While I couldn't bring myself to watch President Barack Obama's 1,000th-1,004th health care propaganda spiels on the Sunday shows, I did read some transcripts and watch a few video highlights. What is it about this guy's personality that compels him to keep beating his head against the wall?
Why does he keep doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result?
The more Obama stumps for socialized medicine the less popular it becomes. Yet Obama keeps going back to the well, apparently believing that if he just explains it one more time -- or maybe 10 more times -- to the ignorant masses, his wards will finally come around to his way of thinking.
On the one hand, it seems that Obama truly believes that the majority of people are as sick as he is of America and reject many of its founding principles. After all, during his formative years and beyond, he was always surrounded by those -- family and mentors -- who had bones to pick with America and its "exploitive" capitalistic economy. To say that most of his role models were outright Marxists is hardly inflammatory hyperbole.
When it was time for him to make his own associational choices, he opted to continue the pattern in which he'd been raised, from the church he chose to the angry, activist, anti-establishment street agitation he embraced in Chicago.
So he very well might believe that his attitude favoring fundamental change for America is the norm and that the only ones who want to preserve the nation's "outmoded" founding principles are selfish, moneyed elites and those they control. Indeed, on the campaign trail, he was explicit about his intention to pursue fundamental change. Those paying close attention and not blinded by the Utopian slogans of hope and change were fearful Obama was quite serious about his plan to push America's reset button.
On the other hand, Obama had to be aware that many Americans, even if he mistakenly thought they were the minority, did not share his jaundiced view of America. Otherwise, why did he have to organize the Chicago streets? Why did he have to train ACORN in its corrupt practices -- corrupt practices I'm sure Obama justifies under an ends-and-means rationale? And how could Ronald Reagan or the Bushes ever have been elected if everyone thinks like Obama?
Obama obviously hedged his bets and campaigned as an optimistic reformer, sending clear signals to the far left that he was one of them and, like any good radical, seduced significant numbers of others with center-right language, from praising the free market to pledging his undying loyalty to America's national defenses.
Unfortunately for Obama, he allowed his extraordinarily high opinion of himself, exacerbated by sycophantic handlers and a fawning press, to delude himself into believing he could unload his destructive socialist agenda on America at hyper-speed without losing the people's faith and trust -- a major miscalculation.
Paradoxically, then, we are unintended beneficiaries of this man's unparalleled arrogance, without which he might have been shrewder about dismantling America's institutions brick by brick.
People have caught on to Obama now. They're informed and engaged. They see the abject absurdity of his claiming on "Face the Nation" that the federal budget can't sustain our inflationary health care costs at the same time he is deliberately expanding our federal deficits and national debt into the multitrillion-dollar stratosphere. They see through his indignant denials to ABC's George Stephanopoulos, who deserves kudos, that his proposed penalty on those refusing to buy health insurance is a tax.
They see his narcissism in rejecting any political dissent from his ambitious agenda as unreasonable, rude, uncivil and bickering while dubbing himself the exemplar of civility and calling the rest of us liars. They see his hypocrisy and megalomania in threatening to "call out" anyone who misrepresents his plan, which means anyone who has the temerity to challenge him on his myriad deceptions. Niccolo Machiavelli would be proud.
But it's not just the force of his charisma that Obama miscalculated. He also misunderstood just how out of phase he is with the majority of Americans on his negative assessment of this glorious nation. The more his dangerous agenda unfolds, from Mirandizing battlefield jihadists to scrapping our missile defense systems to unilaterally disarming our nukes when rogue nations are nuking up to emasculating the CIA to taxing the fire out of middle- and upper-income earners, the more Americans will oppose his blueprint.
But Obama has been groomed for and anticipated this moment for decades and will not abandon his ambitions -- no matter how much resistance he encounters from the American people -- because in the end, he believes, like all radicals, that he knows better than the people what is in their best interests.