But, the article continued, “Obama had a way of transcending ambition, though he himself was ambitious as hell.” Newsweek might as well have simply said Obama was not—at least as regards personal ambition—as he appeared. It could have made the same point regarding his seeming indifference to the politics of identity and grievance or his showing “no sense of entitlement or resentment.”16
For in fact, while Obama talked a good game about having risen above race issues, eschewing any sense of entitlement, rejecting identity politics, and demonstrating a willingness to listen to all sides and bring them together into a magical consensus, the reality was starkly different. Obama’s unifying facade only appeared when dealing in the generalities and routine doubletalk of a campaign. Once in office, when he began encountering resistance to his extreme liberal policy agenda, the congeniality and counterfeit bipartisanship withered away, to be replaced by the strident, arrogant, patronizing narcissism that brooked neither criticism nor opposition. His trademark “cool” also gave way, at times, to impulses of haughty impatience and intolerance to ideas outside his ideological comfort zone.
He proved to be anything but post-racial, as we saw in his Justice Department’s summary dismissal of the slam-dunk case against New Black Panther Party members for voter intimidation. He was anything but post-partisan, as we saw in his repeated “calling out” of Republicans for their alleged dishonesty when they dared oppose his agenda on its merits. He was anything but post-grievance when he repeatedly denounced America’s blemished history, for which it clearly had to atone.
And resentment? It permeated his every speech and policy proposal: resentment at America’s history on race, resentment at capitalism for allowing disparities of income, resentment at America for consuming too many natural resources, resentment at America for its “arrogance” and “dismissiveness” and “imperialism” in dealing with other nations, and resentment at banks, corporations, insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, conservatives, and small-town Americans for all their supposed sins.
None of this should have surprised conservatives, especially self-described intellectual ones, who should have seen through his feigned centrism and bipartisanship to his uncompromising liberalism. Signs of his radicalism were everywhere, from his parents, mentors, and college and post-college associations, to his autobiographies, to his street organizing and other political activism in Chicago, to his record in the state senate and U.S. Senate, to his church and its illustrious, America-hating, racially obsessed, Marxist-leaning pastor, to his spontaneous statements on the presidential campaign trail.
Despite the gaping biographical holes and general mysteriousness of Obama’s background, there was abundant information in the public domain to show, beyond doubt, that both of his natural parents, his stepfather, and his primary mentor Frank Marshall Davis were all radicals; that the pastor and church he chose were steeped in the Marxism and racialism of Black Liberation Theology; and that he associated and worked with leftist street activists in Chicago. Everything about his past pointed to radicalism.
In fact, during some unscripted moments on the campaign trail he couldn’t conceal his redistributionist mindset, such as when he told Joe the Plumber he wanted to spread the wealth around, or confessed to Charlie Gibson during the primary presidential debate that he supported capital gains tax increases as “a matter of fairness,” even knowing they would reduce tax revenue. Those who didn’t see the unmistakable signs of Obama’s radicalism were trying not to see them, for many of us were sounding the alarm bells. As Ben Domenech wrote in the Washington Times in June 2008, “Barack Obama has been ranked as the most liberal member of the United States Senate. He favors socialized health care, significant tax increases, abortion on demand. He is supported enthusiastically by George Soros, Walter Mondale, and Jimmy Carter. So why would any thinking conservative support Sen. Obama for president in 2008?”17
Why indeed? Well, as columnist Robert Novak wrote, “The Obamacon syndrome is based on hostility to Bush and his administration, and revulsion over today’s Republican Party.”18 Conservatives were up in arms over the Republicans’ dismal record on spending—a record that now seems relatively austere. Additionally, conservative elites felt revulsion at Bush’s alleged anti-intellectualism and were growing disenchanted with the Iraq war—not to mention John McCain was hardly the conservatives’ ideal candidate.
The “intellectual” conservatives were embarrassed by Bush and anxious to identify with one of their own. To some extent, it was no more complicated than a revenge of the nerds. They identified with Obama and their hubris drove them to get behind him as a form of self-approbation, elevating trappings of intellectualism above experience and certainly above ideology. For all their intelligence, they were either pathetically naïve or had engaged in self-deception about his “conservative values.” They were willing to look the other way on his liberalism because they placed a higher emphasis on his supposed intelligence than on how he would use it. Former National Review editor Wick Allison, explaining his support for Obama,19 pointed one reporter to an op-ed his conservative wife had penned for the Dallas Morning News. Hailing Obama as “prudent, thoughtful, and courageous,” Christine Allison exclaimed that Obama’s “life story embodies the conservative values that go to the core of my beliefs.”20
Despite all their accolades for Obama, some Obamacons still seemed anxious he would end up governing like a liberal. Christopher Buckley declared, “If [Obama] raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens up the coffers of the DNB to bribe-money from the special interest groups . . . then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.”21 Likewise, Ken Adelman confessed, “I sure hope Obama is more open, centrist, sensible—dare I say, Clintonesque—than his liberal record indicates, than his cooperation with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid portends. If not I will be even more startled by my vote than I am now.”22
But in fairness to the center-right intellectuals, Obama is a poseur who masked his liberalism to buttress his image as an exemplar of a new kind of politics. During his first Illinois state senate run in 1996, he sat for an interview and then filled out a questionnaire issued by a liberal Chicago non-profit group, revealing very liberal positions on key issues. He expressed opposition to parental notification on abortions, though later amended it to say he might support it for 12- or 13-year-olds, but no older. He flatly opposed the death penalty, and he supported bans on the sale, possession, and manufacture of guns.
During his presidential campaign, Obama’s staff unconvincingly claimed the responses were filled out by a campaign aide who “unintentionally mischaracterize(d) his position,” but they never explained the similarity of the respondent’s handwriting to his own, nor did they refute Politico’s finding that Obama himself actually sat for the interview and submitted the amended questionnaire.23 Despite this evidence, Obama’s campaign presented a fact sheet denying he ever held those views, insisting he “consistently supported the death penalty for certain crimes but backed a moratorium until problems were fixed,” and “has consistently supported common-sense gun control, as well as the rights of law-abiding gun owners.”24
Obama wouldn’t own up to his liberalism throughout the entire presidential campaign. He took umbrage at anyone calling him a liberal. In one campaign speech he mocked his critics, saying,“Oh, he’s liberal, he’s liberal.” Let me tell you something. There’s nothing liberal about wanting to reduce money in politics. That is common sense. There’s nothing liberal about wanting to make sure [our soldiers] are treated properly when they come home. . . . There’s nothing liberal about wanting to make sure that everybody has healthcare. We are spending more on healthcare in this country than any other advanced country, but we’ve still got more uninsured. There’s nothing liberal about saying that doesn’t make sense, and we should do something smarter with our healthcare system.25
Some of those assertions may be correct, but there is something liberal—ve
ry liberal—about spending America into oblivion, resurrecting failed welfare schemes, kowtowing to big labor, nationalizing healthcare and automakers, and seeking to foist crushing energy and other taxes on the American people—all of which Obama has done or is trying to do as president.
COMMUNITY ORGANIZING WRAPPED IN A BIPARTISAN PACKAGE
Even if some conservative intellectuals were slow on the uptake, Obama’s fellow liberals knew he was one of them. Mark Schmitt, executive editor of the American Prospect (subtitled “Liberal Intelligence”), wrote about Obama’s duplicity as early as late 2007—though Schmitt hardly used the pejorative “duplicity.” He argued Obama was not so ideologically different from Hillary Clinton; rather, he was employing tactics designed to make him appear less ideological in order to advance his agenda. The two Democratic candidates, wrote Schmitt, though having similar ideologies, have different “assumptions about the current circumstance and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track.”26
Schmitt rejected the claim of some leftists that Obama was naïve about “power and partisanship.” He was playing the electorate, saying what it wanted to hear as a “tactic,” a method of “subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure.” Political commentators, Schmitt argued, have a duty to “describe the [political] situation exactly.” But if you’re a presidential candidate, looking to impose “progressive governance,” you have a duty to “subvert it.... Claiming the mantle of bipartisanship and national unity, and defining the problem to be solved (e.g., universal health care) puts one in a position of strength, and Republicans would defect from that position at their own risk.”
In other words, seduce the people to vote for you with promises of hope and change and, once elected, enact transformational change the voters actually oppose. “The public, and younger voters in particular,” wrote Schmitt, “seem to want an end to partisanship and conflictual politics, and an administration that came in with that premise (an option not available to Hillary Clinton), would have a tremendous advantage, at least for a moment.”
“For a moment”—how prescient!
Obama’s “bipartisan” approach, according to Schmitt, was “better positioned to take advantage” of the “math”: persuading sufficient numbers of Republican senators to cross the aisle on issues such as healthcare in order to reach the filibuster-proof number of sixty votes, which Schmitt wrongly assumed Democrats would not achieve in the 2008 elections. Schmitt also maintained that Obama could use his skills as a “community organizer” to leverage his self-made reputation as a bipartisan against the Republicans’ image as a “bad-faith opposition” party. You “draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that’s not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists—it’s a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It’s how you deal with intractable demands—put ’em on a committee. Then define the committee’s mission your own way.”27
Schmitt couldn’t have been more accurate in analyzing Obama’s strategy, which he employed, for example, in his bogus healthcare summit. Unhappily for Obama, Republicans didn’t “have nothing.” Obama did—and it showed. Congressional Republicans like Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor deftly challenged his dubious assertions, frustrating Obama and robbing him of his trademark eloquence. Obama tried to stigmatize his Republican challengers during and after the summit, but his plan backfired, as he revealed his own pettiness, partisanship, and dogmatism.
The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, who once penned a hysterical screed against George W. Bush saying he hated almost everything about him,28 recently wrote about the difference between Obama’s inclusive rhetoric and actual practice, all but admitting Obama’s deceit—and apparently approving it. “I still find it strange,” wrote Chait, “how little understood President Obama’s political method is. The first person I know who identified it is Mark Schmitt, over two years ago. At the time, many liberals viewed Obama’s inclusive rhetoric as a sign that he intended to capitulate the liberal agenda for the sake of winning Republican agreement. Schmitt disagreed. Obama’s language is highly conciliatory, he wrote, but the method isn’t.”29
In a previous piece, Chait had likened Obama’s approach to Republicans to his approach to “foreign enemies like the Iranian regime: take them up on their claim to some shared goal (nuclear disarmament, health care reform), elide their preferred red herrings, engage them seriously, and then expose their disingenuousness.” Chait wrote, “This apparent paradox is one reason Obama’s political identity has eluded easy definition. On the one hand, you have a disciple of the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky turned ruthless politician. On the other hand, there is the conciliatory post-partisan idealist. The mistake here is in thinking of these two notions as opposing poles. In reality it’s all the same thing. Obama’s defining political trait is the belief that conciliatory rhetoric is a ruthless strategy.” Bingo, but it gets even better:Obama’s health care summit is a classic example of the Obama method. Once again, skeptics are viewing it as a plot that depends on securing Republican cooperation. . . . That’s not the point. Obama knows perfectly well that the Republicans have no serious proposals to address the main problems of the health care system and have no interest (or political room, given their crazy base) in handing him a victory of any substance. Obama is bringing them in to discuss health care so he can expose this reality. 30
Chait understands Obama’s method. Why don’t conservative “intellectuals?”
OBAMA’S NO RONALD REAGAN
But Obama’s deception about his liberalism was not as simple a ruse to pull off as his charade as a bipartisan, nor has he employed it as deftly as Bill Clinton executed his strategy to sell himself as a New Democrat and Third Way politician. Clinton was a card-carrying member of the reputedly centrist Democratic Leadership Council and far more willing to compromise his agenda and deviate from his true ideology if it would increase his popularity or divert attention from his myriad scandals. In a speech to the DLC in 1993 he hailed its approach of infusing “new ideas and new energy, a new direction and reinvigoration into the party that most of us belong to by heritage, instinct, and conviction.” He went on to express his fealty to the DLC’s commitment to bringing the Democratic Party closer to the center on fiscal and national security policies.31
Obama’s task was more complex, both because he had greater ambitions than Clinton and because he was less inclined to compromise, being far more of a leftist ideologue than Clinton. Obama said he saw himself as a transformative figure like Ronald Reagan; he truly intended to “fundamentally change” America. Of course, ideologically, Obama was the anti-Reagan, who intended to undo what remained of the Reagan agenda as well as that of the 1994 Republican Contract with America. But he couldn’t afford to let Americans know that (any more than he already had through his previous activism, his liberal voting record, and his unscripted comments), because America is still a center-right nation, even if many Americans were disenchanted with Republicans at the time Obama was running.
Obama held himself out as transformative all right, but also above ideology. It’s difficult to be transformative from the center, however, or even to make that case. In the end, that’s a major reason Obama’s campaign was so filled with platitudes and vague, emotional catch phrases such as “hope” and “change.” By luck he came onto the presidential scene when we were beset by financial crises and the public had grown weary of the Iraq war. Obama seized on the public’s mood, played their fears like a virtuoso musician, and depicted America as being in dire straights from which only he could deliver us. By playing up the crisis mentality, and with unprecedented support and cover from the press, he was able to get away with his vacuous slogans without ever defining them.
It didn’t take long for Obama to reveal his true colors once in office. He had sold himself
as post-racial, bipartisan, sagacious and mature beyond his years, effortlessly fluent and articulate, moderate, transparent, honest, non-ideological, and open to opposing views. But inside a few months, he showed himself to be deeply racial, aggressively partisan, grossly incompetent, often verbally awkward apart from his teleprompter, an inflexible liberal ideologue, secretive, dishonest, undemocratic, dogmatic and dictatorial, and intolerant and dismissive of his opposition.
His signature “charismatic charm” and “congeniality” soon degenerated into what Washington Examiner White House correspondent Julie Mason described as his “irritation, imperiousness and dissatisfaction.” “More than a year later” wrote Mason, “a different picture of Obama is emerging. Impatient with gainsayers and frustrated with political process, the president seems increasingly disenchanted as progress on his own agenda remains elusive.” She quoted Republican strategist Kevin Madden saying, “The entire 2008 Obama campaign was built around a cult of personality. He is totally lacking the kind of leadership skills you forge after a long time on Capitol Hill.”32 In fact, at this point Obama’s incompetent leadership had only begun to emerge, as we later realized with his disastrous mismanagement of the Gulf oil spill.
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