Who do you say that I am?

Ed Driscoll has some fun with Richard Cohen’s Obamyopia. Washington Post columnist Cohen, while giving signs of increasing frustration with our president, is still bafflingly baffled by who he really is. Ed says:

Who indeed. If only Cohen worked for an organization that had people paid to gather facts and…what’s the word I’m looking for — reported them to the public — yes, that’s it! — before going all in on a candidate. Perhaps someone should invent such a business. It could combine a mass audience with a veneer of… hmmm, what’s a word that rhymes with mass? Class! Yes, that’s it.
You could print it on paper for a retro vibe and call it news on paper, a paper of news, something like that. I’m sure there’s got to be a catchier name for it, and it’ll come to me eventually. But in these days of media experimentation, such a venture could really catch on with elitist readers, particularly inside the Washington Beltway.

Obama is an arrogant, inexperienced ideologue whose climb up the political career ladder has been assisted by the Democratic machine at every step. He has been insulated from the vetting process of our rough-and-tumble political system by a host of cronies and operators, in an environment (Chicago) where, with the endorsement of the permanent ruling class, failure is almost impossible. He grasped the brass ring of the presidency, lifted up by an adoring media, for which his candidacy and ultimate victory represented the happy ending to the gloomy narrative of the Bush years (and if the honor of objective journalism – always something of a myth – became hopelessly compromised, then it was surely a small price to pay for the pleasure of seeing, and for the prestige of helping to engineer, the desired conclusion to the great liberal fairytale). An easy victory in the presidential election, on top of his charmed (albeit short) previous string of political successes, gave Obama an exalted sense of his own intelligence, wisdom and competence, as well as a peevish disdain for those who disagreed with him, which congeries of vanity, alienation and obliviousness to public opinion impelled this advocate of statism – bred in the cocoon of big-city machine politics, steeped in anti-American radicalism - quite naturally to expand the reach of the state in all directions. His imperviousness to the empirical proofs of the falseness of his worldview has permitted him to lay the groundwork for social and economic ruin – a prospect that, not surprisingly, has alarmed a majority of America’s voters, whose grave misgivings have already begun to be felt at the ballot-box, and will, in all likelihood, only grow stronger and more widespread in November.

Whatever else he is, Obama is not an enigma.