In an op-ed in today's New York Times entitled "Obama Rejects Obamaism" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/opinion/brooks-obama-rejects-obamaism.html?ref=opinion), David Brooks trumpets noises which are certainly not music to the president's ears:
"I liked Obama’s payroll tax cut ideas and urged Republicans to play along. But of course I’m a sap. When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill.
It recycles ideas that couldn’t get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress. In his remarks Monday the president didn’t try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures. He repeated the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives.
He claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)
. . . .
The White House gives moderates little morsels of hope, and then rips them from our mouths. To be an Obama admirer is to toggle from being uplifted to feeling used."
Wow!
Well, I don't feel like a sap, and I don't feel used, because I never believed "the president’s soul would like to do something about the country’s structural problems." Rather, I was convinced early on that the Obama administation was never about government of the people, by the people, for the people. Rather, the Obama administration has been about feeding the narcissism of a photogenic young man, abandoned in his youth by both father and mother, who became president, notwithstanding his tissue paper-thin resume, owing to the incompetence of the prior administration.
The pendulum swung from right to left, and is now ready to swing back to the right in the absence of improved employment statistics, and Obama is growing more desperate by the hour. If it requires class warfare in order to preserve his presidency, so be it. However, Obama has yet to learn that calls to kill the kulaks or to bludgeon the bourgeois often have unexpected and undesired consequences.
Mr. Brooks still believes "in the governing style Obama talked about in 2008"? Yes, David, you are a sap.
Hold your horses! Or better still, keep your hounds at bay! Arnold, who is seeking to be the first canine candidate short-listed for a Nobel Peace Prize ("What did Arnold ever do?," you ask, to which Arnold replies, "What did Obama ever do?") tells me that I am being too harsh on Brooks.
"What's that Arnold? You say he's not a sap?"
"As the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined."
"Your point?"
"You can't see the wood for the trees."
"I'm still not following you, Arnold."
"You never were terribly bright, Jeffrey. All I'm saying is that you're barking up the wrong tree."
"Yeah, all that and money doesn't grow on trees."
"Go chase yourself, Jeffrey."
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