What motivates our President's ambition? Why does Obama behave and lead the way he does, bowing there and ignoring public opinion here?
Shelby Steele has a pretty good idea. Like Obama, he has a black father and a white mother. Here are some excerpts from his
WSJ op-ed, Barack the Good.
"Suppose you were the first black president of the United States and,
therefore, also the first black head-of-state in the entire history of
Western Civilization. You represent a human first, something entirely
new under the sun. There aren't even any myths that speak directly to
your circumstance, no allegorical tales of ancient black kings who ruled
over white kingdoms.
"If anything, you may literally experience yourself as a myth in the
making. After all, you embody a heretofore unimaginable transcendence
over the old human plagues of tribalism, hatred and ignorance. Standing
on ground that no man has stood on before, wouldn't it be understandable
if you felt pressured by the grandiosity of your circumstance? Isn't
there a special—and impossible—burden on "the first" to do something
that lives up to his historical originality?
"A historic figure making history, this is emerging as an over-arching
theme—if not obsession—in the Obama presidency. In Iowa, a day after
signing health care into law, he put himself into competition with
history. If history shapes men, "We still have the power to shape
history." But this adds up to one thing: He is likely to be the most
liberal president in American history. And, oddly, he may be a more
effective liberal precisely because his liberalism is something he uses
more than he believes in. As the far left constantly reminds us, he is
not really a true believer. Rather liberalism is his ticket to
grandiosity and to historical significance.
"Of the two great societal goals—freedom and "the good"—freedom
requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good,
limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today's
liberalism is focused on "the good" more than on freedom. And ideas of
"the good" are often a license to transgress democratic principles in
order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen
suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its
offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence—if not
superiority—on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health
insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence
at the same time.
"Mr. Obama's success has always been ephemeral because it was based on an
illusion: that if we Americans could transcend race enough to elect a
black president, we could transcend all manner of human banalities and
be on our way to human perfectibility. A black president would put us in
a higher human territory. And yet the poor man we elected to play out
this fantasy is now torturing us with his need to reflect our
grandiosity back to us."
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