Seeing Obama Clearly

A devout Baptist expired in his sleep one night and awakened happily to find himself in heaven. While looking around and taking in his surroundings, he noticed an old, white bearded fellow outfitted in cowboy boots and a ten gallon hat strutting around, barking out orders, and generally behaving in an overbearing manner.

“Who’s that?” he asked the person next to him.

“Oh,” the person replied,  “that’s God. He thinks he’s Lyndon Johnson.”

old joke circa mid-1960’s

Change the costume a bit, and you would have a perfectly good Obama joke, fitting his  personality and ideology as well as the old one did Johnson’s. In many ways there really is not that much new or different about Obama. Regardless of the fear mongering of conservative pundits and the fantasies of his press agents in the traditional media, Obama is not a historic man of destiny, reshaping the nation  to his will. He is not Napoleon (he just has the complex). He’s not even Mussolini, despite the remarkably similar jutting of the chin. He is just a typical American leftist doing what leftists do when they get the chance, as a quick look at history can help to illustrate.

Roosevelt’s New Deal prolonged the depression and left the nation’s economy in many ways more hamstrung and regulated and its bureaucracy more powerful than today. The country was definitively far more union-ridden, and Roosevelt’s attacks on business, success,  and wealth make Obama’s seem mild.  Certainly none of Obama’s questionable or even illegal executive orders comes close to Roosevelt’s sending a whole class of innocent, loyal Americans to concentration camps by executive decree.

 Johnson’s left wing agenda and authoritarian vision were at least as grandiose as Obama’s, and he was far better at getting his plans enacted into law. He was fully as arrogant and power mad as Obama, and his corruption and abuses of power were perhaps greater. (As an aside he was probably also slightly more vulgar.)

 Though Carter’s ideology and failures are obvious and well known, people sometimes forget that the celebrated moderation of the later years of Clinton’s administration was a result of and a pragmatic reaction to political defeat. In the first couple of years when he was proposing the things he actually wanted, Clinton was about as far to the left as Obama has been. Hillarycare, his  most important proposal,  was more socialistic and authoritarian than Obamacare – Obamacare for example having, as far as we know, no provisions for criminal penalties for people selecting their own doctors.

While we can accept that some of Obama’s notions, hatreds, and desires may be unusual, his actions and behavior are mainly typical of the American left when it gets power. He is doing what leftists usually do. He is harming those leftists usually harm. He is favoring those leftists usually favor. During his first two years in office, he had the votes in congress to run roughshod at least some of the time. He no longer does. Obamacare is a mess that will have to be fixed or repealed some day. It is not permanent or politically untouchable.  His opponents need to keep their heads. He is a crafty, dedicated enemy of liberty and limited government who should not be taken lightly. He is not Attila, the booger man, or the destroyer of the republic. Those conservatives who paint him as such overate him as much as he and  his sycophants do and play into his hand. What is needed is a clear headed recognition  that he is  another dangerous  opponent, one to be taken seriously and opposed seriously, but not one to be panicked or awed by. A little less gloom and a few more good, offensive jokes might be a good place to start.