Amused Cynic

A blogger I admire, Neo-neocon, has a brand new post up on “Obama’s emptiness.” In it, she cites Shelby Steele’s WSJ piece on that same subject, but then demurs slightly. I agree with her demurral, and would take it even a step further.

Steele eloquently and correctly describes how this empty suit…this cipher….managed get himself elected President of the United States: it was an Emperor’s New Clothes situation that played to obsequious white people who wanted to prove that they weren’t racists, or feel that they had an “imaginary hip black friend.” Voting for Obama made them feel like Peggy Lipton in the old “Mod Squad” TV series.

The lie of seeing clothes where there were none amounted to a sophistication—joining oneself to an obvious falsehood in order to achieve social acceptance. In such a sophistication there is an unspoken agreement not to see what one clearly sees—in this case the emperor’s flagrant nakedness.

America’s primary race problem today is our new “sophistication” around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods (”diversity”) and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama’s election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.

Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If “hope and change” was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.

Our new race problem—the sophistication of seeing what isn’t there rather than what is—has surprised us with a president who hides his lack of economic understanding behind a drama of scale. Hundreds of billions moving into trillions. Dramatic, history-making numbers. But where is the economic logic behind a stimulus package that doesn’t fully click in for a number of years? How is every stimulus dollar spent actually going to stimulate? Why bailouts to institutions that only hoard the money? How is vast government spending simultaneously a kind of prudence that will not “add to the deficit?” How can such spending not trigger smothering levels of taxation?

Mr. Obama’s economic thinking (or lack thereof) adds up to a kind of rudderless cowboyism combined with wishful thinking. You would think that in the two solid years of daily campaigning leading up to his election this nakedness would have been seen.

This is an excellent analysis as far as it goes, but it makes the all-too-common mistake of interpreting Obama’s emptiness as a simple, vapid vacuum. Steele, like so many smart, well-meaning conservatives misses the real and deliberate evil lurking inside the Trojan Horse that is Barack Obama. Neo-neocon does not miss this crucial point:

I think this is very finely put, but I would add the following: I do not believe that Obama’s political emptiness is real. Rather, I think he is quite full—of leftist ideology, that is. This political emptiness was (and still is, although the extent to which he can still manage to pull it off has diminished over time as his actions have begun to speak more loudly than his lofty words) a strategic pose that he adopted in order to get elected. His truer and deeper emptiness is an emotional one which, to paraphrase Steele, has been “nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the world in which he found himself as a child and young adult.” That, perhaps, is the most frightening part of all; I believe he lacks an inner core, and has filled the vacuum with an ideology that he plans to impose on this country if he possibly can, whether we like it or not.

That’s what “yes, we can” was all about.

What Neo is describing was put forth in greater detail by David Horowitz of the Freedom Center in a pamphlet titled Barack Obama’s Rules For Revolution: The Alinsky Model. In it, Horowitz explained the linkage between what Obama is doing right now and the radical revolutionary inventor of the “community organizer” concept, Saul Alinsky. Horowitz describes Alinsky as an advocate of what he (Horowitz) calls “political nihilism,” that is, a strategy for achieving power for its own sake under the guise of humanitarianism by destroying the existing social structure by “boring from within.”

Horowitz’s pamphlet is available through FrontPage, but much of what it contains can be found online, here.

In the first installment, Horowitz cites the dedication at the beginning of Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals:

“Lest we forget, an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

Horowitz then continues:

So Alinsky begins by telling readers what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer. This is something that in my experience conservatives have a very hard time understanding. Conservatives are altogether too decent, too civilized to match up adequately, at least in the initial stages of the battle, with their adversaries. They are too prone to give them the benefit of the doubt. They assume that radicals can’t really want to destroy a society that is democratic and liberal and has brought wealth and prosperity to so many. Oh yes they can. That is in fact the essence of what it means to be a radical — to be willing to destroy the values, structures and institutions that sustain the society we live in. Marx himself famously cited Alinsky’s first rebel (using another of his names — Mephistopheles): “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”

You’ll want to read the whole series. You’ll also want to read this remarkable piece by Ryan Lizza, a senior editor at The New Republic.

Obama’s self-conception as an organizer isn’t just a campaign gimmick. Organizing remained central to Obama long after his stint on the South Side. In the 13 years between Obama’s return to Chicago from law school and his Senate campaign, he was deeply involved with the city’s constellation of community-organizing groups. He wrote about the subject. He attended organizing seminars. He served on the boards of foundations that support community organizing. He taught Alinsky’s concepts and methods in workshops. When he first ran for office in 1996, he pledged to bring the spirit of community organizing to his job in the state Senate. And, after he was elected to the U.S. Senate, his wife, Michelle, told a reporter, “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” Recalling her remark in 2005, Obama wrote, “I take that observation as a compliment.”

By defining himself as a “community organizer” above all else, Obama is linking himself to America’s radical democratic tradition and presenting himself as an heir to a particular political style and methodology that, at least superficially, contrasts sharply with the candidate Obama has become.

Barbara at Mommy Life—like Horowitz, a self-described former “radical activist”—wrote this piece on 10/28/08—-just days before the cataclysm, and about the same time I was writing my first “Silent Coup” post.

Really, with all the information available out there I need to share with you all, there are a couple things that I’ve let slide. One is Saul Alinsky.

The thing is, as a former radical activist, I know the movers and shakers from my own early political days. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are my age. They are from the same counterculture milieu as I. In the 60s and 70s I actually would have rolled up my sleeves and joined them building bombs in a heartbeat. Seriously. I was a sick cookie.

So I know what drives these people. And I also know that what happened was that as they grew older, they found more subtle and sophisticated ways to work toward the revolution they yearned for. The only thing that surprises me is that somehow they pulled it off. Somehow they’ve all shown up in critical places to form a coalition supporting the most radical and inexperienced candidate ever seen in America. Completely unrepentant and given a pass by a media complicit in shamelessly promoting a candidate and vilifying his opposition – even ordinary citizens who haven’t yet learned that you aren’t supposed to ask dictators questions.

Our country is on the verge of handing the reins to people who truly despise America and the common people. Who regard themselves as intellectuals who know what’s best for “the masses. Who are not motivated by love but by ideology. Who see the masses as useful to their cause and nothing else. But who somehow have put forward a front man with enough charisma to convince people he cares.

I look at Obama and see a cold, calculating and cynical man who occasionally slips up so we see it. And his wife is driven by anger and ingratitude for a country that paved the way for her to achieve. These two and their cohorts have a complete disconnect with our country’s history and heritage. They’ve already let us know that all the time leading up to Obama has been something to be despised – and that the real America will begin when he takes office.