Emperor Obama Has No Clothes

It has been a charmed life for Barack Hussein Obama, rolling along with a paper-thin resume and virtually no real world experience, and somehow landing in the Oval Office four years ago. But the fantasy-like journey took an unexpected turn recently in the form of a 90-minute debate with a relentless buzz saw by the name of Mitt Romney. 

It may have been, perhaps, the first time the President, his policies and ideology, have actually been challenged in sustained fashion, absent the protective cordon of apologists and media that typically surround him.  His poor performance however should have surprised no one; the dismal record of his Presidency, after all, is visible for all to see. 

The only unknown going in was Romney himself and whether he would take full advantage of the ample, low hanging fruit Obama provided.  For this President, perhaps, more than any other is eminently vulnerable.

The Obama journey (and self-rapturous tendencies) began well before that trip to the White House though when he went from Occidental College to Columbia and then to Harvard Law, presumably on the basis of his minority status.  One can’t be sure because Obama has never released his transcripts.  We do know though that at least in High School, in his own words, that he “dabbled in drugs and alcohol” even as his grades were declining, and one generally does not get into Columbia University while smoking pot, snorting cocaine, and maintaining mediocre grades - unless there are other mitigating circumstances.

He also became the first black to lead the prestigious Harvard Law Review in 1990, and soon after received an advance for an autobiography about his life as a successful black academician, the result of which was Dreams of My Father, published in 1995.  He moved to Chicago, became a community organizer, was a back bencher in the Illinois State Senate for 8 years, delivered the keynote address at the Democratic Convention in 2004, was elected US Senator where he served a few months before deciding to run for President, which he succeeded in winning in 2008, a meteoric rise, to say the least.

In his first Presidential campaign, Obama managed to slide past an array of associations that for any routine national candidate would have spelled disaster.  But not Obama: as America’s first black Presidential candidate, his relationships with radicals, bigots, and anti-Semites were simply papered over.

This is the man, after all, who spent 20 years as a member of Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church, where he listened to his mentor serving up red-hot sermons ripe with hatred for his country and pregnant with lusty anti-American, anti-white, and anti-Semitic tirades.  He lounged with known sixties era radicals Bernadette Dorn and Bill Ayres, and Yasser Arafat apostles Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, not to mention the black Muslim anti-Semite, Louis Farrakhan and left wing pastor, Father Michael Pfleger (a white version of Jeremiah White). 

Had a Republican been found to have any involvement with similar such fringe groups and individuals, say, the KKK, however brief and tangential, even if later apologized for and unequivocally renounced, the career would have been over by the next day’s news cycle. 

For Obama, though, he barely skipped a beat.  The news came, went, was dismissed, and liberals were not uncomfortable with such a past anyway.  But the man whom the media and supporters were attempting to package as a moderate seemed to have a most radical background indeed.

But if the media was willing to overlook some very questionable connections from Obama’s earlier career, it really came into its own in safeguarding him once he became President.

Where, for example, was the media scrutiny that would have accompanied a Republican President over any number of issues the last four years?  The annual trillion dollar deficits, the anemic recovery, the credit downgrade, the explosion in food stamps and disability claims, the growing levels of poverty, the decline in wages, the stubbornly high unemployment, the failed “stimulus” package, rising food and fuel costs, the shrinking US dollar, “Fast and Furious,” Guantanamo, Benghazi, Iran, the aimless mission in Afghanistan with more than 2000 American dead... and so on.

Then there was the image, promoted by the media and supporters, of Obama as healer, the biracial, historic, even messianic figure whose ascendancy to power would atone for the national sins of slavery and racism, and unite the country; but such a myth from so extreme an individual was absurd from the start.  Indeed, the racial fault lines under Obama have only deepened, along with divisions across gender, ethnicity, and class lines as well.

Obama has also limited media access to him (despite its overwhelming sympathy for him), other than for softball interviews of the Leno-Letterman type, preferring instead, it seemed, to dwell in a secure and controlled bubble in which he was adored, idolized, and, most importantly, never challenged.

But all that came to a confusing, cringe inducing end in what can only be described as a wholesale crushing by Mitt Romney in the first Presidential debate.

For ninety minutes, the man who has never truly been grilled by a feisty, hostile media, who has been coddled and indulged most of his life, convinced of his own unique and epic importance, surrounded by backers and friends, shuffled along from one campaign event or fund raiser to the next by a worshipful circle of supporters and admirers, stepped on stage, alone, with no protection or staff or teleprompter, no reverential throngs, no opportunity for evasion or media cover-up, and forced to answer hard questions - perhaps for the first time. 

His performance was entirely predictable.  How, in truth, does one successfully defend an indefensible record? The problem for Obama was that he had never been challenged before, and therefore did not know how to respond nor, perhaps, even understood the damage his policies have caused. 

All Presidents live in a cocoon divorced to some extent from reality, but more so for Obama, because as the first black President and a man of the left, the liberal press found it impossible to criticize him.  As such, it has done him and the country no favors.  

Obama rose not because of his talent, which has always been marginal, not because of an impressive background in the private sector or business, because he has none, not because of an exemplary career in public service, achieving worthy goals on a bipartisan basis, because he never did, but because superficially he presented himself as a reasonable person – and, as a member of an "oppressed" minority, he enjoyed privileged status.  

He was, as Vice President Joe Biden said, “clean ... and articulate,” and, as Senator Harry Reid noted, without a “Negro dialect.” 

But absent the proper skin complexion, no one today would have heard the name Barack Hussein Obama. 

He is, in effect, our first affirmative action President - and that, unfortunately for Obama, did not quite cut it against Romney. 

Nor has it benefited the country.