The Obama Contradiction [Obama Speech Was "Contradiction At It's Heart"- Peggy Noonan]

Wall St. Journal ^ | January 29, 2010 | Peggy Noonan

[Steelfish]

The Obama Contradiction Washington is sick and broken—and it can solve all our problems.

PEGGY NOONAN

When you watch a president give a State of the Union Address on television, you're always watching three people: the president at the podium, and the vice president and House speaker on the rise behind him. As a TV shot it's awkward. The vice president and the speaker have been instructed by media professionals not to let their eyes do what they want to do, which is survey the doings in the chamber. Instead they must stare unwaveringly at the back of the president's head. This is so that they appear to be fascinated by what he's saying, as if he's so interesting that they can't take their eyes off him. It's also so that you, the viewer, don't become distracted by wondering whom they're looking at in the audience.

It's uncomfortable for them, and boring. You, as a member of the TV audience, get to watch the president. The speaker and the vice president get to think, "Huh, he's getting a little gray in the back." The reason Nancy Pelosi often seems a little dart-eyed in these circumstances is that she's always trying to get a look at the chamber when she thinks the camera isn't on her. Joe Biden seems happy to be the fascinated person with crinkly eyes and shining teeth. But for Mrs. Pelosi it's a challenge. This is her chamber, all her people are here, and she wants to be looking at John Boehner's face and Harry Reid's and see who's cheering and who's wearing what.

But the three-shot the other night was also the president's problem. It underscored that he gave the first year of his presidency to the Democrats of Congress, that they wrote the costly and.....

[HiTech RedNeck]

The great issue, this friendly critic added, is debt. The public knows this; Congress and the White House do not. "To me the Republicans are as rotten as the Democrats" in terms of spending. "Almost."

For goodness sake, Bummer and Co. have made George W. Bush look like Ebenezer Scrooge, a veritable penny pincher.

[screaminsunshine]

Too funny. They are trying their best to justify a complete incometant communinty agitating communist being elected to the Presidentcy.

[South40]

I read the entire article and there was not one mention of how horrific it was for viewers with HiDef to have to sit through that entire speech with Pelooser’s face on our widescreens. I’m still having nightmares.

[Terpfen]

Peggy Noonan is still an airhead, I see.

[nathanbedford]

As fashionable as it has lately become to beat up on Peggy Noonan, I think I will forgo the masochistic pleasure of that exercise and comment on her analysis of the president's speech on its own terms.

When Peggy Noonan analyzes the effectiveness of a president's speech she has the chops to get our attention because she's been there and done that and she has done it as well as a almost anyone. I think I think on the whole she has got this speech right. It was a meandering, themeless affair except for the unconscious theme, the inherent contradiction, which the combined art of the speechwriter and the forensic skill of the presenter could not wholly camouflage.

The contradiction: Washington is broken, lean on Washington. The contradiction is even deeper. Washington is broken but Obama himself is Washington. He is the titular and actual head of a one-party town with unrestrained majorities in Congress, control of the agencies, and the slobbering support of the media. If Washington is broken so is Obama's presidency. As we shall see, so is Obama.

That is why the speech was alternately defensive, combative, self pitying, hypocritical, lying and condescending. The speech was an attempt to hide the great truth that the Emperor has no clothes and his policies are failing.

I think Noonan also got it right with the anecdote from her Republican acquaintance. Obama is an ideologue and a narcissist. The narcissist has found the philosophy which feeds the insatiable need to play God. All his life his skin color and his forensic charm I've given him tools to fulfill his narcissism. His ideology gave him the vocabulary to ascend in the circles of power populated by leftists. Some time ago I tried to portray this in this reply:

"I think he is a narcissist who survives and prospers not by addressing problems but by manipulating people. Narcissists like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama are not stupid, they are wonderfully clever and exceedingly effective in reading their victims and manipulating them.

I think that Barack Obama has a worldview provided to him, posthumously, by Saul Alinsky which gives him a framework for analysis. In other words, Obama does not "analyze", rather he "sorts" and puts data into their appropriate slots provided by the philosophy of Saul Alinsky. He has learned a vocabulary which enables him to contrive a front of effectiveness, a seriousness of purpose and depth of character which is all a sham.

Think of Barack Obama as the professional coordinator at an Alinsky meeting. For those old enough, think of Barack Obama as the leader of an EST meeting of the 1970s. These experiences give him an eschatology, a vocabulary, a forensic ability to manipulate, and ego satisfaction. What was he doing as editor of the Harvard Law Review if he was not producing actual work? He was acting out as a community organizer with the shtick modified to fit a new venue. If one examines his career at every level the pattern is the same. As a constitutional law lecturer he produced no written work but he was evidently perfectly fit to the culture of the law school. In the Illinois Senate he voted present but ingratiated himself with the Daley machine. He barely passed go in the United States Senate but he knew the vocabulary and he passed muster with the likes of George Soros. In each instance, Barack Obama behaves as a narcissist, very shallow, producing no work product, but selling a great package.

If one takes away the Marxist belief system provided to him or reinforced in every step of his development from his mother to Frank Marshall Davis, to Columbia University, the Harvard Law school, William Ayres, to Reverend Wright, one is left with a truly hollow man. That is why Obama is such a dangerous ideologue. There is no Obama apart from a lifelong sham, a compensation for always being advanced beyond his competence because of his race and his ability to manipulate. He simply cannot stop the act and get off stage because there is nothing but the act.

Obama is a man without a soul and without a spiritual compass. His relationship to Reverend Wright reveals that he has no real spiritual quality to him for there could hardly be a more rank apostasy than in the church which he attended for 20 years. It has nothing to do with spirituality and everything to do with ego satisfaction. It is the opposite of the Judeo-Christian message.

Obama cannot abandon his radicalism because there is no other there there. He is a massive compensation system. His body is a life-support system for his narcissism and the narcissism is utterly dependent on the received wisdom from Saul Alinsky and the rest of them."

I think Peggy and her Republican friend got it right. But Obama will not be chastened by criticism or election setback, although he might be tactically diverted. Obama needs to be defeated in the polls not because it will put his mind right but because the checks and balances laid down in the Constitution will right the Republic and cure, if only temporarily, what is wrong with Washington. What is wrong with Obama will remain between him and Allah.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Now, now, Bummer has to have a soul. Which way it’s going is quite a different question.

[P.O.E.]

Whatever happened to Peggy Noonan? I find her vapid, wandering, and dithery these last few years.

[P.O.E.]

Whatever happened to Peggy Noonan? I find her vapid, wandering, and dithery these last few years.

[donna]

I think she got scared to death the day President Reagan’s body landed at Andrews and the Capital was evacuated because the plane carrying Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher was off course and created a scare by entering restricted airspace. She and her son literally ran for their lives and I don’t think her columns have been the same since.

[antceecee]

Peggy Noonan... one who would never muck about or with “Congress critters”.. what an elitist Beotch.

[Tolkien]

Her article is as vapid and Nobama's speech.

Drop dead boring. She didn't say anything.

[iopscusa]

NB, I know what you mean by ‘forgo the masochistic pleasure’ of commenting on Ms. Noonan’s analysis...the berating of PN is a guilty pleasure but you are spot on about the essence of BO! The bit of laughter from the R's @ the SOTU was the first trickle of an oncoming flood of derision that will engulf this husk of a man and most failed leader.

[rjohnb]

Imagine Peggy Noonan not knowing that ‘its’ does not have an apostrophe in this context!

[backhoe]

Whatever happened to Peggy Noonan? I find her vapid, wandering, and dithery these last few years.

I think she got tired of not being invited to The Kool Kidz cocktail parties up there.

I'm half facetious, half serious.

The old American Spectator used to have a "Strange New Respect" award for conservatives who went to Washington and "grew" in the eyes of the Left, less conservative and more like them.

It's an ugly thing, at best- she used to be an insightful writer.

[Stepan12]

Peggy Noonan is a contradiction.

A former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan who sang hosannas for the "Messiah"?

From clear thinking Capitalism to fuzzy headed Bolshevism? Now that is a contradiction. Or maybe it proves that Darwin is wrong.

[Wpin]

incredible analysis nathanbedford! Thanks, it helps put things into perspective more readily.

[Arthur McGowan]

The media professionals must have advised Nancy Pelosi, Don’t let your eyes wander back and forth, and use your tongue to readust your dentures.

[Rocky]

Excellent analysis!

The article says: We need a real adult in the White House because we don't have adults in the Congress.

But, as you say, that won't happen by replacing a bunch of congress critters. However, sweeping Democrats and RINOs out of Congress will help to restrain the White House and the Egotist in Chief.

[RU88]

The only way to tackle the long term systemic debt problems that America is experiencing, and will continue to experience, will be through the reform of the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs. These three programs are increasingly gobbling up larger and larger percentages of the federal budget. Both Social Security and Medicare are sitting on demographic time bombs. Every politician, both Republican and Democrat know this to be true. The problem I see is that no one has the political will to change this head long trajectory to fiscal disaster. All of these politicians realize that by taking the proper course of action is akin to political suicide. Unless we start to elect individuals who will take principal-ed, not political stands, it not a question of it, but when our great Republic will face it's day of reckoning.