Probably the most surprising and disappointing expositions about Barack Obama in the last 2½ years have been his disinterest in governing and his avalanche-sized self-adoration.
We wuz robbed.
He was sold to us as a brilliant professor, uncommonly self-effacing.
Instead, we have been fed the narcissist of the century, who has demanded and received more facetime on television to give the same angry, xeroxed speech than the venerable logos of NBC, CBS and ABC, cumulatively.
Since April, he has been the centerfold of at least 43 of the most immodest fundraising self-tributes ever dished up in this country.
If you tell me he has smoked 43 cigarettes or drunk 43 beers since April, that would be fine. This laziest of all Presidents would not need to invest spare energy in either bad habit. But to put on his game-face for fundraisers costing up to $38,000 a plate requires hours of preparation by a network of flunkies, not to mention the feared madam, Mad Michelle.
Obama Silliness descends to a new low today when he engineers a stunt that would make an aware politician blush, a three-day campaign bus excursion of the Middle West, where his polling numbers look like the winter thermometer. The man who never has stopped campaigning, ‘cause then he’d have to govern, says it is a Presidential junket, not a campaign stunt, and therefore the tab will be paid by taxpayers, the 50 percent of us who pay income taxes. Has he no shame?
He departed this morning on a barely disguised three-day campaign junket —This bus gimmick will give him a badly needed sheen of tradition — through three crucial Midwestern swing states, Minnesota, Uiwa, Illinois.
Once the bus is parked Wednesday night, the obsessively globetrotting Obama family flies off to Martha Vineyard’s for this month’s holiday. That has been his governing pattern — campaigning followed by vacation followed by campaigning followed by holiday. Makes a normal person dizzy.
No wonder his Gallup Poll approval rating has sunk to 39 percent.
His indolence is not to be confused with being unambitious. He is the antithesis. Virtually every breath is scripted and recorded, especially all that are in public view.
He has traveled more often and farther than any star you or your children could pick out of the sky this evening.
No one in Washington ever has heard him utter the pronoun “we” in reference to his administration unless it was to deflect blame for one of his many foolish acts.
He has a temper that would make a tyrant recoil. Combined with his hotheadedness, carefully enveloped within his mountainous ego, the double-decker mental knuckle sandwich forms one of the most unlikable public American figures imaginable. But you will not read that anywhere this side of a vault because virtually all of Washington’s practicing journalists have sworn fealty to the death to him.
He knows less about American history than any modern President. The pre-modern Presidents were history.
He is the first President since a drunken Andy Johnson to almost braggingly proclaim that he does not believe in American exceptionalism, and anyone who does should be embarrassed. This is one of his most unforgivable gaffes.
You Have My Shaky Word
In the 4½ years since he first came to wide attention, we have only his (heaven forbid) frequently spoken word that he is not simply a scholar but enviably erudite.
Not a single piece of written supporting evidence has been allowed into the public thoroughfare. Because it would mar his self-declared brilliance, he has guarded his college records more closely than bin Laden’s human shields protected their prey.
His iron incuriosity only shocks those who have met him since he began running for the White House.
As for political skills, he must have authored the book “All That I Learned in Kindergarten.”
As the most unprepared President, he is hardly the first to be baffled by the way Washington works, merely the only one with no interest in finding out. He is the quintessential hands-off President, completely disinterested.
He lies, openly, with a silkily facileness that matches the king of untruths, LBJ. But the media, as with every Democrat, has his back.
Any Republican or sensible Democrat — I nominate Hillary —warned you in 2008, just after a cursory inspection, that he knew/knows less about governing than a schoolboy and is devoid of an aptitude for learning.
If only he were embarrassable.
Even though he is recycling the tired clichés for about the 15,000th time, he still will need his teleprompters on his bus tour after he says he-ll-o. What a master student.
But, as you may know, Jews and blacks only read the funny papers when turning to the media. Sloth-like, they nevertheless will trudge to the polls in 15 months and reflexively cast their ballots for an image they have been sold because that is how their families taught them.
Fellow Jews, I weep for you and for our country.
