My attitude towards Barack Obama has changed over time. As I wrote recently, some of the things I have to say about him now approach what once (and not all that long ago, either) had seemed like tinfoil hat territory.
How did this happen? How did I come to the point of agreeing that Obama is a socialist who only cares about our economy as a vehicle for income redistribution, has no interest in promoting or even supporting liberty either abroad or in this country and in fact considers liberty to be his bitter enemy, is intent on gaining more power for himself by rewarding his constituents with money earned by others, and wants to make America over into a European-style social welfare state at best and a Chavez-style banana republic at worst?
Hey, if I turn out to be wrong, I’ll be happy. I hope subsequent events prove me wrong. But I don’t think they will—at least, not if Obama has anything to say about it. If I do turn out to be wrong, I predict it will only be because enough people in the United States, and especially in Congress, decide to use their voting power to block Obama’s agenda, not because he’s changed his mind.
I was extremely reluctant to come to this point; I was dragged here kicking and screaming by the facts before my eyes. I’d been uneasy about Obama for quite a while, but I was absolutely determined to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, and I believe I did so. Take a look, for example, at the piece I wrote right after the election, on avoiding Obama Derangement Syndrome:
But I suggest that everyone stand back, take a deep breath, and wait. Wait, and observe. It will become clear enough as Obama chooses a Cabinet and advisers. And then it will become even more clear as he takes office and begins the work of government. More clarity will come as he handles the inevitable crises and tests that will occur on his watch.
The goal of each of us should be to react only to evidence, not fear.
Well, clarity has come. As with many cognitive changes (or you might say “evolutions”), my current position has been the result of an accretion of evidence rather than a single “aha!” moment, with certain incidents standing out as watersheds.
When I first encountered Barack Obama at the start of his campaign for president I hardly had a perception of him at all. Initially, what he said seemed bland and vague, couched in a relatively attractive and youthful package and delivered in that resonant baritone. The content was more “motivational speaker” than politician, a genre that doesn’t tend to appeal to me (actually, neither genre does). But I figured he wasn’t trying to appeal to me anyway; he was aiming at a younger, fuzzier, and/or more liberal audience.
Over time, as Obama continued to speak, it began to be clear that he had many liberal tendencies, but was either trying to hide them with a veneer of centrism, or had balanced them with actual centrism on certain issues. I wasn’t sure which it was.
As the campaign went on my unease built, but very slowly. At first many of my posts were of the “who’s the real Obama?” variety, discussing the strange blankness and the mixed messages that made it difficult to know what Obama would really be like once in office. Was Obama actually a Chauncey Gardiner sort of character? Was he as undecided as he sometimes sounded, and would he govern from the middle? Or was his tendency towards vague and shifting positions a carefully constructed ploy to allow him to appeal to the greatest number of voters possible? Was it essentially duplicitous, hiding his true intentions, which were far too radical for all but a small percentage of Americans?
That last idea was so extreme, so dreadful in its implications, and so different from the modus operandi of any other president in my lifetime (whether I supported them or not). I knew it was a possibility, but I rejected it: for now, I would regard Obama as innocent of that accusation until proven otherwise.
Obama’s narcissism soon became quite clear, however. That’s a trait so common among politicians as to be almost obligatory, but Obama brought it to new and disturbing heights, and used it and worked it to evoke a cult of personality in his followers. Then there was the matter of Obama’s past. This slowly began to be filled in, but again in a way that seemed murky and unclear. Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko; there were so many smoking guns and yet so little hard evidence of anything much, and Obama continued to bob and weave around them in ways that started to seem outright duplicitous.
That’s when I began to be aware of another phenomenon. Time and again, Obama would hit a snag and say something (for example, that Ayers was just a guy in the neighborhood, or that Obama had sat in Wright’s church for twenty years and yet hadn’t heard Wright’s offensive sermons) that seemed on the face of it to be—well, there’s no other way to put it—a brazen lie.
And it didn’t appear to matter to too many people. There were some bleats in the press on the Right, and even one or two in the MSM. But it seemed that few in the mainstream media really wanted to challenge this man in any way. Previously, the press had salivated at nearly everything in candidates’ pasts that seemed even remotely suspicious; now they refused to pursue leads about things that were highly suspicious, and even made excuses for them.
Of course, this was not totally new. I had only to remember the way the press had rejected the Swift Vets’ claims in 2004 by first ignoring their attempts to get coverage, and then when the Vets’ went beyond the press and directly to the people, by reviling the Vets and printing “refutations” of their claims that didn’t really address the points the Vets had made. This had been enough to disqualify the Vets in the eyes of people who were not paying attention to the details. But apparently enough people still believed the Vets that it furnished a margin for Bush in Kerry’s narrow defeat.
But what was happening with Obama and the MSM seemed different. With Kerry, there had been only one major topic for a press coverup: his Vietnam service. Other than this, what we saw with Kerry was what we were going to get. His history was so well known, his time in the public eye so lengthy, that we pretty much knew who this man was. We might not like what he was (I considered him an ultra-liberal blowhard and narcissist) or we might support him, but even those who were determined to vote for him mostly did so reluctantly and with eyes open, holding their noses and pulling the lever with a fairly clear sense of who Kerry was.
With Obama the areas of suspicious concern were so many that they were practically dizzying. Obama also had so little public record that the press had an even higher duty to inform, and yet it was shirking this task far more egregiously than it had before. And this was true even though, unlike Kerry, Obama wasn’t running against the hated Bush, but rather against the kinder gentler (and previous press darling himself) John McCain.
Over and over during the 2008 campaign, something else would come out about Obama that I thought might be the deal breaker. His secretiveness about his school records. His relationship with Acorn and Alinsky (not the man, but the strategy). His cold-blooded treatment of former mentor Alice Palmer and other candidates in his very first political race, which had been an open part of his history in Chicago and about which the Chicago Tribune had written an in-depth article back in April of 2007. All ignored or covered up or trivialized or excused.
For me the first major turning point during the campaign, the moment at which my growing but still vague uneasiness became more pointed, was in June of 2008, when Obama reversed his previous pledge on campaign financing—perhaps because this was not an association or an act of his in the past, but an act of his in the present.
Some people probably would not consider it all that important; it was disturbing, yes, but (as I wrote at the time), all politicians break promises of one sort or other. For me it was the way Obama did it that was so troubling, the obvious disconnect between his public persona and his actions. He’d been campaigning very much on who he was rather than on his record of accomplishments, and what this told us about who he was made my blood run cold. At the time I wrote:
It’s not just that [Obama] reneged, either—it’s how he reneged. Who’s to blame, according to Obama? Why, John McCain and the nasty Republicans, that’s who. James Joyner writes that this charge of Obama’s does take “a bit of gall.” I’d say it takes substantially more than a bit, as well as a heavy dose of the whining, blaming, audacity in which the holier-than-thou Obama tends to specialize.
There was something even more perturbing to me than what Obama was doing or even how he was doing it, and that was the reaction to him. The mainstream press (with only a few exceptions) seemed to take it in stride, mentioning it but not making a fuss about it, seeing it as a pragmatic decision. But what of Obama’s supporters? Would they not feel betrayed by his hypocrisy on campaign financing? After all, wasn’t his perceived trustworthiness, his business-as-unusual persona, a great part of what attracted them to him in the first place? Would this lack of integrity not make the scales fall from their eyes?
Once again, with just a few exceptions, the answer was a resounding “no.” It was merely seen as a clever move, a sign that Obama was a winner rather than a loser.
Yet another thought then came to me—the idea that this action of Obama’s had been a sort of test—not of him, but of us. In weighing whether to go ahead and refuse public financing, he had probably calculated that the extra money he’d have access to if he broke his pledge might be the key to his winning. So, although it would give his opponents further ammunition with which to criticize him, and might offend his base by showing that he was just a pol like any other after all, he felt it was probably worth the gamble. But his public’s reaction told him that there had been virtually no risk at all, and gave him a green light for future reversals and other cynical moves.
From this experience, Obama learned to his pleasure (I don’t know whether it was to his surprise) that the press was so thoroughly behind him, and his many supporters so hypnotized by his spellbinding charisma, that he no longer had to be quite as careful as before. Audacity was going to pay off, big time.
It was all extremely worrisome, to be sure. But despite his history of Leftist associations, there was still no clear indication of what Obama would actually do in terms of policy if elected. He was a liberal, yes, but that was no surprise, and some of what he proposed sounded more middle of the road. Strong hints at his far Leftist orientation towards policy were to come later—although not much later.
[Continued in Part II.]
