O

Obama Mythologos

Barack Obama is a myth, our modern version of Pecos Bill or Paul
Bunyan. What we were told is true, never had much basis in fact — a
fact now increasingly clear as hype gives way to reality.

"Brilliant"

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, on no evidence, once
proclaimed Obama "probably the smartest guy ever to become president."
When he thus summed up liberal consensus, was he perhaps referring to
academic achievement? Soaring SAT scores? Seminal publications? IQ
scores known only to a small Ivy League cloister? Political wizardry?

Who was this Churchillian president so much smarter than the
Renaissance man Thomas Jefferson, more astute than a John Adams or
James Madison, with more insight than a Lincoln, brighter still than
the polymath Teddy Roosevelt, more studious than the bookish Woodrow
Wilson, better read than the autodidact Harry Truman?

Consider. Did Obama achieve a B+ average at Columbia? Who knows? (Who
will ever know?) But even today's inflated version of yesteryear's
gentleman Cs would not normally warrant admission to Harvard Law. And
once there, did the Law Review editor publish at least one seminal
article? Why not?

I ask not because I particularly care about the GPAs or certificates
of the president, but only because I am searching for a shred of
evidence to substantiate this image of singular intellectual power and
known erudition. For now, I don't see any difference between Bush's
Yale/Harvard MBA record and Obama's Columbia/Harvard Law record —
except Bush, in self-deprecation, laughed at his quite public C+/B-
accomplishments that he implied were in line with his occasional
gaffes, while Obama has quarantined his transcripts and relied on the
media to assert that his own versions of "nucular" moments were not
moments of embarrassment at all.

At Chicago, did lecturer Obama write a path-breaking legal article or
a book on jurisprudence that warranted the rare tenure offer to a
part-
time lecturer? (Has that offer ever been extended to others of like
stature?) In the Illinois legislature or U.S. Senate, was Obama known
as a deeply learned man of the Patrick Moynihan variety? Whether as an
undergraduate, law student, lawyer, professor, legislator or senator,
Obama was given numerous opportunities to reveal his intellectual
weight. Did he ever really? On what basis did Harvard Law Dean Elena
Kagan regret that Obama could not be lured to a top billet at Harvard?

That his brilliance is a myth was not just revealed by the weekly
lapses (whether phonetic [corpse-man], or cultural [Austria/Germany,
the United Kingdom/England, Memorial Day/Veterans Day] or inane [57
states]), but in matters of common sense and basic history. The error-
ridden Cairo speech was foolish; the serial appeasement of Iran
revealed an ignorance of human nature; a two-minute glance at an
etiquette book would have nixed the bowing or the cheap gifts to the
UK.

In short, the myth of Obama's brilliance was based on his teleprompted
eloquence, the sort of fable that says we should listen to a clueless
Sean Penn or Matt Damon on politics because they can sometimes act
well. Read Plato's Ion on the difference between gifted rhapsody and
wisdom — and Socrates' warning about easily conflating the two. It
need not have been so. At any point in a long career, Obama the
rhapsode could have shunned the easy way, stuck his head in a book,
and earned rather than charmed those (for whom he had contempt) for
his rewards. Clinton was a browser with a near photographic memory who
had pretensions of deeply-read wonkery; but he nonetheless browsed.
Obama seems never to have done that. He liked the vague idea of
Obamacare, outsourced the details to the Democratic Congress, applied
his Chicago protocols to getting it passed, and worried little what
was actually in the bill. We were to think that the obsessions with
the NBA, the NCAA final four, the golfing tics, etc., were all
respites from exhausting labors of the mind rather than in fact the
presidency respites from all the former.

"Healer"

Take away all the"'no more red state/no more blue state," "this is our
moment" mish-mash and what is left to us? "Reaching across the aisle"
sounded bipartisan, but it came from the most consistently partisan
member of the U.S. Senate. Most of the 2008 campaign was a frantic
effort on the part of the media to explain away Bill Ayers, ACORN, the
SEIU, Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger, the clingers speech, "get in their
face," and the revealing put downs of Hillary Clinton. But those were
windows into a soul that soon opened even wider — with everything from
limb-lopping doctors and polluting Republicans to stupidly acting
police and "punish our enemies" nativists. The Special Olympics
"joke," the pig reference to Sarah Palin, the middle finger nose rub
to Hillary — all that was a scratch of the thin shiny veneer into the
hard plywood beneath.

The binding up our wounds myth had no basis in reality, but was
constructed on the notion (to channel the racially condescending Harry
Reid and Joe Biden) that a charismatic and young postracial
rhetorician seemed so non-threatening. The logic was that Obama took a
train from Springfield to DC; so did Lincoln; presto, both were like
healers. The truth? The Obamites — Jarrett, Axelrod, Emanuel, etc. —
were hard-core partisan dividers, who had a history of demonizing
enemies, suing to eliminate opponents, and leaking divorce records, in
addition to the usual Chicago campaign protocols.

If one were to collate the Obama record on race (from Eric Holder's
"my people" and "cowards" to Sotomayor's "wise Latina" and Van Jones's
racist rants), it is the most polarizing in a generation. The Obama
way is and always was to create horrific straw men: opponents of
health care reform are greedy doctors who want to rip out your
tonsils; opponents of tax increases jet off to Vegas to blow their
children's tuition money; skeptics of Solyndra-like disasters want to
dirty the air; those against open borders wish to put alligators and
moats in the Rio Grande as they round up children at ice cream
parlors. There were ways of opposing Republicans without the
demonization, but the demonization was useful when followed by the
soaring, one-eyed Jack rhetoric about reaching out, working together,
and avoiding the old politics of acrimony.

"Reformer"

The notion that there was anything in Obama's past or present
temperament to suggest a political reformer was mythological to the
core. Almost all his prior elections relied on a paradigm of attacking
his opponents rather than defending his own record, from the races for
the legislature to the U.S. Senate. He shook down Wall Street as no
one had before or since — and well after the September 2008 meltdown.
He was the logical expression of the Chicago/Illinois system of Tony
Rezko, Blago, and the Daleys, not its aberration — from the mundane of
expanding his yard to melting down opponents by leaking sealed divorce
records.

The more Obama badmouthed BP and Goldman Sachs, the more we knew he
received record amounts of cash from both (were the bad "millionaires
and billionaires" snickering that this was just part of the game?). He
renounced liberal public financing of campaigns of over three decades
duration, as only a liberal reformer might, and got away with it.
Obama raised far more money than any candidate in history, and will go
back to the same trough this time around. On a Monday the president
will vilify Wall Street, on Tuesday host a $40,000-a-head dinner for
those who apparently did not get his earlier message that at some
point they had already made enough money and this was now surely not
the time to profit — or did they get it all too well? Wait, you say,
"They all do this!" Well, perhaps most at any rate; but most also
spare us the messianic rhetoric and so do not win the additional
charge of hypocrisy. Reforming the system is hard; reforming the
reformers of the system impossible.

So when Obama speaks loudly about Wall Street criminality, we now
snooze — only to awaken knowing Corzine's missing $1 billion, or
George Soros's felony conviction in France, or Jeffrey Immelt's no-tax
gymnastics were not just never raised, but are exempted through the
purchase of liberal penance, in the manner that John Kerry never
really docked his gargantuan yacht in a less taxed state, or Timothy
Geithner never really pocketed his FICA allowances.

As far as the vaunted promises to end the revolving door, lobbyists,
and earmarks and usher in a new transparency, well, blah, blah, blah.
Obama did not merely violate his proposed reforms, but excelled in the
old politics as few others had. The career of a Peter Orszag or the
crony machinations of the Solyndra executives attest well enough.

As far as medical transparency, I care only that my president seems
healthy enough to get up in the morning for his grueling ordeal and
can be spared the how part; but I do recognize that we have a history
of disguising maladies (cf. Wilson's incapacity, FDR's last year, or
JFK's numerous prescription drugs), and that, in recent times at
least, we have demanded a new transparency. Was that why the media
harped on McCain's melanoma, his age, and his injuries? So I thought
we would get the now mandatory 24-look at 500 pages of thirty years of
Obama's doctors visits, medications, vital signs, diseases, all the
treatments that the watchdog media goes ape over — whether Tom
Eagleton's shock treatments or Mike Dukakis's use of Advil or the Bush
thyroid problem.

Instead, we got a tiny paragraph from Obama's doctor assuring us that
he's healthy, and this from the most "transparent" president in
history, in an age when the press is frenzied over a presidential
Ambien prescription. To this day, I have no idea whether our president
smokes, or ever did, or for how long and how much, or if he ever took
a prescription drug, or if his blood pressure is perfect or under
treatment. Again, I care only that he gets up in the morning — and
that the de facto rules of disclosure that have applied to others
apply to him.

We will never know much about Fast and Furious, and even less about
Greengate. Obama — and this was clever rather than brilliant — gauged
rightly that not only would liberals' hysteria about ethics cease when
he brought them to power, but in a strange way they would grin that
one of their own had out-hustled the supposed right-wing hustlers. Or
was it a sort of paleo-Marxist idea of using the corrupt system to end
the supposedly corrupt system? Those who vacation at Vail, Martha's
Vineyard, or Costa del Sol are supposedly insidiously undermining the
system that allows only the millionaire and billionaire few to do so?

"Magnanimous"

This was the strangest chapter of the myth, the idea that Obama the
Olympian was above the fray. He lobbied the Germans for an address at
the Brandenburg Gate, settled for the Prussian Victory Column, and, as
thanks, then skipped out as president on the 20th anniversary of the
fall of the Berlin Wall — but managed to jet to Copenhagen to lobby
for the Chicago Olympics.

There was never a peep that Obama's present anti-terrorism protocols —
Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, Predators, the Patriot Act,
preventative detention — came from George Bush. Much less did we hear
that had Bush for a nanosecond ever listened to the demagoguery of
then state legislator and later senator Obama, none of these tools
would presently exist. How did what was superfluous, unconstitutional,
and possibly illegal in 2008 become vital in 2011?

Ditto the Iraq War. We went in a blink from the surge that failed and
made things worse and all troops must be out by March 2008 to Iraq was
a shining example of American idealism and commitment. It was as if
the touch-and-go, life-and-death gamble between February 2007 and
January 2009 in Iraq never had existed. Bombing Libya was not warlike,
and those who sued Bush on Iraq and Guantanamo now filed briefs to
prove that we were not at war killing Libyan thugs. We hear only of
reset; never that Obama has now simply abandoned all his "Bush-did-it"
policies and is quietly going back to the Bush consensus on Russia,
Iran, Syria, and the Middle East in general. We will not only never
see Guantanamo closed or KSM tried in a civilian court, but never hear
why not. Are we to applaud the hypocrisy as at least better than
continued ignorance?

On the domestic front, we are forever frozen on September 15, 2008.
There is never an Obama sentence that the Freddie/Fannie machinations
(both agencies were routinely plundered for bonuses by ex-Clinton
flunkies) gave a green light to Wall Street greed — much less that
both empowered public recklessness either to flip houses or to buy a
house without credit worthiness or any history of thrift. Did we ever
hear that between the meltdown and the inauguration, there were four
months of frantic stabilization that, by the time of Obama's
ascendancy, had ensured that the panic had largely passed? Instead,
blowing $5 trillion in three years is to be forever the response to
the ongoing and now multiyear Bush crash, all to justify a "never
waste a crisis" reordering of society.

I could go on, but we know only that we know very little about Barack
Obama, and what we do know is quite different from what is alleged.
All presidents have mythographies, but they also have a record and
auditors that can collate facts with fiction. In Obama's case, we were
never given all the facts and there were few in the press interested
in finding them.

To quote Maxwell Scott in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the
legend becomes fact, print the legend."

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/when-the-legend-becomes-fact-pri...

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