I HAVE THIS TALENT
This is the first openly critical appraisal from this corner on the intentions of Barack Obama. This is not about errors or omissions. I’m talking about a man’s intentions.
A few cats came out of the bag during the President’s so-called bipartisan meeting on Thursday. Up to now Obama’s been working in that verbal closet he told Harry Reid about when he first came into the Senate: “I have this talent,” he reportedly said to Reid, and since that date has proven that indeed he does. Barack Obama does not blush or even hesitate when he makes two diametrically opposed statements to a mixed or general audience, giving each of two or more opposing views something to like and hang on to. But last Thursday he let the cat out of the bag . . . I was elected to change this nation radically and everlastingly, and this is what I’m going to do whether you or anyone else likes it or not.
He may actually believe he was elected to put in place a socialist welfare state or at least to move all important decision making from individual to governmental hands. This could even be what some of those who voted for him intended, but I doubt many of the independents, who are the voters who elect all our Presidents, understood they were electing him to accomplish this radical a change.
We can’t even say we deserved what we got, because the truth is we didn’t know much about Barack Obama beyond his silver-tongued oratory. Or maybe we didn’t care, since so many of us were, as usual, voting against something . . . and not for Obama or for anything else so specific as a policy of redistributing the wealth through massive and unsustainable public expenditures that can only be met by raising taxes to economy killing levels.
Whatever our wisdom in hindsight might be, the fact is we put him there and he’s going to make the most of what he personally came into politics to accomplish . . . right all the wrongs he witnessed when he was a community organizer on Chicago’s Southside.
I’ve been hoping for a year that he’d tackle the issues of the needy in a more transparent, enlightened, and centrist manner . . . near to where most of the rest of us fair-minded Americans pitch our tents. That hasn’t happened, and on Thursday he slipped and told us it’s not going to happen.
We’ll see if this talent he has . . . to convince us he believes one thing while doing quite another . . . is sufficient to let him continue to swim upstream against a rising current of mistrust. It’s hard to fool all the people all the time . . . even with all that talent.
