Supporting Obama now seen as . . . naive nostalgia.
It is an irony of Obama’s presidency - which came into being because he was the unBush - that it shares some of the worst traits of his predecessor’s administration. Among these are insularity and a blinkered arrogance.
Obama has never been wracked by self-doubt and he is unusually self-contained for a politician. He seems not to need people or reassurance. In office, this is dangerous – he sometimes seems to be living in a cocoon.
The White House’s attempts to deal criticisms of Obama’s detachment have been comical. First there was Obama’s own cringeworthy (and doubtless bogus) anecdote about his 11-year-old daughter Malia asking: “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?” Then there was Gibbs illustrating Obama’s passionate concern for the people of the Gulf by relating that he had said “damn” and exhibited a “clenched jaw”.
Perhaps their biggest problem is that it was not just McCartney’s dyed hair and 1960s songs that seemed so retro. His adulation of Obama struck the wrong chord because few outside the White House bubble are in that place any more. It is now permissible – even fashionable – to have a go at the man once hailed as the Messiah.
Obama loses the Left: suddenly, it’s cool to bash Barack - Telegraph.
And it gets worse. Obama’s Self-Absorption by Sherman Frederick:
Pick just about any issue these days – unemployment, federal debt, Israel, Iran, terrorism, illegal immigration, Gulf oil spill – and two words always describe President Barack Obama’s leadership style: “self” and “absorbed.”
He tells us he saved the American economy as we know it, but my hometown of Las Vegas leads the league in unemployment at 14 percent – and it’s still climbing. If this is what Team Obama calls “saved,” then please, let me give purgatory a shot.
Meanwhile, the federal debt skyrockets without a credible plan to repay it, other than to pass the buck to future generations.
The president won’t stand up for Israel as a friend.
And he won’t stand against Iran as a foe.
He treats Islamic terrorists like they were 1960s counterculture protesters with a righteous gripe against an imperialist America.
There is very little good to say about Obama’s presidency. It’s sad, in a way. The millions disillusioned will not soon return to politics. They will become cynical and angry. Many will be too embarrassed to participate in the future.
For most of our history, one’s political views received narrow notice. Friends, family, coworkers might have heard the most strident partisan exclaiming the virtues of a peanut farmer from Georgia. When that president failed, you lost a little face with those closest to you. They’re forgiving.
But the internet and facebook and twitter changed that game. Now, potentially millions learned of a twenty-something’s believe that Barack Obama would turn America into some sort of 24/7 Disney World where Uncle Sam dispensed Mickey Bucks until passed out from sugar poisoning. And it all ran on electricity generated by clicking together the heels of Dorothy’s red shoes. Amen.
How will they face the post-Obama reality? With an economy about to revisit 1933, with terrorists launching frequent attacks on American soil, with oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, and with most of Obama’s promises and promise in pieces, will those bold, smug Obamatron’s find the spine to say, “I had no idea,” and join in our efforts to fix America?
I hope so. We’ll need them. We’ll need their energy, their youth, their strength, their idealism, and their vision for a better tomorrow. Obama’s failures are not their failures, but all of ours. He is the president we deserved.