Big-time American opinion makers have again been exposed as the
sentimentalists that so many of them are. Their coddling of our
current president does not even rise to the level of the backhanded
compliment by which George Bailey was accused of “playing nursemaid
to a bunch of garlic eaters.” Hyperbole from Paula Broadwell about
David Petraeus makes more sense than the way that presidential
biographer David Maraniss
hailed a 1,600-word mixture of sermon, warning, straw man, and
prescription from
President Obama as a speech on par with the Gettysburg Address.
Columnist
Georgie Ann Geyer had similarly fulsome praise for the man
whose scripted condolences in the aftermath of a mass shooting had
unexpectedly transformed him into “a president one could believe
in.” Even Geyer’s embarrassing tongue bath of a column was just an
appetizer: Time magazine editors declared Barack Obama
“person of the year” for 2012.
As far as pundits like these are concerned, our president is not
the best-known beneficiary of the “new America.” Instead, he is —
by acclamation, if not actual accomplishment — its architect.
Their admiration for his labor is such that most of them have
already forgotten that the “new America” was here even before Mr.
Obama parlayed an Ivy League education and a habit of voting
“present” into a seat on Air Force One.
It’s time to correct the record before it hardens into history.
Abraham Lincoln had more flaws as a chief executive than our
reigning mythology ascribes to him, but what Lincoln said in
Gettysburg, PA on November 19, 1863 still resonates in ways that
Barack Obama and his speechwriters can only aspire to, because the
Gettysburg Address had something long since forgotten by our
celebrity-saturated culture: humility.
There is a profound difference between hectoring an audience and
empathizing with an audience, and yet it is a difference that can
only be recognized by humble people. From President Obama’s big
moment, we got rhetorical questions about national failure and a
lecture about what we can’t tolerate anymore, as though we were
sanguine about massacres until a community organizer known for
missing the significance of the annual Right to Life march in
Washington, D.C. came along to show us the error of our ways.
From President Lincoln’s big moment, we got recognition of our
mortal limits and inspiration to keep striving for freedom and
self-government in spite of those limits.
There is a great gulf between “We must change” and “We cannot
dedicate — We cannot consecrate — We cannot hallow — this
ground.” President Obama often tries for the mountaintop of the
transcendent, but the ideology in which he was raised and with
which he is comfortable keeps him from rising above the foothills
of the circumstantial. Talk show host
Mark Levin found bias even in the events to which the president
alluded while speaking last week in Connecticut, because President
Obama’s count of the mass shootings on his watch ignored the
shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, in November of 2009. Levin is right.
Thirteen people were killed that day, but because death at schools
seems more tragic than death at army bases, and because everything
for progressives is about circumstance, Fort Hood was flushed down
the memory hole.
Ironically, machinations like that work ultimately to the
disadvantage of our current president: When your career is built on
the premise that every playing field needs to be leveled for the
sake of “fairness,” the muscles needed for mountain climbing tend
to atrophy. Soft socialism is a comfy pillow but a rotten ladder,
and no amount of cheerleading obscures the difference between prose
and poetry, or the difference between scriptural cadences woven
seamlessly into a speech and scripture sprinkled like cheap
Parmesan over favorite policies.
Abraham Lincoln
asked his audience to take increased devotion to the cause for
which the honored dead at Gettysburg had given “the last full
measure of devotion.” Barack Obama told the people of Newtown that
they were not alone, and worked a subtle plug for early childhood
education into his remarks (“…this job of keeping our children safe
and teaching them well is something we can only do together, with
the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community and the
help of a nation”). Three days later and back in Washington, D.C.
but hoping to cajole alleged opponents into making stupid mistakes,
President Obama cited the massacre in Connecticut as an event that
should “give us some perspective” — not on good and evil or
mortality and suffering, but on
federal tax policy.
There are no words for callous cluelessness of such Olympian
proportions, although “George, you’re worth more dead than alive”
once came close to capturing that thought. We are too often
encouraged to settle for or mislabel mediocrity. Fortunately, the
seasons of Advent and Christmas offer blessed relief from despair
over such ugliness, and we may like the Magi in the canon of
Christian scriptures return to our country by another way.
