Fouad Ajami Tells the Truth About Obama: No More Pixie Dust

From Washington to Kazakstan [Most Corrupt Country in the World]

Fouad Ajami remains one of the most insightful pundits in the world---his judgments are those of a man who deeply understands the long-term consequences of American deeds and how the era of Europe fails as a democracy. Most of all, he notes how America succumbed to Obama much like Argentina did to Peron, or Russia to Putin:

The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon.

The nation's faith in institutions and time-honored ways had cracked. In a little-known senator from Illinois millions of Americans came to see a savior who would deliver the nation out of its troubles. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies.

Fouad understands well how broken societies look to a savior, as France did to DeGaulle after first surrendering and silently cooperating with the Nazis during the Second World War. The international lefts incessant drumbeat of how evil America was for pursuing a democratic vision in the Middle East by GWB convinced the chattering classes of both Left Coasts of the USA that now that religion is gone, we need a secular Redeemer, and his name was Obama:

He was a blank slate, and devotees projected onto him what they wanted or wished. In the manner of political redeemers who have marked—and wrecked—the politics of the Arab world and Latin America, Mr. Obama left the crowd to its most precious and volatile asset—its imagination. There was no internal coherence to the coalition that swept him to power. There was cultural "cool" and racial absolution for the white professional classes who were the first to embrace him. There was understandable racial pride on the part of the African-American community that came around to his banners after it ditched the Clinton dynasty.

The Republicans demonstrated their dysfunction by nominating an aged war hero and left a competent businessman with technocratic skills and a large background in governing a blue state, Mitt Romney, in the wings, selecting a young and telegenic woman for Vice Presidential candidate. Although she was actually more experienced than any other of the national candidates in running a state and negotiating a large business deal for the state with an oil pipeline company, she was scorned most of all by the barren NARAL and NOW types whose screeching hysteria served as a signal to the Ultra-Left to trash the VP candidate. The NYT came out with a bogus story about McCain "seeing" a woman named Vicki Iseman [and ignored completely the vacuous John Edwards' dalliance with his in-house "video reporter" whom he inseminated during his crusade against the rich---a Marxist from South Carolina's dark satanic textile mills!?! Who managed as a "trial lawyer" to amass a fortune and become a N. Carolina Senator]. The New York Times is a bankrupt institution, both morally and fiscally, under the bizarrely incompetent duo of Pinch & Keller. The NYT, Teddy Kennedy, and the trendy MSM fell hard for the Man Without a Background, whose senior thesis at Columbia U. and complete set of State Senate campaign finance records had "disappeared" without a peep from the MSM so diligent in stalking Sarah Palin's family drama. But I digress. Fouad strikes home:

The white working class had been slow to be convinced. The technocracy and elitism of Mr. Obama's campaign—indeed of his whole persona—troubled that big constituency, much more, I believe, than did his race and name. The promise of economic help, of an interventionist state that would salvage ailing industries and provide a safety net for the working poor, reconciled these voters to a candidate they viewed with a healthy measure of suspicion. He had been caught denigrating them as people "clinging to their guns and religion," but they had forgiven him.

The working class was unaware that Obama was a Manchurian Candidate for Unions, NGO's like ACORN & other ultra-left parties and organizations, and Big Government almost without limits. When he won an election by majority, the first Democrat to do so since LBJ in 1964, the young tyro remained stylish, but somehow became enmeshed by grandiosity, caught himself in the narrative drama of his own improbable vertical ascent almost overnite to Superstardom. And as usual, this sort of overnight ascendancy doesn't end up well:

Mr. Obama himself authored the tale of his own political crisis. He had won an election, but he took it as a plebiscite granting him a writ to remake the basic political compact of this republic.

Mr. Obama's self-regard, and his reading of his mandate, overwhelmed all restraint. The age-old American balance between a relatively small government and a larger role for the agencies of civil society was suddenly turned on its head. Speed was of the essence to the Obama team and its allies, the powerful barons in Congress. Better ram down sweeping social programs—a big liberal agenda before the people stirred to life again.

Progressives pressed for a draconian attack on the workings of our health care, and on the broader balance between the state and the marketplace. The economic stimulus, ObamaCare, the large deficits, the bailout package for the automobile industry—these, and so much more, were nothing short of a fundamental assault on the givens of the American social compact.

And then there was the hubris of the man at the helm: He was everywhere, and pronounced on matters large and small. This was political death by the teleprompter.

Americans don't deify their leaders or hang on their utterances, but Mr. Obama succumbed to what the devotees said of him: He was the Awaited One. A measure of reticence could have served him. But the flight had been heady, and in the manner of Icarus, Mr. Obama flew too close to the sun.

Now this man without limits is going to propose a $3.8 trillion budget that will further enlarge deficits by $1.6 trillion, indeed the budget will project $5.08 trillion in deficit spending over the next five years -- a 35 percent increase over what the administration projected a year ago. And if you believe that this is the final number, a declining dollar and rising inflation are sure to push the deficit closer to $10 trillion while Obama flails at the economy....

Perhaps Obama didn't notice that Scott Brown won his election on fiscal discipline and even the blue states will object. Pace Krugman and other Marxist commissars of a JournoList stripe who infest the media, Obama's further excesses aren't going to cure this economy overnight. And Obama's plunging poll numbers indicate that he is no JFK, the detached student of human tragedy who knew about limits and was himself subsumed in a horrific national tragedy:

We have had stylish presidents, none more so than JFK. But Kennedy was an ironist and never fell for his own mystique. Mr. Obama's self-regard comes without irony—he himself now owns up to the "remoteness and detachment" of his governing style. We don't have in this republic the technocratic model of the European states, where a bureaucratic elite disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will. Mr. Obama was smitten with his own specialness.

Perhaps the Eurocentric bias of American thought and opinion give the Eurotards, who run oligarchic top-down non-federal states where media and corporations are under the control of technocratic statist elites, more credibility for being democrats than they actually deserve. The Europeans were saved by the US from Communism, but still regard themselves in some sort of 19th century hegemony, at least in moral terms, which is hardly deserved. They are simply creatures more or less of an international left of which the EU and UN are ancillary arms. Following their institutional shallowness and captious snobbery, as they fall economically behind the Far East, is chasing a false chimera.

In this extraordinary tale of hubris undone, the Europeans—more even than the people in Islamic lands—can be assigned no small share of blame. They overdid the enthusiasm for the star who had risen in America.

It was the way in Paris and Berlin (not to forget Oslo of course) of rebuking all that played out in America since 9/11—the vigilance, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sense that America's interests and ways were threatened by a vengeful Islamism. But while the Europeans and Muslim crowds hailed him, they damned his country all the same. For his part, Mr. Obama played along, and in Ankara, Cairo, Paris and Berlin he offered penance aplenty for American ways.

But bowing and scraping won't keep away a terrorist combine which relentlessly tries to duplicate 9/11, despite Obama's bleats that a new page has been turned and we're closing Guantanamo and giving terrorist civilian trials without thoroughly debriefing them because Miranda rights trump NATIONAL SECURITY. Obama is so naive and the American left so utterly parochial in its pseudo-sophistication that they believe acts of public contrition will actually affect foreign policy.

But no sooner had the country recovered its poise, it drew a line for Mr. Obama. The "bluest" of states, Massachusetts, sent to Washington a senator who had behind him three decades of service in the National Guard, who proclaimed his pride in his "army values" and was unapologetic in his assertion that it was more urgent to hunt down terrorists than to provide for their legal defense.

Then the close call on Christmas Day at the hands of the Nigerian jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab demonstrated that the terrorist threat had not receded. The president did his best to recover: We are at war, he suddenly proclaimed. Nor were we in need of penance abroad. Rumors of our decline had been exaggerated. The generosity of the American response to Haiti, when compared to what India and China had provided, was a stark reminder that this remains an exceptional nation that needs no apologies in distant lands.

What America doesn't need is a Saddam or a Peron or a Castro or a Chavez to strip away democratic rights like First Amendment speech, as Obama did on his SOTU attack on the Supreme Court. This charmer has already been thrown into a check position on the chessboard by Scott Brown's victory, and Brown's polls began a rapid ascent on Dec. 28th, when the full import of giving the terrorist crotch-bomber his civil rights before being debriefed began to sink in. Brown rose from 20 points behind on Dec. 28th to five points ahead on January 19th, and it seems that Obama [and Holder] were repudiated by Massachusetts in that three-week period [which also saw a second-rate not-ready-for-prime-time candidate utterly self-immolate with stupid thoughtless off-the-cuff demonstrations of her evident entitlement to "the Kennedy seat." The entitlement ethos of the libtard left has been soundly repudiated in the most dramatic fashion, and if Obama thinks he can assuage Republicans by visiting their Baltimore seminar and whining that they act like he's a Bolshevik, he simply isn't ready for prime time himself. He will have to use reconciliation to pass the $4.3 trillion budget unless Boehner & McConnell lose their nerve, or if a dumb female Senator is peeled off by the Dems in the process.

A historical hallmark of "isms" and charismatic movements is to dig deeper when they falter—to insist that the "thing" itself, whether it be Peronism, or socialism, etc., had not been tried but that the leader had been undone by forces that hemmed him in.

It is true to this history that countless voices on the left now want Obama to be Obama. The economic stimulus, the true believers say, had not gone astray, it only needed to be larger; the popular revolt against ObamaCare would subside if and when a new system was put in place.

There had been that magical moment—the campaign of 2008—and the true believers want to return to it. But reality is merciless. The spell is broken.

The USA is an economy based on fiscal years and quarterly reports while its enemies like Al Qaeda and Iran think in terms of eras and millennia. The USA was ranked 19th least corrupt country in the world last year, far better than Kazakhstan, which is one of the TEN MOST CORRUPT. Democracy is a fragile system and the abuse by a "tyranny of the majority" has long been seen as one of its most dangerous contradictions. And tyrannies lead to corruption, as the ACORN saga began to reveal before the MSM "lost interest" and looked in other directions. Chicago-style machine corruption now rules the Democrat Party and it had better realize that the American people have already caught on.

Great change cannot be done overnight in democracies, yet in times of crisis, drastic measures are sometimes called for. But the wrong drastic measures can lead to catastrophe, as the lessons in many other countries can demonstrate over the 20th century. Massachusetts was a signal, or should have been, for Obama, the bloom is off the rose and he had better respect minority rights vis-a-vis political parties just as with human beings.

Otherwise, ridiculous vapid exhalations such as Tom Friedman's about "American instability" may actually become true, though he himself wouldn't have his wits about him to figure it out one way or another. Yeah, compared to Russia or China or the EU, which can't decide whether or not to eject its most delinquent member Greece or assist it on a corrupt road to fiscal sanity? Why does Friedman care more about what Eurotards and second-rate police states think about America? Scott Brown knows that the important goal is to achieve good results so that Americans are protected from terrorists and feel good themselves about this country.

Not what the vapid chattering classes and Left Coast elites think about America.