The President Formerly Known as Barack Obama.

Exactly four years ago this month, I made a left turn into the Twilight Zone when I first saw the now-famous red and blue effigy of Barack Obama twenty feet tall on the side of a downtown brick building.  All I could do was pull over, fall to my knees, pound the ground and shout, “You finally really did it. You maniacs!  Damn you!  Damn you all to Hell!”  Then I pulled out my iPhone, snapped the photograph below, and went about my day.

We are now coming to the end of Barack Obama’s first term as President and the two competing party conventions serve as opportunistic milestones to examine how things have been shaping up.  If the underlying theme of the Republican National Convention was Believe In America, the Democratic counterpart was Believe In Barack Obama.  And it appears that a classic quandary has set in for the President; manifest celebrity coupled with questionable substance.

While the warm-up speeches at the Democratic convention provided all the vitriolic red meat that liberals clamor for, the President arrived with a surprising tone. (And by the way, was it not ironic that Bill Clinton followed Sandra Fluke’s speech on re-defining rape?)  The DNC delegates are so in love with The One that he could rhapsodize like a conservative and his adoring masses would still cheer.  In fact, President Obama did present a strongly conservative defense of his administration when it came his turn at the podium.

But the significant shape-shifting comment in the President’s acceptance speech was that “the election in 2008 wasn’t about me.”  The very man who played along with iconic suggestions of Greek deity and even joked about being born in a manger at the 2008 Alfred E. Smith Foundation Dinner was now downplaying his presumed royalty.

Inherent in the makeup of the liberal mindset is a struggle with God.  In fact, the word Israel means “struggles with God.”  And like the Israelis in the Biblical books of Samuel, liberals have elevated their leader to a highly inappropriate stratum for a nation that was founded on the idea that everyone, including presidents, are equally mortal and fallible.

About five months into his presidency, students at the B. Bernice Young Elementary School in? Burlington, New Jersey were taught to sing a praise song for Barack Hussein Obama, with the famous chant of “Mmm, mmm, mmm.”  Two months later, the students of Sand Hill Elementary School in Asheville, North Carolina were made to memorize their own poetic chant in praise of President Obama.  The students of Colburn School in Los Angeles put on a dress performance of “Obama’s Gonna Change The World.”

We saw the confusion come to the forefront of the Democratic Party with their scramble to reinstate God into their platform after the rest of the nation noticed that the single mention of Him from four years ago was now missing altogether.  The platform committee preferred that God not get in the way of merging church with state.  Once you have both together, you have unending power over the citizens.  As Jonah Goldberg recently described it, “They believe in what the philosopher Hegel called ‘the God State’ because government could do all the things that God would do if God actually existed.”

If Barack Hussein Obama were the deity that children have been taught to sing about, he should have been able to solve all of America’s problems with a spoken word.  As it is, we live with a shattered economy, persistent unemployment, elevated gas prices, doomed retirement programs, and unimaginable debt.  

History tells us with harsh clarity that the utopian ideals of centralized government power never ends well for the citizens.  But hope springs eternal for the enlightened liberal, who believes that success in socialism will finally be realized when they simply elect The One.  And just when I thought that he was going to replace his actual name with that over-used big “O” logo and insist on being referred to as The President Formerly Known as Barack Obama, the President made his semi-humble statement that demonstrated an understanding of managing expectations.

It is beginning to become evident that being the coolest guy to ever take the Presidential Oath of Office does not make for being the best qualified person to take the Presidential Oath of Office.  Results matter.  And it appears that the Barack Obama re-election campaign has come to realize that.