Before the election, while I was listening to a Victor Davis Hanson interview on a podcast of the Hugh Hewitt show, one thing that the esteemed historian said stuck with me and I have repeated it to a number of people since. He talked about the danger of electing a President with Barack Obama’s unique combination of far-reaching hubris and genuine naivete. That worried me then and even contributed to leaving me in a little bit of a state of denial. I had a hard time believing that my fellow Americans would put such a uniquely unqualified and untested individual in the White House. I remain a little bit stunned…. but I am rambling again. This is about VDH’s article today at The Corner on National Review.
Professor Hanson argues that we are beginning to see the results of the media putting The One up on a pedestal during the election rather than doing their jobs:
Some of us have been warning that it was not healthy for the U.S. media to have deified rather than questioned Obama, especially given that they tore apart Bush, ridiculed Palin, and caricatured Hillary. And now we can see the results of their two years of advocacy rather than scrutiny.
We are quite literally after two weeks teetering on an Obama implosion—and with no Dick Morris to bail him out—brought on by messianic delusions of grandeur, hubris, and a strange naivete that soaring rhetoric and a multiracial profile can add requisite cover to good old-fashioned Chicago politicking.
He uses as examples the scandal-ridden cabinet appointments, the horrible so-called stimulus package which he describes as “simply a way to go into debt for a generation to shower Democratic constinuencies with cash”, and other early problems including his slowness to dismantle the Bush anti-terror infrastructure:
Fourth, there was the campaign rhetoric of Bush shredding the Constitution—FISA, Guantanamo, Patriot Act, Iraq, renditions, etc.—followed by “all that for now stays the same” inasmuch as we haven’t ben hit in over seven years and can’t risk another attack.
If Obama knows one thing it is this: if he proceeds with the Daily Kos roadmap for returning to a September 10th mindset, and we are hit again, he is toast. Now that he gets the daily briefings even he has to admit to himself what a naive tool he was during the election, filled with know-nothing rhetoric that got the Democrat Underground all a-twitter.
I remember Clinton coming into office in 93, the ‘hippies’ coming into town, and how they seemed a little too drunk with power to restrain themselves. The result of tax increases and gays in the military and other liberal actions was Newt Gingrich and his GOP revolution (which was very good for our country, it forced Clinton to govern as a centrist). At first I really thought that Obama would be much slicker than Clinton was in his bumbling first months, but I think that even I have overestimated him. VDH predicts huge results:
At home, Obama is becoming laughable and laying the groundwork for the greatest conservative populist reaction since the Reagan Revolution.
We shall see about that one. But Hanson labels the Obama start a “disaster”:
This is quite serious. I can’t recall a similarly disastrous start in a half-century (far worse than Bill Clinton’s initial slips). Obama immediately must lower the hope-and-change rhetoric, ignore Reid/Pelosi, drop the therapy, and accept the tragic view that the world abroad is not misunderstood but quite dangerous. And he must listen on foreign policy to his National Security Advisor, Billary, and Sec. of Defense. If he doesn’t quit the messianic style and perpetual campaign mode, and begin humbly governing, then he will devolve into Carterism—angry that the once-fawning press betrayed him while we the people, due to our American malaise, are to blame.
Read the whole article here at The Corner on National Review.
In case VDH is new to any readers I have to give him a well deserved plug. Victor Davis Hanson is one of the sharpest historians out there and has real depth and an ability to put current events into perspective, often drawing analogies to ancient history. Read every article that you can find from him, he writes for Pajamas Media and has his own site as well. I have read almost all of his books and recommend them all. The Soul Of Battle was particularly good.
from the foothills 