Mickey Kaus found President Obama’s speech of last week articulate but tremendously disconnected from reality:
Does Obama recognize that his initiatives have a weak connection, and even perverse connection, with actually achieving his goal? I hope his biographer, Jonathan Alter, will tell me. But either way, there’s a vacuum between his speechmaking and governing. Is that unusual? After all, Democrats have campaigned for years by arguing that Republican policies benefit the rich–think of all the distributional tables Democrats distributed to fight Reagan’s budgets-without ever saying how much inequality, exactly, they’d be willing to tolerate.
But Obama isn’t vague or incoherent. He’s quite precise about where he wants to go–namely back to something like what we had three decades ago. If his means don’t come close to matching his ends, if they even subvert them, that seems a more troubling, almost pathological mismatch, in which liberalism becomes a sort of cargo cult whose mechanisms have zero hope of achieving the desired results.
If I interpret Mickey correctly, he believes that the president is either being dishonest or is delusional. My interpretation is kinder than that. I think he’s sincere but misinformed.
Who is misinforming the President? Where is he getting his data and info from? It’s not that he is a newbie! This is his second term, and he is still campaigning, not governing. He is the one who has the reins of government. He also has one arm of Congress under his control — the Senate. He is beloved by many people. His intelligence is something few have questioned. So, how can one continue to be kind about him having so much misinformation, misusing his power, be so disconnected from his responsibilites when he does so little with so much, at such a painful time in our history?
I think the president, like most presidents or other powerful people, is surrounded by toadies and yes-men. Nobody wants to tell him he’s wrong.
Interesting that Kaus describes the speech as being given at Knox College, instead of at Galesburg. What’s the difference?
Galesburg is a city of around 34,000, which had a Maytag plant employing 1,600 workers close nine years ago when the plant was sent to Mexico. I had an uncle who worked there once. Carl Sandburg was from Galesburg and the city had all of the virtues on a smaller scale that he saw in Chicago, with their steel rails, stockyards, tools and freight, husky, stormy men, shoveling and building and breaking. Obama visited this Galesburg and made it a rhetorical point of reference in his campaigns for Senate and President. The union found his rhetoric empty and endorsed Hillary Clinion. They were particularly rankled to discover Obama’s personal and financial ties with the Crown family, which is Maytag’s largest shareholder, sits on Maytag’s Board, is a Democratic Party contributor, and was the financial manager of Obama’s first Presidential race.
Knox College is a private liberal arts college that used to cater the children of farmers with some money, now it draws children from all over the country with $50,000 per year to spend. One of the Lincoln-Douglas debates was held here, concerning the notion and extent of equality of man. Later figures gave speeches here, Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford B. Hayes, William McKinley, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama, who liked his speech so much he gave it again eight years later.