Obama worship syndrome

When George W. Bush was president of the United States, many of the left fell prey to what columnist Charles Krauthammer called “Bush Derangement Syndrome”: “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.” With Bush out of office, BDS has waned somewhat.

Unfortunately, it has been replaced by a converse condition, just as grave and dangerous to the mental stability of its victims: “Obama Worship Syndrome.” Primarily affecting low-information voters and members of the mainstream media, Obama Worship Syndrome attributes impossible capabilities to Obama’s political opponents, finds excuses for every Obama failure in everyone around him and praises the president as the finest politician — nay, human being — of our time.

On Monday evening, for example, CNN’s Piers Morgan considered whether New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie could run for president as an overweight man. Morgan, with stars in his eyes, asked crisis-management expert Judy Smith, “After the perfect Barack Obama — who’s a perfect physical specimen to many people’s eyes — does it matter?” After toweling himself off, Morgan then asked whether Americans could even stomach “a regular kind of guy who likes cheeseburgers and beer, but appears to be a straight talker?”

Morgan’s OWS pales in comparison to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who infamously declared that Obama made his leg tingle. But that’s just the first symptom of Matthews’ OWS: He’s also declared Obama “the perfect father, the perfect husband, the perfect American,” explaining that Obama has “never done anything wrong in his life, legally, ethically, whatever”; he’s blamed the sun for Obama’s pathetic June 2013 speech in Berlin (it glared off his teleprompter, Matthews insisted); and he’s compared Obama to Henry V among others.

Nathan Bedford's first Maxim of American politics: All politics in America is not local but ultimately racial.

Ben Shapiro is a sound conservative, an Orthodox Jew who always wears a yarmulke, and an up-and-comer. However, when the George W. Bush syndrome was the order of the day young Ben was a graduate student and when Barack Obama swept into office riding a wave of Obama Worship Syndrome, Ben was still in law school. At these times we on FreeRepublic were pointing out these truths, albeit with different labels and different descriptions but with the same undoubted meanings.

But the author does get us to think about two sides of this coin: heads Democrats win because their man is deified by the media and, tails, Republicans lose because their man is demonized. When the Democrat in office is placed above reproach or even criticism, the system simply does not work.

We have had a few occasions in our nation's history when our chief executive was placed above criticism. Perhaps Washington, comparatively speaking, enjoyed this privilege during his first term and for large part of his second term. But we know that even great presidents like Abraham Lincoln were freely vilified in deeply personal terms during their incumbency. Some presidents were assassinated and others were the objects of assassination attempts-probably the most extreme example of criticism.

John F. Kennedy, a victim of assassination, enjoyed for a time the immunity not enjoyed by any president since Washington but Kennedy was placed on the pedestal only posthumously in the wake of his assassination. Brack Obama for most of his first term and, critically, during two election campaigns has been largely elevated above criticism by the mainstream media. According to Monica Crowley, the media collaborated and connived daily in actual conspiracies to protect Brack Obama's campaign in 2007 and 2008.

Why has Obama enjoyed such privileges and immunities granted no president except our greatest? The answer is self-evident: Brack Obama claims African-American blood and his election was universally regarded as historic because he was the first black president in America. His election stands for the vindication of the civil rights movement and a national atonement for America's original sin of slavery and segregation which was papered over in the Declaration of Independence and institutionalized in the Constitution. This sin was attempted to be redeemed by the Civil War and Reconstruction, but the effort was abandoned by 1876 when a deal to put Rutherford B Hayes in the White House ended the occupation of the remaining three southern states by Yankee troops and Jim Crow became the norm in the South and in much of the North.

As a new baby boomer generation media abandoned its Damon Runyon image and took on the more rounded edges of the university and postgraduate journalism education in places like Columbia, the media drew further and further away from a populist culture to an elitist culture, a culture reflecting the values of the faculty lounge. Barack Obama was a man of the faculty lounge, a black man who was a professor (or sort of a professor) a Columbia and Harvard graduate, president of the Law Review, a black man who spoke like a white man rather than like Jesse Jackson, in short, he was the physical embodiment of the civil rights movement and the repository of all the values concerning the centuries-old battle in America for racial justice. All of this not for any achievements he had personally accomplished but for what he represented and what he represented was all to be seen in his skin color and in his style of elocution.

While young Ben Shapiro was gaining honors in the aeries of our ivory towers, we crusty old conservatives on FreeRepublic were shouting our Jeremiahs that Brack Obama was not just an empty suit but a crypto communist, a Manchurian Marxist, a radical who should be feared. Barack Obama ran as an empty suit confident that the liberal media would fill that hollow place with the hopes, dreams and cultural values that had been instilled into them since kindergarten. He knew that his communism would not be exposed, indeed, the more he characterized himself with specifics the less he would appeal but the more he clung to empty generalities like "hope" the more the media would create illusions.

There is a kind of media which sets the American culture. It's not talk radio, rather it is that media directed toward females. It is The Today Show, it was Oprah Winfrey, it is women's magazines with their sexist but profoundly leftist worldview, it is the oh-so-reasonable voice of National Public Radio that sets the culture and it is culture which trumps politics. Barack Obama was a cultural phenomenon with political symptoms. We conservatives kept treating the symptoms while the patient who was dying of the disease hardly knew we were in the room. Nothing demonstrates our irrelevance to that which moves the culture better than the stunning results of the 2012 election. As a man, those results are incomprehensible to me. But to a woman like Peggy Noonan the elections of Barack Obama make perfect sense. Dear, dear Peggy who made her reputation flacking her association with Ronald Reagan voted for Barack Obama. Unicorns and lollipops and just over the rainbow we will have bipartisanship and racial harmony. If you confront these dewy eyed females today and tell them that that what they got was a communist they will become uneasy and wonder if you are dangerous or merely eccentric as they edge away.

Yes there is an Obama Worship Syndrome which is still real but it is waning. The problem for conservatives is to understand the culture, to understand how to affect the culture and to anticipate where the next battle will be played and by what rules. The next battle will not be like the last, just as Obama's syndrome was not like Bill Clinton's or Al Gore's. The weapons deployed will certainly be different and it is no particular insight to observe that Republicans have shown themselves to be wholly inept across the cyber battlefield of social media. Like the Germans who put together all the elements of warfare into a blitzkrieg and with often inferior forces overwhelmed numerically and materially superior enemies, so the Democrats, aided by virtually every institution in America from academia through media to the bureaucracy of government itself, have integrated all the techniques of modern electioneering while the Republicans, mostly aging male elitists, scratch their heads after every election loss and wonder why the people will not listen to reason.

Reason, as was observed by Mae West, had "nothing to do" with the election of The Empty Suit. Barack Obama was elected because of race. Barack Obama enjoyed a long honeymoon from well-deserved criticism because of his race. Even to this day the media is not free of its bias on behalf of Barack Obama not just for his race, of course, but for his progressivism. That will always be so in one way or another, the Republicans will always be wringing their hands, cutting deals with the Democrats as with this recent budget deal fashioned by Paul Ryan, selling out conservatism, intimidated by the media and by Democrats, losing elections, and losing us our liberty. So the Republican Party is on the cusp of a death spiral in which its own ineptness breeds cowardice as election losses pile up, media criticism mounts, and defections in ranks occur. There is nothing wrong with the conservative message, the problem is that we are applying reason to an emotional ritual. I have picked on women for their vulnerability to the soap operas of politics but men are vulnerable as well. We cannot win at politics in two and four year cycles when we lose the culture every day.

Those who would point out that all politics in America is not exclusively about race and would include class and gender as well as religion etc. are quite right but what we are both saying is that it is about culture and there are a few levers shifting that culture. Democrats, like Archimedes, know far better than we where to stand and how to press.

I disagree.

To point out that Obama would not have had a chance to be elected if he were a black conservative instead of a black progressive, although quite true, does not prove the point that he was not elected primarily because of his race but rather because of his progressivism.

Yes, it was necessary for him to qualify as a leftist as well as black but his excessive leftism was left largely unexposed because it was taboo and it was taboo because Obama was shielded by his race. More, Obama was advanced past white, female Hillary Clinton of roughly equal or seemingly equal progressive inclinations who was arguably more qualified.

Obama was almost without credentials for the office as a rookie senator still wet behind very prominent ears. He almost certainly would not have attained his meteoric trajectory if he were white, whether leftist or conservative. White leftists were thick on the ground in 2008 but the Democrats passed up all others including Hillary and went for the inexperienced black candidate.

We are talking about the impact of the media on the outcome of the election and the media narrative was profoundly affected by Obama's color, even more than Hillary's genitalia. In fact, Hillary, the punitive first female president, was quite literally jilted for the first African-American president.

To repeat, Obama's extreme, radical leftism would normally have been a handicap in the general election as it had proved for so many Democrat wannabes who preceded him but Obama's skin color shielded him from exposure. By way of example, I cite the Reverend Wright episode.

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