The alien in the White House’s false bravado

Dorothy Rabinowitz puts her finger on why there is a growing acknowledgement of the disconnect between the White House and majority of Americans: There is an “alien in the White House”. Now she doesn’t mean it in either of the literal terms. She’s neither subscribing to the claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, nor is she claiming he is an extraterrestrial. What she’s saying is that Obama, unlike his predecessors, doesn’t really attempt to be the leader of the whole United States.

A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class.

The Obama administration, from the top down, has spent the last 18 months pushing the country further to the fringe left, while simultaneously blaming his predecessor for all the problems he’s dealing with and the failures of this president’s policies. Moreover, even when he attempts to sound like the unifying leader, his lame attempts come out sounding hollow and forced. Compare this clip from the “Today” show where Obama tries to deflect criticism over his passivity and lack of leadership in the BP Gulf oil crisis…

… to this clip of President Bush at Ground Zero in New York on 9/14/01 addressing the rescue and recovery workers.

Nearly 9 years later I still well up with pride at the response. It shows an American unbeaten and unbowed, maintaining her spirit, tending to her wounded and lost, and preparing to bring justice to those who perpetrated such an enormous injustice. Bush’s leadership in that video rests easy on his shoulders as he stands in solidarity with the working-class men who surround him. Meanwhile Obama’s crude “ass-kicking” comment sounds like the nerdy guy who wandered into the wrong bar trying to sound tougher than he is. Heck, even Bill Clinton was more believable as the red-neck tough-talker.

The Obama presidency is the triumph of the angry lefty intellectuals on campus who suddenly—and to their own surprise—have the power to implement all the hare-brained schemes they thought would save the world and finding such a task to be more complex and unwieldy than they thought. Rabinowitz catalogs some of the worst excesses of the pie-in-the-sky ivory tower types in the Executive Branch with regard to the War on Terror. Attorney General Eric Holder bends over backwards to avoid saying that the terrorists targeting the US are Islamic radicals. Obama’s head of counterterrorism says that terrorists are “victims”. Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner draws a moral equivalency between the US and China, equating Arizona’s law to enforce federal laws on immigration with China’s brutal and repressive acts of violence toward Tibetans and Uighurs.

These fringe views aren’t new. What’s new is the extent to which they are the official policy stances of the present president of the United States. It’s no longer “America first”, but “America apologize first”.

We can only hope that come the November election this year and the presidential election in two years, enough of the American people will have figured what a massive mistake it is to have a president and a party so out of touch with the people to be in control of the country.