Sensitive to the criticism from some black leaders that he is
not “black enough,” Barack Obama attempted the thunderous, rolling
rhetorical style of Jesse Jackson at a dinner for the Congressional
Black Caucus last weekend. This just got him into more trouble with
black leaders. “Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your
marching shoes,” Obama practically yelled at the crowd. “Shake it
off. Stop complainin’, stop grumblin’, stop cryin’,” he said before
slapping the lectern and striding angrily across the stage.
Black leaders weren’t in the mood for a challenging
sermon. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, among others, called Obama’s
remarks “curious,” observed that he would never speak to the gay
lobby that way, and professed perplexity at his “bedroom slippers”
reference.
Always the class warrior, Obama sees plutocrats in bedroom
slippers everywhere. It is ironic that his words keep tripping him
up. His advertised strength, oratory, has become one of his
biggest weaknesses. Even liberal Europeans, once awed
by his pre-presidency speech in Berlin, now find his rhetoric
tiresome. “Obama’s lecture on the euro crisis… is overbearing,
arrogant and absurd,” ran an editorial in the German newspaper
Bild. “The president’s scolding
is a pathetic attempt to distract attention from his own failures.
How embarrassing.”
Evidently Obama has not won back for America the “respect
of the world.” His ruinous economic policies have, however,
increased the respect businessmen feel toward some parts of the
world. It is becoming a recurring theme among some CEOs that it is
easier to do business in Communist China than in Obama’s America.
Las Vegas businessman Steve Wynn said as much several months back,
and now this week Coke CEO Muhtar Kent weighs in along similar
lines: “In the West, we’re forgetting what really worked 20 years
ago. In China and other markets around the world, you see the kind
of attention to detail about how business works and how business
creates employment.”
Yet Obama just shrugs America’s anti-business climate off
and returns to his socialist themes and trivial, self-serving
politics. He continues to encourage the myth that opposition to him
is based not on his policies but on his person. While he tells the
Congressional Black Caucus to stop whining, he reserves that right
for himself. He likes to remind audiences of his victim status by
saying that he won election as “Barack Hussein Obama.”
Now creeping into his hackish remarks on the DNC
fundraising trail is the notion that his “values” are superior to
his opponents. Unable to run on a good economy, he has to come up
with a new criterion for evaluating his presidency, and he thinks
“values” will fit the bill. He even implies that the bad economy is
a testament to those superior values. You see, he isn’t about to
let Americans get rich off dirty air and polluted rivers and a tax
code that benefits “millionaires and billionaires.” He wants it
known that his stand against prosperity is principled.
The boos and clapping at GOP debates confirm him in his
rectitude. “I mean has anybody been watching the debates lately?”
Obama said at a DNC event in San Jose. “You’ve got a governor whose
state is on fire denying climate change.… It’s true. You’ve got
audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they
don’t have healthcare. And booing a service member in Iraq because
they’re gay.”
Guilt by scattered clapping and booing has become an
acceptable tactic in American politics, though the loud applause at
Democratic events for the “choice” to kill unborn children never
seems to get liberals in trouble.
Joe Biden, appearing very solemn, informed cultural
arbiter Joy Behar that he considered the booing of the gay solider
to be “reprehensible.” Even the socially liberal Megyn Kelly at Fox
News, if only out of professional annoyance, disputes this
interpretation of the boo, noting that it was directed not at the
soldier but at his biased question. This won’t satisfy the Thought
Police, as they consider any questioning of gay rights to be
evidence of evil.
Obama is at his most sanctimonious when talking about the
abolition of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He considers that definitive
proof of his moral superiority to his opponents. Black groups are
right to suspect that he views them more warily than gay groups.
Obama prefers the newest and most glamorous causes to the party’s
staler ones. As Jesse Jackson said, when he was caught making a
crude remark about candidate Obama off camera, Obama is “talking
down to black people.”
