As Obama kicks off his “You're Too Stupid to Understand” campaign tour, I’d like to make the following observation as a public service reminder: It's not that Obama started believing his press clippings; it's that Obama never for a moment doubted his press clippings.
Generally, buying into the fables that the press tells about you-- both good and bad-- is a loser's proposition, especially in politics.
Because when reality bumps up against the storyline, the storyline is unsustainable.
The government lied about Vietnam.
Bill Clinton lied about the Bible: oral sex, it turns out, is still sex.
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We’re losing the war on terror.
And finally, Obama is neither the great genius, constitutional lawgiver and Savior of the Democrats nor is he the maniacal mastermind of socialist America, the lead miner and sapper of capitalism.
The truth is that Barack Obama is a middling politician, with an outsized ego-- just like most of them—who has very little experience in the real world and the unfortunate disadvantage of having a static worldview.
When reality bumps up against his worldview, say goodbye to reality.
Sure, the dude's a socialist.
But that's not his defining personal characteristic.
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His defining personal characteristic is incompetence, combined with a self-centeredness that prevents him from seeing past his own navel.
And because nobody in his own party-- and amongst his own press service, and amongst his own race-- can tell the truth about his incompetence, they've engaged in a years-long attempt to make policy fit into the Alice in Wonderland reality that Obama lives in.
Writes Tim Cavanuagh at NRO about a recent Left Coast fundraising speech by the One:
“You get a self-fulfilling prophecy,” the president told supporters, urging them to help Democrats avoid potentially significant losses in both houses of Congress in the November midterm elections. “The people who have the most at stake in a government that works opt out of the system. People who believe government doesn’t work are most empowered. Gridlock reigns and we get the downward spiral of even more cynicism.”
Um, Mr. President?
It wasn't so much that people “opted out” of the system.
The system hasn’t worked for them.
That's what happens when $5 trillion worth of extraordinary spending goes everywhere except the places it's most needed.
How do you spend $5 trillion and not even marginally help the very people that you say you care about the most?
“Blacks disproportionately left the labor market,” Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal economic outfit, said in January “with the labor force participation rate for African Americans dropping by 0.3 percentage points to 60.2 percent, it’s lowest rate since December of 1977. The rate for African American men fell 0.7 percent to 65.6 percent, the lowest on record.”
Whoever else Obama may have benefited, it’s clear that black communities haven’t been high on the priority list for him.
Black unemployment at 11.6% remains double what the national average is at 6.3%.
But that doesn't tell the whole story.
Because unemployment for racial groups beside blacks is at 5.8%, or what the Federal Reserve Bank defines as full employment these days.
$5 trillion for Wall Street, but not one dollar for African-Americans?
“The White House is carving out a role for President Barack Obama in this fall's midterm elections,” reports the Wall Street Journal without irony, “which he will try to pose as a choice between the parties' economic visions while targeting appeals to African-Americans, young voters and others in his coalition.”
Obama is targeting the very voters he complains have opted out of the system.
It’s takes a special brand of incompetence-- combined with navel gazing so intense that no one else is visible-- to go back to those groups again to carry policies that haven’t worked for them.
Because these people haven’t opted out of the system so much as Obama himself has kicked them out of the system.
While incompetence is Obama’s most defining personal characteristic, hypocrisy is his most defining political characteristic.
And he thinks people, “his people,” are too stupid to see it.
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