Main Street U.S.A.: Trials and the Celebrity-in-Chief

They're all over him -- swarms, flocks, flights of critics taking apart President Obama: his style, his motives, his modus operandi, assuming he has one.

Charles Krauthammer, in a dead-on column, called him "Obama the Mortal." Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal, sought to close the deal: "Obama has grown boring … He always has the same stance. There is no humor or humility in it … He is cold …" Cries of alarm escaped the mouth of Time Magazine's Joe Klein: "He has to lead, clearly and decisively, starting now." How's he going to restore his sagging popularity and procure enactment of health care reform?

Well, we'll see. There's a lot more out there to look at, even so. What we see, when we really look hard, are the consequences of celebrity politics. In naming Obama their chief magistrate, American voters handed over their credit cards for a pig in a poke -- as, by the way, they had been warned along the way to avoid doing. They no more knew how Obama would perform, than they knew why real estate prices were collapsing.

They knew he wasn't George W. Bush, and that was a good start. They thought they sensed even more -- wit, intellectual brilliance, the ability to coax birds out of trees (and, inferentially, to coax votes out of hard-headed congressional bulls). He would bring us together as one people despite persistent differences over, just to name one thing, racial relationships. He would challenge us, prod us, heal us, change us.

We swooned dead away. What a guy! The media said so with stale regularity. Wasn't it true? If not, why did they keep saying it? Meanwhile the crowds swarmed around, loving what they saw.

This poker in a poke -- to borrow E. B. White's celebrated phrase -- was obviously "some pig." He had no political track record to speak of. He'd never met a payroll, never passed an important bill, never administered anything larger than a senatorial office. Still, couldn't the guy speak? Yes, he could, even when you count reading a teleprompter as speaking. He was new, he was different, the media loved him, the Democrats (including Ted Kennedy) came to concur, and, well, there was no end to it.

He was a celeb: in some sense the political equivalent of Brad and Angelina and Leo and Kate and Jon and Jessica and Simon and … and … you get it. Far more intelligent, of course -- how many aren't? Maybe nicer as well. Still, a celeb -- new and hot and mysterious. And we bit.

You could tell at the Democratic National Convention what was afoot. That Hollywood set the party constructed for him -- the Temple of Obama, Republicans called it. The Republicans, who were about to nominate an old warhorse as opposed to a young colt, knew what was coming at them and cannily inserted Sarah Palin into the proceedings. But the financial collapses x-ed out that gambit.

Such is electoral politics in the age of Omnipresent Media. A candidate has to wow 'em -- make 'em laugh, hope, cry, dream. Alas for the process, the candidate, once chosen, has to have some idea of what he's doing. We can likely all agree that Barack Obama had and has some idea as to what he would like to do. Or is it safer to say "some vision"?

Obama has failed, fairly dismally so far, to match interior vision with exterior reality. How do we come up with an extra trillion dollars to finance a federal health care takeover, and why are we even talking about it with deficits soaring? And how do you convince 300 million people in a matter of months that the health care system that most find acceptable is a ruin and wreck in need of replacement? Those would be just a few of the questions crying out for answers, which our celebrity-in-chief may or may not bring us in coming days.

A McCain voter feels a confession coming on: an odd but necessary one. The confession is that he feels more than a little sorry for Barack Obama, a president seemingly in over his head at a moment of exquisite need for a pro, a vet, a warhorse if you will.

"Wasn't it true? If not, why did they keep saying it? "

Stockholm Syndrome. If you study how cults work, you find very neurotic people with low self-esteem, post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety, damaged egos, troubled childhoods, broken relationships, employment and financial problems, hopelessness, loneliness, confusion, etc., drawn to a charismatic leader they project fantasies into, believing he will solve all of their problems. A con artist becomes a messiah. Ted Kennedy becomes a saint. Obama becomes god.

The mental state the Dems were in after eight years of Bush-Cheney made them more vulnerable to this, but you have to ask why so MANY people in the country, many of them secular liberals, got caught up in the cult and religious frenzy of the Obama as messiah movement. It's something deeper and more seriously wrong in American society and culture going on here. Why did he seem messianic and god-like to them, but not to most conservatives who saw through the con artist act and utopianism? We were all writing what Krauthammer has said about him being merely mortal last summer.

"Obama has failed, fairly dismally so far, to match interior vision with exterior reality."

How liberals and the more hysterical Obama followers respond to this will be interesting to watch and study. Noonan has made the correction. Can Chris Matthews be far behind??? He's the canary in the coal mine for Obama's imploding messiah status. Now that Obama's mojo pheromone cologne has worn off, they may wake up and realize it was all just a dream.

Recent events have triggered a very public, citizen, involvement in a battle of ideas which has been going on for decades! The problem is that, until now, most Americans went about their business and ignored it.

Today, they are engaged and beginning the learn the difference between two conflicting ideas about freedom and coercive government control. America's Founders identified the conflicting ideas as liberty versus tyranny. By Lincoln's time, he had a clear understanding of it and said this: "The world has never had a good definition of the word 'liberty.' And the American people just now are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not mean the same thing . . . . The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act . . . . Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty."

But Lincoln could distinguish between real liberty and a counterfeit idea. Of the American idea, Lincoln declared:

"Most governments have been based practically, on the denial of the rights of men. Ours began by affirming those rights . . . . [These opposing ideas] are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle . . . . It [denial of individual Creator-endowed rights] is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. . . it is the same tyrannical principle."

Of the Founding principle, Lincoln said: ". . . it is no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. . . .The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society . . . And yet, they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. . . All honor to Jefferson - to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce in a . . . revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers [initiators of threatening change] of reappearing tyranny and oppression."

Yes, the battle of ideas is re-engaged in America today, in a manner not seen for decades.

American citizens are utilizing the new technologies that make possible close examination of the Founders' ideas in many collections online such as those at Liberty USA Foundation, WallBuilders, and in new books, such as Mark Levin's "Liberty and Tyranny." They are returning to the Founders' own explanation of their Constitution in THE FEDERALIST and to 1987's Bicentennial Year volumes such as "Our Ageless Constitution." See

Just as in Lincoln's day, those who try to fool the people into believing their definition of liberty is authentic are being exposed for the charlatans they are--mere men who wish to gain power over the lives of millions.

They are being exposed by the "self-evident truths" "embalmed" in that revolutionary document described by Lincoln.

They can read the Founders' intent that ours is not a government's Constitution to limit people. Rather, it is "We, the People's" Constitution to be used, according to Jefferson, to "bind them (government) down by the chains of the Constitution."

What we are seeing now is a battle between forces who have one charismatic, but mere mortal Krauthammer, man out there carrying the water for changing that concept in the minds of citizens who, they thought, had been dumbed down by decades of neglect and censorship of the ideas of liberty.

Providence may have outwitted them by allowing the development of technologies that make the Founders' ideas a powerful tool in the new battle.

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