I’ll add my two cents.
Obama always seems to me to be trying to act Presidential. He seems to be reading words written by a committee of people trying to imagine themselves into the perceptual space of a real President. The relevant scene is that in “The Birdcage” (one of my favorite comedies) where the various homosexual friends of the parents are trying to rework the apartment to look heterosexual. They put a Playboy in the bathroom, since that is what “they” read.
At root, though, they are trying to create the outward trappings of a culture they really don’t understand.
Similarly, Obama has none of the shared passions of the rest of us. He literally grew up outside our nation, culturally. Even when he was living in our borders, and going to our schools, he was surrounded by radicals. The grandfather who raised him in Hawaii from age ten on was almost certainly a pot-smoking Communist. Imagine what those discussions must have been like around the dinner table.
It is unremarkable, given that background, that Obama would have gravitated to radicals in every State and university where he subsequently went. But the key point here is that NONE of the traditional associations that send shivers up OUR spines–the flag, the invocation of sacrifice in war, the National Anthem–resonate with him at all. He has none of the sense of the sacred that is common to the rest of us.
Neither do the people with whom he feels comfortable, with whom he has chosen to continue to surround himself as President. When dealing with Obama, you have to factor in the Hive Mind around him, which includes the “advisors” he meets in places like Martha’s Vineyard.
They don’t get it. They have what are in reality very chauvinistic, very prejudicial notions about ordinary Americans, but they have to act, for political purposes, as if they felt themselves in synchrony with the very people they despise, or at least the caricatures of whom they despise.
So you have multiple levels of disconnect. First, they misunderstand ordinary Americans. Then, they reach out to their sterotypes, with feigned goodwill. In the end, they are neither communicating their truth, nor our truth. They are simply speaking. This cannot really be covered up with focus groups, and the outward mechanical appropriation of the methods of professional marketers. They are selling a person, and that person is plainly not who we want or need him to be, and no amount of scrubbing can obscure this fact.
As I look at Obama, I see someone who has made himself into something like a machine. He has exorcised all genuine traces of spontaneity, actual good humor, and sincerity. At the same time, this machine is arrogant. George Bush was cocky, in the way that the best kid on the baseball team is. Yet, I never doubted that he loved the country, and that he had deeply held opinions on the nature of right and wrong. I doubt that with respect to Obama.
I don’t think he has any core beliefs. If forced to guess, I would hazard a guess that his focus is some sort of revolution–however he frames it–and that he has consecrated his life to the task, a la Sergei Nechaev. This is certainly what Alinsky taught, and Obama, we are told, was perhaps Alinsky’s most talented heir.
From a fundamental muddle of deceptiveness, misunderstanding, and malignity with respect to our national traditions, how could anything positive result?
Just look at the use Obama tried to make of the attempted murder of a conservative Democrat, and the actual murder of a Republican judge, and 5 others. This is perhaps the most naked and vile political opportunism I have ever witnessed in my adult life. It is amoral. It is compassionless. It is ruthless. He provided teleprompters for the audience, telling them when to clap. He made of a genuine tragedy a political farce.
No, I don’t like Obama.