Posted on 09/04/2009 12:48:09 PM PDT by SpareChange
Getting It: My Two Cents on Who’s Missing the Point
By David J. Aland 4 September 2009
The White House just doesn’t get it as to why so many Americans just don’t get it. With the August Congressional recess turning the health care debate from merely muddy to toxic sludge, the President is now preparing to take his message – any message – to anyone he can get to listen. Whether in front of joint sessions of Congress or millions of school kids, the President is desperate to get someone to listen in the hopes that they will get it – and that’s what the White House just doesn’t get: it’s not the hearing that is the problem, it’s the message.
By now, Americans are getting wise to the bait-and-switch leitmotif of this Administration: promises of economic responsibility have resulted in dizzying debts; promises of transparency are belied by bands of publicly unaccountable “czars” and advisors; promises of accountability ignore the highjinks of Geithner, Murtha, Rangel, and Dodd; promises of “moving forward” see us moving backwards to second-guess or prosecute CIA operatives; promises of bipartisanship are addressed by partisan hat-tricks with unread legislation. The candidate who campaigned on being a new kind of politician is playing all the old political games (with a distinct tang of Chicago) – is it any wonder that a growing number of Americans don’t trust him or his team?
But the distrust goes beyond the mere fact that what the President promises and what he delivers are separate concepts. The message itself is increasingly divorced from reality. Medicare is failing and nearly bankrupt, but held up as an example of how health care should work? The technocrats that have mismanaged education, energy resources, the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Amtrak, FEMA, and the risible “Cash for Clunkers” (aka “Stiff the Dealers”) program are now the people Americans should trust to manage things as vast as the medical, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries? When key Administration figures can’t even manage to accurately compute their own taxes, how are Americans supposed to trust those people to manage life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Even worse than political prestidigitation and unreality, this Administration continues to demonstrate a disturbing lack of discipline. For a political organization that is, by all accounts, very tightly controlled, far too many verbal and procedural gaffes come out of this White House. There are appointees with financial issues, police entanglements, and public records of statements and writings that many Americans find disturbing on subjects as varied as eugenics, race, socialism, and even 9/11. Press Secretary Gibbs has had to “clarify” enough infelicitous turns of phrase by the President that his damage control has become as boring as the correction section of the newspaper. The Administration has backpedaled from Cabinet member assertions, advice sent to schools, and even foreign policy positions.
Foreign policy, for that matter, is in tatters. It is not clear to anyone that anyone is in charge of American foreign policy. The Secretary of State seems to pursue an incoherent agenda, but bristle like Barbara Boxer at any suggestion that she is not in charge. Unable to convince the Russians to tone down the rhetoric, unable to convince the EU or NATO to support military objectives, unable (or unwilling) to pursue human rights issues anywhere, it comes as no surprise that this Administration couldn’t even convince Scotland not to release a mass murderer and had to send a former President to lend prestige to a tin-pot dictator.
This is what the White House doesn’t get, then: it’s not the audience, it’s the message – and all the sniffing indignation at the supposed lumpen refusal of Americans to “get” the message will not change the fact that the message is the problem. All of the personality cult stuff aside, the public is growing distrustful of bait-and-switch tactics, of assurances that are disassociated with reality, of sincerely-stated insincerity, of bumbling and missing the mark. It should come as no surprise that Obama’s approval rating continues to plunge, and that his disapproval rating has exceeded his approval.
Soaring rhetoric, schoolhouse exhortations, and photo-ops will not change the situation – only the hard work of rational governance that is responsive to (and not dismissive of) the American people. In the end, the public rarely embraces an imposed agenda, no matter how prettily it may be packaged.
As the Washington Post slogan has it: If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. Got that?
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David J. Aland is a retired Naval Officer with a graduate degree in National Security Affairs from the U. S. Naval War College.
What “We the People” get is we know a Marxist coup when we see it.
UP YOURS, HUSSIEN!!
Excellent description..Bait and switch. The list is long for this administration.
They should throw aside their agenda and try something new for them, like, oh, I don’t know, FREEDOM!
We don’t do collectivism!
This Fuhrer Rede to the children is a prime example: it is the next step in creating a cult of personality which can override normal limits of governence; but to work, it has to rest on a foundation of accomplishment.
That foundation was supposed to be the takeover of the financial industry; the energy tax; centralized health care control; seizure of the auto industry; foreign policy which generated foreign support for the domestic agenda.
Each step has failed in its intended purpose, but the movement lurches on, like a zombie juggernaut. This can mean only one thing: in the end it will be based on the threat and use of force, whether the public wants it or not.
Endgame:
US gov’t might not have the guts to follow through on these invetigations (trials) but I can easily see the AG quitely pass the information to the World Court, Middle East or European countries. Foreign trials will commence and the defendants will be tried in absentia. As a result, the Obama administration will have “plausible deniability”.
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