By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, November 01, 2012
In 2008, Barack "No Drama" Obama was the
coolest presidential candidate America had ever seen -- young, hip, Ivy League,
mellifluous and black, with a melodic and exotic name. Rock stars vied to
perform at his massive rallies, where Obama often began his hope-and-change
sermons by reminding the teary-eyed audience what to do in case of mass
fainting.
Money, like manna from heaven, seemed to drop
spontaneously into his $1 billion campaign coffers. Ecstatic Hollywood stars
were rendered near speechless at the thought of Obama's promised Big Rock Candy
Mountain to come -- peace, harmony, prosperity and "5 million new
jobs" in renewable energy alone.
Even the cynical Europeans went crazy over his
anti-George W. Bush candidacy, one gussied up with faux-Greek columns and Latin
presidential mottoes. Huge rainbow-colored Obama signs sprouted like weeds on
America's upscale suburban lawns, and hip-hoppers rapped out Obama themes. All
of America, it seemed, wanted to believe in this largely unknown newcomer.
The giddy media declared Obama a "sort of god,"
and "the smartest man with the highest IQ" ever to assume the
presidency. Somehow, even legs got into the hero worship, as pundits praised
the sight of Obama's "perfectly creased pant," and one commentator
felt "this thrill going up my leg" when Obama spoke.
And why not, when the soft-spoken, adaptable
African-American candidate preached civility and visions of a postracial
America -- changing his speech from a white suburban patois to Southern black
evangelical cadences as needed to woo widely diverse audiences.
Obama, the most partisan member of the U.S. Senate,
promised a new post-political nonpartisanship. Almost by fiat, he declared an
end to big debts, corruption, lobbyists, wars, unpopular American foreign
policies and unlawful antiterrorism protocols -- almost everything that had
predated the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.
Four years of governance later, the huge crowds have
mostly melted away. Those still left do not faint. The columns are in storage.
The Latinate "Vero Possumus" is not even voiced in English.
Instead of "no red states or blue states"
healing rhetoric, Obama has sown all sorts of needless divisions in hopes of
cobbling together a thin us-versus-them coalition, as independents flee. The 99
percent claim oppression by the 1 percent. Young single female professionals
are supposedly at war with Republican Neanderthals. Beleaguered gays apparently
must fight the bigotry of the homophobic right wing. Greens should go on the
offensive against conservative polluters who are OK with dirty air and water.
Latinos must "punish our enemies" at the polls, and Attorney General
Eric Holder's "my people" are to be set against "a nation of
cowards." With all the advantages of incumbency and an obsequious media,
why is Barack Obama reduced to stooping to save his campaign?
A dismal economy, of course, explains voter discontent.
So do the contradictory and illogical explanations about the recent killing of
a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Libya. Mitt Romney is also
proving a far better campaigner than were prior so-so Obama opponents like
Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Obama's first debate was a disaster.
A more worldly Obama no longer talks of cooling the
planet or lowering the rising seas. Barely even with challenger Mitt Romney in
the polls, he now alternates between the crude and the trivial in a campaign
that in its shrillness on the stump evokes the last desperate days of failed
incumbents like Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.
Obama blasts Romney as a "bullsh--ter," and
releases an ad in which a starlet compares voting for him to her first sexual
experience. When Obama is not crude, he is adolescent -- as he references Big
Bird, plays word games like "Romnesia" and ridicules Romney for his
"binders" debate remark.
The greatest problem facing Obama, however, is not just
his mediocre record of governance, but the growing public perception that he is
as uncool in 2012 as he was cool in 2008. Voters no longer feel they're square
for voting against Obama. Instead, it's becoming the "in" thing to
shrug that enough is enough.
A common theme of classic American tales such as
"The Rainmaker," "Elmer Gantry," "The Music Man"
and "The Wizard of Oz" is popular anger unleashed at Pied Piper-like
messiahs who once hypnotized the masses with promises of grandeur.
The bamboozled people rarely fault their own gullibility
for swooning over hope-and-change banalities, but rather, once sober, turn with
fury on the itinerant messiahs who made them look so foolish.
In other words, it is not just the economy, foreign
policy, poor debating skills or a so-so campaign that now plagues Obama, but
the growing public perception that voters were had in 2008, and that it now is
OK -- even cool -- to no longer believe in him.
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