If you are as confused as I am as I try to understand the President and his strange behaviour, perhaps this article by Herbert London will help.
Obama: A Man Apart
by Herbert London (more by this author)
Albert Camus was expert at describing a man apart, an existential man The Stranger, who didn’t belong in the society in which he found himself. He didn’t have emotional roots; in fact, this character was haunted by shadows — the real and the metaphorical. He is the quintessential rebel challenging normative standards.
At the risk of drawing literary comparisons, I am persuaded based on his performance that President Obama is a man apart. He seems to equate power with arrogance; pride with willfulness and exceptionalism with dominance. As a consequence, he has changed foreign policy perceptions. The America he leads is a nation like any other — no more, no less. In fact, as a Nobel laureate, he is considered by the Europeans as a man of the world, not merely a citizen of the United States.
When asked if the United States is exceptional, President Obama said America is exceptional and England is exceptional and Greece is exceptional. That the United States is sui generis didn’t cross his mind. How could it? He is pledged to a scenario in which America opts out of its traditional role as peace keeper, the balance wheel in maintaining international equilibrium. The war against terrorists is over along with the nation’s hegemonic role.
Unfortunately the war fatigue President Obama embodies is not embraced by our global enemies who see this shift in his policy attitude as a sign of weakness and retreat. I believe President Obama actually thinks that unilateral concessions to our real and putative enemies will result in reciprocal responses. But as his bizarre overtures to the Olympic Committee demonstrated, gestures directed at multilateralism and celebrity status do not result in favorable results. Real power as opposed to soft power still has meaning on the world stage.
A man with roots would know that wild policy swings of the kind that we’ve experienced with healthcare, cap and trade and education proposals cannot possibly fly, with the American people, even with those who voted for President Obama in the last election. Despite cultural shifts in the nation, the United States still fashions itself as a conservative nation. Only a man apart cannot sense that condition.
Yes, Obama does seem to be a man who is totally disconnected from mainstream Americans. When almost 1 million Tea partiers and others descended on DC to tell him of their concerns, he made a hastily planned retreat to a friendly crowd of Democratic supporters in Minneapolis and pretended he did not know about the concerns of us Americans and had his spkesmen out calling the peaceful, orderly protesters an angry mob and racists.
We never dreamed we would be seeing someone so far apart from our values and our culture in the White House! We need our elected legislators to stand up and tell him what we are saying! And if they do not we need to replace them with people who will!
Related posts:
Are the Blue Dogs pining for the good old days of 19th century Democrats who saw Jefferson and Jackson as more influential than Rousseau and Marx, as cited in THE CHANGING FACE OF DEMOCRATS on Amazon and http://www.claysamerica.com, or just waiting for a better cash deal from Obama? Would be nice if more would stand up for individual freedom instead of the supremacy of community and its elite few rulers. Obama told us that community interests were more important than are individual interests, so we need a return to 19th century Democrats to preserve individual freedom.
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