Barack Obama - Another Failed Presidency: Obama Following the Dreams of his father

Geoffrey P. Hunt wrote the following article for American Thinker in August 2009. As bad as it looked to Hunt at that time, Obama's presidency has been diminished extraordinarily and astoundingly, but not surprisingly, since the date of publication.

Hunt refers to Obama as a "small president," and he points out that Obama has no American narrative that we can identify with, no "command of history" to "reveal" the "authenticity at the core" of his personality - nothing that "resonates in an "endearing way" with Americans. This is a different look at the Obama aura that rushed him into the White House, and unleashed his decidedly un-American dreams (and those of his father as well) onto the Nation.

The following are selected portions from Hunt's Another Failed Presidency: (American Thinker added this note to Hunt's article: [editor's note: The author is not the not the same person as Geoffrey P Hunt, who works at the Institute for Scientific Analysis as a senior research scientist.]

Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson.

In the modern era, we've seen several failed presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed presidents have one strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon, indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China....

But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big.  Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in  the Wall Street Journal, put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard, says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.

But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage. This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?

No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us.  He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us. All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don't align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, Reagan.

But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, is historically illiterate, and woefully small minded for the size of the task-- all contributory of course.  It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience. 

In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn't give me enough time; if only I'd had a second term, I could have offended you too."

Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that. 

Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them. The coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps rolling along.

The authenticity at the core of Obama's personality is described in the President's own words in his book Dreams From My Father. It is no wonder we do not connect with a man who said he tried to shape himself into "the high blown ideals" of his hard-drinking, polygamist, womanizing, communist father. Obama admits that he had something to prove to his father, because the elder Obama was a political organizer - and so the story of Obama the Younger began. In the East African Journal, Barack the Elder attacked all economic proposals of all pro-Western interests in the area. He wanted the communal ownership of land, and he advocated for the forced confiscation of privately controlled land. He wanted the nationalization of European and Asian-owned properties, including hotels. He wanted these enterprises handed over to the Black population. 

It is no wonder the average American, whether Conservative or Liberal, feels no connection to this man who donated his time and money to support the ravings of Jeremiah Wright and shared an office with Weatherman Bill Ayers for three years, and wanted to be the image of his father.  

Mr. Hunt did a superb job of phrasing the repugnant aura that most of us see hovering around this man, who lives in our White House, courtesy of the American people, and dreams his dreams of the take over of our democracy. Another failed Presidency? No doubt.

Thank you to Lynne at TravelLight for the Hunt article.