Crimes Against Liberty (4 page)

Indeed, it often seems that for our president, American policy, and even American history, is not about the United States, but about
him
personally. At the Summit of the Americas, Obama sat through a 50-minute harangue against the United States by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, who eviscerated the United States for a century of “terroristic” aggression in Central America. When it was Obama’s turn, he did not defend the United States, but made himself the issue: “I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.”
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During the contentious debate over Obama’s unrelenting push for socialized medicine, many Democratic congressmen were running scared, fearing a 1994-style electoral thrashing. The White House, however, saw it much differently. Democratic congressman Marion Berry noted incredulously, “They just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all. They just keep telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’”
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Obama’s numerous self-references soon became legendary. According to Kevin Hall of the
Des Moines Conservative Examiner
, Obama referred to himself 114 times in his first State of the Union. He said “I” ninety-six times, and used “my” or “me” eighteen times.
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By September 23, 2009, FOX News reported Obama had given forty-one speeches so far that year, referring to himself 1,198 times.
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At his West Point speech in December 2009 (where soldiers were asked before he spoke to show enthusiasm), he referred to himself forty-four times.
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In a speech in Ohio on jobs on January 22, 2010, Obama referred to himself no fewer than 132 times and, in the same speech, had the unwittingly humorous audacity to proclaim, “This is not about me.”
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“IT’S NOT ABOUT ME”

That phrase, “This is not about me,” cropped up in many of Obama’s speeches, signaling that whatever “this” is, it’s precisely about him—his ego, his ideology, his agenda, his legacy, or his unbending ambition to have his way. In his mind, it seems, everything is always about him, no matter how much he protests otherwise. The rhetorical device, “It’s not about me,” is a long established pattern in which he self-servingly pretends to project an air of humility to leave the impression that he is modest about accomplishing great things—thereby shamelessly seeking credit both for his modesty and his greatness. He used a variation of this theme at a February 2010 meeting with Senate Democrats, telling them, “It is constantly important to remind myself why I got into this business in the first place; why I’m willing to be away from my family for big stretches at a time. . . . You don’t get in this for the fame. You don’t get in it for the title.”
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Yes, Obama is always about a cause bigger than himself—so big that it’s worth his enormous sacrifices.

Likewise, on February 15, 1990, after becoming the first black president of the
Harvard Law Review
, Obama proclaimed, “I realized my election was not about me, but it was about us, about what we could do and what we could accomplish.”
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On November 2, 2004, when he visited the campus of the University of Illinois during his U.S. Senate campaign, he declared, “Ultimately, this election is not about me. . . . It’s about the willingness of our citizens to get engaged and get involved.”
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On December 11, 2006, in New Hampshire, he again insisted, “It’s not about me.” (But an NPR reporter covering the event remarked, “It really is all about him.”)
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On December 10, 2007, Obama argued, “This campaign is not about me; it is about the hundreds of volunteers . . . in Rhode Island . . . and the millions of people across the country who want change we can believe in.”
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On December 13, 2007, he said during a Democratic presidential debate, “I want to remind myself constantly that this is not about me, what I’m doing today.”
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(Apparently, he feels the need to keep reminding
us
as well.) And in his acceptance speech in August 2008, he said, “This election has never been about me; it’s about you.”
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President-elect Obama issued a pre-inauguration video statement in which he said, “This election is not about me. It’s about all of us.”
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On a visit to the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. in July 2009, responding to Senator Jim DeMint’s comment that ObamaCare could be his “Waterloo,” Obama pleaded, “This isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking America’s families, breaking America’s businesses, and breaking America’s economy.”
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But Obama’s obsessive drive to nationalize healthcare has really been all about him, and the American people have issued a clear referendum on his healthcare scheme and his entire agenda through their consistent rejection of Democratic candidates. This trend culminated in the takeover of Senator Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat by Republican Scott Brown, whose opposition to ObamaCare was a core part of his campaign. Yet Obama continues to tell us—either as a brazen practitioner of Orwellian deception or as a poster-child for political tone-deafness (the latter being quite unlikely)—“I won’t stop fighting for you.”
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If he were truly fighting for the people, however, he wouldn’t have mocked the tea partiers or closed his own counterfeit public forums on healthcare to all but union and other special interest supporters of ObamaCare. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs confessed that Obama is “quite comfortable” with being a one-term president if that’s the consequence of passing his agenda.
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As journalist Kyle-Anne Shiver noted, “What we have here in America today is a real-life jump-the-shark drama, starring a super-narcissistic president so desperate to create his own vainglorious legacy that he is willing to destroy his own political party and do enduring damage to his country in pursuit of his selfish ends.”
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And while Obama is a leftist ideologue of the first order whose determination to socialize medicine knows no bounds, there is abundant proof his ego is motivating him just as strongly as his ideology. Alabama congressman Parker Griffith, who switched from Democrat to Republican, spoke to Obama’s personal investment in ObamaCare. “You have personalities who have bet the farm, bet their reputations, on shoving a health care bill through the Congress. It’s no longer about health care reform. It’s all about ego now. The president’s ego. Nancy Pelosi’s ego. This is about saving face, and it has very little to do with what’s good for the American people.”
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Griffith is convinced the Democratic leadership is so driven with this issue that they would accept losing Democratic control of the House. “This is a trophy for the speaker, it’s a trophy for the several committee chairs, and it’s a trophy for the president.”
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“THE BURDEN OF BEING SO BRIGHT”

Candidate Obama overtly cultivated a messianic image, from the grandiose pomp accompanying his campaign speech in Berlin to the Greek columns that adorned his acceptance speech at Chicago’s Invesco Field. His advisers fully bought into the facade, especially to the idea that Obama possessed a superior intellect—so far above the masses that it was difficult to convey his ideas in terms simple enough for the people to understand. At a forum at the Kennedy School of Government, one participant suggested to Obama’s adviser and long-time confidant, Valerie Jarrett, that Obama’s ideas were so complex that the administration should consider writing simple booklets to explain them to ordinary people (including tea partiers), just like the computer industry originally wrote
DOS For Dummies
. Jarrett said it was an excellent idea. “Everyone understood hope and change” because “they were simple . . . part of our challenge is to find a very simple way of communicating.... When I first got here people kept talking about ‘cloture’ and ‘reconciliation’ and ‘people don’t know what that’s talking about.’” Then it really got thick as Jarrett proclaimed, “There’s nobody more self-critical than President Obama. Part of the burden of being so bright is that he sees his error immediately.”
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Similarly, during the healthcare debates, Obama’s chief adviser David Axelrod reinforced the administration’s low estimation of its hapless subjects. On NBC’s
Meet The Press
, Axelrod said, “The one thing I am sure of is that the American people don’t know or care much about the sequencing of parliamentary procedures.”
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Clearly, Axelrod believes Americans don’t have the sophistication to understand constitutional or legislative principles or the consequences to their liberty when those principles are violated.

The liberal media enthusiastically encouraged Obama’s narcissistic sense of superiority over the American people. HBO’s Bill Maher complained Americans “are not bright enough to really understand the issues. But like an animal they can sort of sense strength and weakness. They can smell it on you.”
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Slate’s
Jacob Weisberg lamented, “The biggest culprit in our current predicament” is “the childishness, ignorance and growing incoherence of the public at large.”
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Time’s
Joe Klein, in his blog post “Too Dumb to Thrive,” made this observation about America’s opposition to Obama’s stimulus package: “This is yet further evidence that Americans are flagrantly ill-informed . . . and, for those watching FOX News, misinformed. It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens. It is impossible to be a citizen if you don’t make an effort to understand the most basic activities of your government. It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you’re a nation of dodos.”
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Blogger Matthew Yglesias, after saying Klein’s comments were “way too harsh,” essentially conceded his point, claiming, “Most people don’t know a lot of macroeconomic theory. . . . The fact of the matter, however, is that most people don’t know much about most things.”
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“HE’S SORT OF GOD”

Media coverage of Obama’s presidential campaign was so fawning that Obama’s opponent, John McCain, put together an ad mocking the media’s “Obama Love”—which was quite a statement coming from a previous darling of the press who was unceremoniously dumped once he challenged the media’s Chosen One.

In addition to showing various media sycophants drooling over Obama, the video included a short video clip of a female journalist, acting like a school girl with a crush, urging a Secret Service agent to sit down in a seat on the airplane so the press could ogle Obama as he spoke on the phone.
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In fact, Obama’s sexiness became a popular topic among the press.
Washingtonian
magazine graced the cover of its May 2009 issue with a “pec-tacular” shirtless picture of Obama strutting on the beach. Garrett Graff, editor-at-large of the magazine, told
ABC News
that with the Obamas came a “celebrity aspect that has brought energy to the city and the attention of the paparazzi. The Obamas are the center of attention here and the whole world is looking to Washington now in a way we haven’t seen in years.” He cooed, “It’s a real golden age of Washington.”
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Indeed, the media’s servile coverage of Obama sometimes crossed the line into outright reverence. HBO producer Ed Norton told
Good Morning America
co-host Diane Sawyer that he was impressed with the tranquil “no-drama Obama. . . . And in a weird way, when you look behind the curtain with that team, they are really zen. It’s amazing how zen they are.”
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Newsweek
editor Evan Thomas infamously told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, “Reagan was all about America . . . Obama is—we are above that now. We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial. We stand for something. I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above the world, he’s sort of God.”
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Thomas was preaching to the choir, as Matthews became well known for proclaiming that an Obama speech sent a “thrill” up his leg. It’s less well known that he followed up that statement with an even greater expression of devotion: “The Biblical term for it,” gushed Matthews, “since we’re in a Biblical era, is deliverance. We’re being picked up and moved to where we have to be.” On another occasion Matthews declared Obama is “sort of a gift from the world to us in so many ways.”
NBC News
’ Lee Cowan said it was “almost hard to remain objective, because it’s infectious. . . . It’s not cool if you haven’t seen Barack Obama in person.” The
New Republic
saw fit to print a cover with Obama’s picture reading, “Why You Love Him.”