Well-Said

The Lord of Truth points me to this article by Shelby Steele, where he examines the President from a perspective that helps crystallize a lot of what I've been thinking. I found this part very illuminating...

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called "individuating"—that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.

He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.

Mr. Obama's ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle. To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as "ideological," and by promising to deliver us from the "tired" culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be "post-ideological," "post-racial" and "post-partisan," which is to say that he defines himself by a series of "nots"—thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

Read the whole thing -- there's a ton of good insight here, most notably in the analogy to the parable of The Emporer's New Clothes. I've always believed that a lot of what people thought about Obama during the election campaign involved the projection of their fondest hopes -- this happens with any politican, but it became something of a cultlike obsession with Obama. People wanted him to be something greater than a man, which is a real danger for any person -- because it's not something any one person can achieve. During and after the campaign, Obama was already being exalted as a liberal Reagan, a wise Lincoln-like statesman, and an FDR-like leader -- all rolled into one. Keep in mind, those are three of the most effective American Presidents ever -- and people were compaing Obama to them before he took office. That's a lot of expectations, and a lot of different coats to wear.

Steele hits upon a key point that fits not only Reagan, but Lincoln and Roosevelt -- these were men who had come to certain viewpoints about the world, and arrived at the Presidency at a time when those viewpoints were or soon became the viewpoints of a majority of their countrymen. They had to cajole and convince others of the wisdom and merits of their views, but were able to do so because people were predisposed to those viewpoints, and largely knew that their leaders held them. That's not true of Obama -- many people honestly thought him to be a moderate rather than a liberal, and he's failed to convince them of the underlying merit of his suggested policies.

Steele's general point is a different one, however, and worth noting. This President seems to lack the ability to inspire people to follow him for any reason other than empty slogans and a wish for something better -- there's no clear principles out there that might inspire people, just the man himself. And if the man himself is empty of everything save what we project onto him, we're bound to be sorely disappointed.