The Broken President

The Broken President
By John Ransom
11/22/2011

Being president was always easy for Barack Obama.

That is, it was easy up until the time he actually was elected president. Then things got a little tougher.

In part, Obama’s troubles stem from the rigidity of his broken ideas. They admit of no compromise. Consequently, he has subsumed his whole personality into an unworkable ideology that was dead outside of academia- and news rooms- until he resurrected it.

It’s the idea that a benign government of technocrats and academics can engineer near perfect justice at the trivial cost of liberty to most.

His life and presidency can only be understood by recognizing this Obama idée fixe goes beyond merely his ideology and merges into that of his personality. Because only when one realizes that he personally identifies with his ideology in the same way that he identifies himself as a father or husband, can one finally understand how tightly he clings to it.

It’s an ideology that he clings to, like some do guns and religion, despite a century of abject failure when implemented- as his own disastrous record as president shows on a fairly small scale.

Unlike guns and religion, however, which both have long records of reliability, his ideology depends upon the unreliable magic trick of redefining of words to mean the opposite of what any plain speaking person in the USA would understand them to mean.

For example, if you redefine liberty to mean that most everyone outside of the ruling elite has the same amount of “things,” then Obama’s materialist ideology ensures “some liberty for most.” Therefore, it is only when you have a static majority, a majority that can neither rise nor fall, that “good, kind-hearted, fat, benevolent people,” as Twain describes them, can assure honest poverty for the rest of us.

In that case, why wouldn’t good, kind-hearted, fat Warren Buffett pay a tax to ensure he and his fellows maintain an ascendancy that can’t be compromised by the majority? Why wouldn’t donor good, kind-hearted, fat George Kaiser go knocking on the door of the White House for a subsidized loan for his failing private venture? The first rule of capital is to preserve it in the same way that politicians first preserve power.

And thus, in Obama’s world, everyone is happy.

It was so much easier for Obama to be president when all he had to do was come up with sunshine words and rosy promises, as opposed to, say, executing unworkable legislation, controlling a suspicious congress, creating policy that gave to the rich in order to secure “some liberty for most;” or following a budget that isn’t even written down on a napkin.

Talk is cheap- as is writing- but when you claim the mantle of leadership you actually have to do something. And in doing something Obama has revealed to Americans the underside, unspoken ideology that belongs to the spirit of the Bastille, rather than that of the Boston Tea Party.

It’s the spirit that talks about immigration reform, but ignores immigration law -or not- depending on how the spirits move him. It’s the spirit that plays the part of constitutional law professor, while ignoring the duty to defend the constitution. It’s the spirit that tells banks to lend money to poor people, but punishes banks through extra-legal means- because they loaned money to poor people.

And those spirits create misgivings in most Americans; and those misgivings are strongly confirmed by the economic failures they have engendered.

When you measure those failures against the expectations that the liberal left pinned on Obama via speeches and skin color, and subtract out the deepening number of Americans who think the country is on the wrong track, we can quantify how cheapened the presidency has become. All you have to do is subtract the Obama expectations from the Obama result.

What you are left with is a remainder that confirms that this president is broken.

How broken?

Utterly, 100 percent, non-fixable broken.

It is interesting to note that the essential defect of this president was pegged by Sarah Palin early on.

“But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform,” said Palin at the 2008 Republican convention while she was accepting the spot as vice president on the McCain ticket.

Obama still hasn’t authored anything much but speeches; speeches which contain nothing new; “not one” new idea, say his friends.

Even his signature healthcare bill wasn’t his own creation but rather a compilation of ideas from lobbyists and Senators.

Because if Obama authored legislation, on say, immigration, or the debt ceiling or his own version of healthcare- if he told us what he really thought of the Main Street American bank or those who truly occupy Main Street - Americans would understand how bankrupt the man is.

All you have to do is subtract his words from our reality to see the result: broken.
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To read another article by John Ransom, click here.