June 3, 2017
IT REALLY TOOK 8 YEARS TO FIGURE THAT OUT?:
INVISIBLE PRESIDENT : a review of We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama edited by e. j. dionne jr. and joy-ann reid (Barton Swaim, June 2017, First Things)
The speech's real solution wasn't any set of policies but Obama himself.Which I guess is why the speeches by President Obama are even duller than those of Senator Obama. Often his presidential addresses led you to expect some crucial insight, only to give you routine political speechifying. In a 2015 speech to the National Prayer Breakfast, for instance, Obama enunciated two principles that should guide Americans of faith as they "counteract" the intolerance perpetrated by "hate groups." The first is humility: "I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt--not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn't speak to others." The second: We need to "uphold the distinction between our faith and our governments. Between church and between state. . . . Our government does not sponsor a religion, nor does it pressure anyone to practice a particular faith, or any faith at all."Why was this and similarly feeble material included in a grandly titled book of presidential addresses? The only answer I can summon is that the people who admire Obama the most, the book's editors and purchasers, sincerely feel that the forty-third president is a great orator and a serious intellectual. And that, in essence, is the defining problem of the Obama presidency and Barack Obama himself: His admirers see in him what they want to see. Maybe this can be said of all politicians. Once you decide you like and admire a politician for a set of reasons, you interpret contrary evidence in the most favorable possible way. [...][O]bama's most fervent supporters have long insisted on seeing an imaginary version of the real thing: confident yet humble, transcending partisan rancor and ideology, and above all a brilliant intellectual able to think outside the old categories and explain it all to a nation in crisis. The editors of We Are the Change We Seek put it as well as anyone: "For his supporters--and, increasingly, as his term concluded, for Americans who had grown weary of the endless partisan wars--Obama remained a figure intent on evoking Abraham Lincoln's appeal to the 'better angels of our nature.'"So distant is this observation from anything I recognize in the presidency of Barack Obama that I can't help thinking of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Near the end of the book, the narrator realizes the whites who had purported to help him had never seen him for who and what he was. "They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me. I was simply a material, a natural resource to be used. . . . [I]t all came out the same--except I now recognized my invisibility." For the white liberals who idolize him, Obama has a gift, all right. He's invisible.
The flip side, of course, is that those who hated the UR saw him the same way as those who loved him; they just opposed what the Left dreamt they saw in him.
But, at the end of his presidency, we can fairly confidently say that, other than the mere fact of his ethnicity, he will be remembered for only a few virtually invisible things : continuation of the Bush/Bernanke economy rescue (which he deserves credit for endorsing during the presidential campaign); the Heritage health care plan (which is just a way-stop between W's health reform act and the eventual universal law); passage and expansion of free trade rules; and the continuation of the WoT to defeat ISIS. He essentially served the third and fourth terms of W.
Posted by Orrin Judd at June 3, 2017 7:23 AM