Free Republic

Obama's aura is no longer adored. He's become a ghoulish specter, an incarnation of dread that haunts our prospects for progress, infects our anxiety when we balance our checkbooks, clouds our ideal of the future. He's the antithesis of everything that America stands for: freedom, rugged individualism, (genuine, not his fake and condescending) optimism, truth, compassion, and the unquenchable pursuit of liberty. His spray-on luster has worn off to reveal at the core what he really is: the quintessential anti-American. And even liberals don't want to say his name.

That's the Obama enigma: boldness wrapped in caution rooted in an ambivalent relationship to the status quo. This is why Obama will, by turns, challenge not only his entrenched adversaries but also his natural allies.

A Somali arrives in Minneapolis as a new immigrant to the United States. He stops the first person he sees walking down the street and says, "Thank you Mr. American for letting me in this country, giving me housing, food stamps, free medical care, and free education!" The passerby says, "You are mistaken, I am Mexican." The man goes on and encounters another passerby. "Thank you for having such a beautiful country here in America!" The person says, "I not American, I Vietnamese." The new arrival walks further, and the next person he sees, he stops, shakes his hand and...