Andrew Klavin on Obama's Character - NOT

The Contents of Obama’s Character

Posted By Andrew Klavan On June 25, 2012 

As everything President Obama touches turns to crap, we begin to hear more and more leftist attacks on Mitt Romney the man. Andrea Mitchell on leftist network NBC ^[1] dishonestly edits a tape ^[2] to make Romney seem “out of touch.” Joe Williams from the leftist website Politico ^[3] crazily suggests Romney is only comfortable ^[4] around white people. Lawrence O’Donnell ^[5] on the leftist cable net MSNBC ^[6] moronically attacks Mrs. Romney for riding horses. And just about every leftist everywhere from the New York Times ^[7] all the way up to some ostensibly legitimate news sources decries the fact that the Republican candidate for president is, horror upon horrors, a Mormon ^[8].

Really? I mean, while believing in the Angel Moroni may be kind of odd, believing in Barack Obama is just plain magical thinking. The jobs “created or saved,” ^[9] the new tone ^[10] in Washington, the health care “reform,” ^[11] the new approach to the Middle East ^[12], the Russian reset ^[13] — sure, all religions have their hard-to-swallow miracle tales but most of them don’t do this kind of real-world damage.

But of all the weird, creepy and false left-wing religious tenets the Obama administration has forced down this nation’s throat, none is as impossible to swallow as the myth of the president’s superior character. Listen, I’ll make no claims for Mitt Romney on this score. From a distance, he seems a decent person enough but I don’t know him and I’m willing to stipulate he’s no better than any other politician. But on the very surface of it, based on his own words and actions and what we know, President Obama clearly does not live up even to that exceedingly low standard.

In many ways, the political “character issue” is a nonsense, a phrase invented by the media as an excuse to expose people’s sex lives. But the real sins that people commit in moments of physical intimacy — sins of personal unkindness, dishonesty and self-degradation — are none of the public’s business. Bill Clinton committed adultery in the Oval Office with a woman half his age and shame on him, but what’s it to me? That satisfying swell of righteous indignation we feel in the presence of others’ personal weaknesses is mostly a psychological ruse to keep us from focusing on our own — that’s a loose translation of Gospel wisdom ^[14], I know, but a fair one.
No, the parts of a politician’s character that matter to the voter are revealed in his relationship to the American people and the principles of American liberty and law. These are the areas in which Obama has shown himself to be a man unsuited to his office. Here are three examples.

1. He lies to us constantly about who he is. Not in the way most politicians lie, spinning and shading events with self-serving half-truths. He lies with the arrogant bravado of a con man messiah. My grandfather was tortured by the British ^[16]. My parents met because of the march in Selma ^[17]. My white girlfriend wanted to be black ^[18]. These aren’t lies that were forced out of him in a rough moment to defend himself from controversy — like the lie about terrorist William Ayers being just a guy in the neighborhood, or the one about never having heard the hate-mongering of Jeremiah Wright — these are intentionally crafted falsehoods. They were meant to do exactly what they did: to recreate Obama in the image of the black savior leftists had been waiting for, the man who would relieve them of the disfiguring guilt arising from their dreadful history of racism ^[19] and justify the disastrous havoc their policies have wreaked ^[20] on African-Americans.

2. He does not believe in the American way. When he is not lying, when he thinks he’s among friends, when he inadvertently announces his radicalism because it runs so deep he doesn’t even realize it is radicalism, when he thinks he can get away with it because it’s good politics, Obama reveals his philosophy to be antithetical to the exceptional American project of limited government, personal liberty and free enterprise. The Constitution needs to be falsely interpreted to allow wealth redistribution ^[21].  The free market doesn’t work ^[22]. His actions should not be hampered by Congress ^[23]. The Supreme Court has no right to overturn his laws as unconstitutional ^[24]. America is arrogant ^[25] overseas. He can decide unilaterally which laws will be enforced ^[26]. He can override the free practice of religion ^[27] if he thinks the issue is really, really important. Again and again, he reveals himself to be wholly a product of the anti-American, anti-liberal and anti-democratic left ^[28] at odds with the principles of our founding.

3. He has no clue how things actually work. Even if socialism did work, it would be wrong because it would strip people of the fruits of their labor and the property rights on which liberty depends. Thankfully, it doesn’t work, which makes the moral issue moot. But Obama has no clue of what’s been tried and found wanting. He surrounds himself with ideologues and tunes out anyone who’s ever made an honest dime in the real world. Thus every single idea the “progressive” president puts forward is a regressive throwback to notions that have been failing miserably for more than seventy years. The stuff he believes is just plain dopey. He thinks technology ^[29] is the cause of unemployment. He does not understand that only private jobs create the wealth that makes public jobs possible ^[30]. He thinks that wind and solar energy ^[31] should be subsidized and fossil fuel production ^[32] suppressed. He insists on bringing the European social model ^[33] to the U.S. even as the model implodes in front of our eyes.

So go ahead, tell me that Mitt Romney is rich and I should hate him for it. Tell me that he’s white and I should hate him for that. Tell me that his wife rides horses or that he said something nasty when he was fifteen or that — omigod! — he’s a Mormon. Whatever his foibles and flaws, it seems pretty clear that Romney has the character to be president. Barack Obama has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he does not.