Many conservatives, myself included, find themselves in despair
about the combination of Barack Obama’s reign of narcissism and the
Republican opposition’s incapacities. We might take heart, however,
in considering the possibility that the sandworm has begun to turn
against The One. At least a few small signs indicate that Obama
might have pushed his hyperactive self-regard too far.
Obama’s job approval, as per
Gallup, has dropped from +13 to dead even — 46-46 — in just
about a week. Even the rabidly liberal
Bill Keller of the New York Times is slamming Obama’s
handling of the sequester. Washington Post fact checker
Glenn Kessler is giving Obama so many Pinocchios that Geppetto
may need to work overtime to keep up with the demand.
Joe Scarborough has taken time out from bashing conservatives
to aim some serious blows at Obama as well. Bob Woodward is
famously calling out Obama’s prevarications and his staff’s
bully-boy tactics.
And Saturday Night Live is
poking great fun at the Ego-in-Chief for “really hav[ing] no
idea about how money works or budgets work.” It is when the
comedians (Stewart,
Leno) turn heavily on a politician that the politician really
should start to worry.
It’s not only the sequester that is getting Obama into trouble.
Even the foot-licking establishment media is getting tired of
Obama’s disdain, as indicated not just by the Woodward flap but
also by the relative conniption fit about lack of access to Obama’s
golf round with Tiger Woods. And the ubiquity of the Obamas (Super
Bowl interviews and Oscar announcements), combined with increasing
public recognition of their extravagant lifestyles, may have
finally begun to wear on the public’s patience. Even a
celebrity-drenched culture eventually wants relief when individual
celebrities intrude into too many areas of life.
Additionally, as the perspicacious Fred Barnes
notes this week, even the New York Times, among
others, also is looking askance at the half-million-dollar
pay-to-play tactics of the new Obamite permanent campaign,
Organizing for Action. As the liberal Fred Wertheimer of Democracy
21
put it on Monday, “Organizing for Action is a national scandal
waiting to happen.”
Most substantively, our perpetually campaigning president is
likely to start suffering again, as he did in 2010, from a public
backlash against ObamaCare. When even uber-Democrat Donna Brazile
starts complaining about her health-insurance premiums going up
even if she can’t figure out that this is a failure of ObamaCare —
it’s a sign that Americans are going to be increasingly unhappy
with the prices, the options, or both, that result from the
president’s health-care regime. Combine that with all of
Obamacare’s taxes, including
the fiercely uncompassionate
medical device tax, and the new system’s eponymous creator is
likely to bear the brunt of growing frustration, dissatisfaction,
and anger.
Not that Obama seems to recognize this. His vast hubris, his
insufferable imperiousness, and his ideological imperviousness to
empirical evidence all combine to make him increasingly immune to
constructive criticism. His second-term appointments — what an only
intermittently political friend of mine described as Obama’s “Team
of Lackeys” (as opposed to Lincoln’s famed
Team of Rivals) — are horribly unlikely to challenge, even
internally, the biases or edicts of their Oval Office overlord.
One gets the impression that Obama is only a small step or two
removed from seeing himself as a real-life Kwisatz
Haderach, the Dune messiah also known as Paul
Muad’Dib, with intelligence and insight so far above ordinary
mortals as to command obeisance. (“I
think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the
people I’ll hire to do it.”) There’s something almost
otherworldly, and not in a good way, about this man’s
self-absorption and his assumption that his own wisdom is
infallible and infinite. The American body politic to him is just a
giant sandworm to be
ridden and controlled to effect his own exalted sense of cosmic
fairness.
Fortunately, James Madison, Roger Sherman, and company created
for us a constitutional system that does not easily lend itself to
political messianism. As ambition counteracts ambition, and as a
multiplicity of interests continues to frustrate efforts at empire
building, even the Obamessiah is now relegated to variations on a
consistent, whiny
refrain: “I’m
not a dictator”; “I’m not a king”; “I’m not the emperor of the
United States.” At some point, his frustration may well boil over
in a way so unattractive as to finally make people wise us to the
reality that, as Mark Levin
puts it, Obama “is not a nice guy.”
Just the other day at lunch, a friend of mine, a businessman
with good connections across the country, recounted a conversation
he had with a Democratic insider while Obama was in the midst of
his first presidential race. “It’ll take the American people five
years,” said the insider, “to realize what Obama’s really about and
what he’s really like.” Then, presumably, the public would catch on
to his manifold defects.
That bit of insight from the insider came nearly five years ago.
As my friend said, we may now be seeing the first cracks in Obama’s
façade. The first signs of ultimate backlash may now be appearing.
Obama is no Kwisatz Haderach. The sandworm may indeed turn against
him.
That, by the way, is almost surely what Frank Herbert, the
author of the Dune books, would want. As Herbert himself
put it, his dream for a healthy society would be “to make a world
where human kind can make its own future from moment to moment,
free of one man’s vision.” And: “The bottom line of the
Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better [to] rely
on your own judgment, and your own mistakes.” In Obama’s world, of
course, it is his judgment, via the apparatus of the state, that
should always predominate. The American public, accustomed to more
freedom than Obama would allow, may be starting to realize that
Obama himself is the mistake.
Photo: UPI
