Noemie Emery
Death of the Obama dream
By: Noemie Emery
Examiner Columnist
March 24, 2009
Well, that was fast.
On March 20, only two months after the cosmic anointing, Vanity Fair, of all places, unloaded on Barack Obama, in the terms it had reserved for the past four or five years for the likes of George W. Bush.
Well, not the whole magazine, but one of its writers, media writer Michael Wolff, took an axe to the president, in a posting beginning “Sheesh, the guy is Jimmy Carter,” ending “This guy is leaden and this show is in trouble,” and titled “Barack Obama is a Terrible Bore.”
The same day, ex-fan Peggy Noonan called him “insubstantial and weightless...not fully focused...jumping from issue to issue and venue to venue from day to day.” “The administration’s difficulties...have created an unfortunate impression of incompetence,”
said The Economist. Politico noted that his skills as a salesman have begun to desert him.
It all came at the end of what Rick Klein of ABC News called Obama’s ‘lost week,’ which got worse on Sunday, when he was attacked by the New York Times in three columns and one editorial. One warned of an oncoming fall of Katrina dimensions. And these were his friends.
Actually, since he was sworn, in most of his weeks have been lost ones, or at least weeks headed downward, the problem being that three or four variations on the theme of incompetence have had time to harden and set.
First, the financial crisis he was hired to fix has only grown worse under his tutelage, losing another 2,000-plus points on the Dow since his ascension. Second, the ‘smoothest transition on record’ stopped being smooth when Bush went back to Texas, and has since been a mélange of scandals and dithering. Third, the immense sums in his budget are starting to stun the more moderate Democrats, not to mention the Obamacons, who once put their hopes in his ‘moderate’ temperament.
Fourth, he and some of his high-profile picks have shown a repeated addiction to unforced errors and slights---mixing up names, misplacing dates, dissing Nancy Reagan, dissing the British Prime Minister, dissing the Special Olympics, created and run by John Kennedy’s sister—giving the impression the administration is run by the under-informed and the boorish and socially compromised.
Would Caroline’s father, who took part in his family’s effort to raise his retarded sister as normal, and who as president put great store in his special relationship with “Uncle Harold” McMillan, have found this amusing? One rather thinks not.
In short, the idea of Obama, the eloquent, elegant, trans-racial hero, able to inspire his way around anything, ran into reality and was dissolved by it, revealing a not-well-prepared neophyte politician with an embarrassing penchant for gaffes.
The markets are down, the price tags are up, the British are piqued, and the independents are heading back to the Republicans, who now have a (slight) lead in the generic ballot, for the first time in nearly three years.
Obama’s teleprompter has its own blog, its own code name---Totus--- and is building a following. One laughs with it, and at him, which cannot be promising. For a would-be Messiah, this is hardly good news.
Way back last year---it was called the campaign--- some people, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, to name only two of them, seemed to suggest that something like this might happen, that there were risks to electing someone with no record or background to speak of, who had never done anything well except talk. They were dismissed as too old and too cranky, jealous that they too did not have a fan base of cult-like intensity.
This was probably right---at least about jealousy---but it doesn’t mean they were wrong on the rest. They were waiting for the bubble to burst, which it did, but too late for their benefit.
“Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny him the White House,” Charles Krauthammer wrote February 15, 2008, winning the Seer of the Year prize for prognostication. “My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.”
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
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