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Obama: the Great Miscommunicator
Dorothy Rabinowitz, Wall Street Journal...The election over, the warming glow of those armies of supporters gone, his capacity to tolerate criticism and dissent from his policies grows thinner apace. His lectures, explaining his health-care proposals, and why theyll be good for everybody, are clearly not going down well with his national audience. This would have to do with the fact that the real Barack Obamaproduct of the academic left, social reformer with a program, is now before that audience, and what they hear in this lecture about one of the central concerns in their liveshis message freighted with generalitiesthey are not prepared to buy. They are not prepared to believe that our first most important concern now is health-care reform or all will go under. The president has a problem. For, despite a great election victory, Mr. Obama, it becomes ever clearer, knows little about Americans. He knows the crowdshe is at home with those. He is a stranger to the countrys heart and character. He seems unable to grasp what runs counter to its nature. That Americans dont take well, for instance, to bullying, especially of the moralizing kind, implicit in those speeches on health care for everybody. Neither do they wish to be taken where they dont know they want to go and being told its good for them. Who would have believed that this politician celebrated, above all, for his eloquence and capacity to connect with voters would end up as president proving so profoundly tone deaf? A great many people is the answerthe same who listened to those speeches of his during the campaign, searching for their meaning. It took this battle over health care to reveal the bloom coming off this rose, but that was coming. It began with the spectacle of the president, impelled to go abroad to apologize for his nationrepeatedly. It is not, in the end, the demonstrators in those town-hall meetings or the agitations of his political enemies that Mr. Obama should fear. It is the judgment of those Americans who have been sitting quietly in their homes, listening to him. Posted by: Mike 2009-08-11 |
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