.”
What a delightful iridescent pearl of wordsmithery you’ve given of our cultural Mau Mau presidential usurper.
Ray Says: December 2nd, 2015 at 2:52 pm
“Obama was the one they had been waiting for, he was going to fix everything with hope and change. Only now it turns out that hope and change aren’t working out very well and he wasn’t really the one they had been waiting for.”
– – – – – –
The thing about the Left: they keep looking for The Perfect Person. (The Right, on the other hand, keeps trying to create The Proper Process.) (*)
So when Leftoid Policies fail, it’s ALWAYS because either (1) “He was the wrong person for the job”, or (2) “Those evil {fill-in-the-blank: Republicans, conservatives, gun-owners, Bible-thumpers} DELIBERATELY sabotaged our best efforts”. It’s perceived as a personal/ personality/ personnel problem, NEVER as a policy problem.
I believe this is why conservatives are continually astonished that the Left doesn’t acknowledge and modify its obvious double-standards regarding the treatment of Favored and Disfavored groups (“don’t they see that they’ve set a precedent that –when The Other Side is in power– will cause them GREAT harm?”). No, they don’t see/ acknowledge that some “process” might come back to bite them; they see only that The Chosen Leader *needs* the power and authority to Boldly Solve The Problem, consistency be damned.
– – – – – –
(*) Regarding “Proper Process”: see The Constitution as one example. A set of rules and procedures governing an individual’s actions, such that some courses of action are required and other courses of action are prohibited. The Process serves to prevent excessive power from being vested in any one person or group. Completely opposed to the notion that a “Perfect Person” can exist, or can be trusted with power.