The 18th Hole
Some thoughts at the end of the Obama presidency.
January 12, 2017
Bruce Bawer
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The man who had presented himself as an exponent of high ideals and great ideas turned out to be the most cynical candidate ever.
To be sure, while Obama had little interest in hard work, and little skill at responsible governance, he was still eager to hear himself talk – and to use the bully pulpit to promote his ideological views. So one of his first major acts as president was to go to Cairo and give a “speech to the Muslim world” that, as I wrote in my book
Surrender, was “a staggering pastiche of half-truths, exaggerations, and utter nonsense about Islamic history” and “an implicit announcement that his administration's policy toward the Muslim world would be one of shameless appeasement.” So much for any hope that Obama would stand up to the Islamization of the West.
And how fitting it was that, after having begun his presidency by brown-nosing Islam, he ended it by kicking Israel in the
cojones. I need not go into detail about the massive mess he has made in these last eight years – the ways in which he's alienated America's allies while kowtowing to its enemies, stood up for criminals while rebuking cops, whitewashed Islam while ignoring its Jewish and Christian victims in the Middle East, defended illegal aliens while sneering at law-abiding, hard-working citizens, and lauded “community organizers” while demonizing entrepreneurs. The list goes on: the Obamacare fiasco, the climate-change fraud, and so on. Not least, there's his sowing of racial discord: how stunning that a man so capable of articulating a noble vision of a post-racial America could turn out to be so toxically obsessed with race, so thoroughly convinced that America is still steeped in racism, so gifted at creating and aggravating racial division while claiming that his goal is to heal.
But as bad a president as Obama has been, imagine how much more damage he could have done if not for his laziness. Fortunately for all of us, it turned out that his sloth exceeded his determination to transform America into Venezuela. If he's leaving office with a far higher level of popular support than he deserves, it's not because of anything he's accomplished but, in large part, because a lot of people who don't pay close attention to politics, and who haven't been personally damaged by his policies, retain an admiration for his style. He's smooth, he's suave, he's “cool.” That “cool” factor seduced a lot of voters in 2008. But over the years it has seemed increasingly clear that that “cool” factor was a function of his indifference. I was thinking about this the other day and it suddenly occurred to me whom he reminded me of : Dean Martin.
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There you have it: in 2008, American voters were seduced by high-flown oratory and a promise of spectacular social and cultural transformation, only to discover that they'd been stuck with a master of
menefreghismo, a slick character who was all talk (except when he decided to do something outright damaging and probably petty). Is it any surprise that in 2016 the electorate turned to a literal Chairman of the Board, a man of action, a man who had behind him a long, hands-on career of actually building things, a man who, eschewing lofty words, spoke in a blunt, honest, and no-nonsense way about the issues – even Islam! – and about the nuts-and-bolts business of fixing problems and getting things done?
The 18th Hole