Even though he was not exactly a savory acquaintance for a man with presidential ambitions, Obama never seemed to see anything wrong with the connection. He didn't seem to understand what everyone else saw as unsavory in his having sat in the pew to listen to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's profane and racist rants over two decades.
The left was aware of Obama's timidity in his early campaigning for the White House and was never quite sure that he was one of them. What they knew was he could be a winner.
The contradictions the voters see in Obama now were real, not the work of spinmeisters. They were tied together by the president's narcissistic belief in himself, which he imagined transcended politics. His prolific use of the personal pronoun bears this out. He believes in his own sincerity. For a while, we did, too.
"Every man alone is sincere," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. "At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins." Before his entrance into the major leagues, the president was virtually a man alone on a private stage. When his audience grew larger, he still believed he could end the rancor in Washington and inspire a new bipartisanship. But sincerity moved to hypocrisy when that stage got crowded, and he was called on to deliver satisfactory answers to an unmanageable audience. Smooth rhetoric covers a multitude of rough edges until the rhetoric must produce legislation.
During the campaign, John McCain demonstrated a much greater understanding of Washington than his unseasoned opponent did, but experience didn't count for much in 2008. When the economy crashed and McCain suggested calling off a scheduled debate to stay in Washington to study what to do about it, he was mocked for lacking leadership. At the least he showed that he knew what he didn't know. Barack Obama still hasn't learned that.
The polls now show that Americans no longer believe the president's rhetoric over health care. The president's approval ratings continue to tank. Left, right and independent men and women are dismayed. Only he sounds like a true believer in himself, that he's delivering what's good for us.
Describing ObamaCare as genuine reform, he told us "the American people will have the (health care) they deserve ... ." A cynic would say he's right about that.