Dan Riehl explains why Obama is failing:
"He can read studies, demographics, charts and graphs. I imagine he can plot strategy and plans with the best of them. Obama is far from a dumb man. But he's totally unable to draw upon a vast number of disparate experiences to truly understand much of America's ground-level priorities, points of view and chief concerns.
In a sense, he is a man trying to govern a nation he doesn't genuinely know, stuck trying to communicate with, as we continue to find out, a nation that never really knew him when they elected him, so superficial and oh my God fantastic, if unrealistic, was the press bubble that surrounded him during the campaign.
Given that the Oval Office may be the worst place in America from which to learn about what's taking place in America at street level everyday, Obama may be doomed to be a one-term president who never really had a chance to govern America effectively because he never understood enough of it well enough when he applied for and was given the job."
Read the whole brilliant thing.
Riehl may have a point about Obama's background, but he forgot to mention another key factor. The current academia itself generally possesses incredible disdain for what they view as the "common American" while believing themselves to be completely in touch with "them."
ReplyDeleteI cannnot even count how many college professors and grad students I know who make, with great pride, wonderfully broad pronouncements about the woeful state of the idiotic American people (brain dead from videogames, and fast food, and television, and etc.) and its dying culture. Thank goodness they're not like that...
In my own area study, English, all those "in the know" are firmly convinced that Americans mostly don't read-- at least not like they did in the time of Dickens. This is being said as bestsellers sell millions of copies... more then could be even printed back in the day.
Obama coming to us almost directly from this mental outlook shouldn't be overlooked either.