Obama’s and Democrats’ world falling apart before our eyes

I’m almost feeling sorry for Obama (no, not really), with Velma Hart’s blistering complaint and question to him yesterday at a townhall-style meeting about the state of the economy. As an omen of the future of the administration, the incident reminded me of a New York Times headline about Jimmy Carter in the summer of 1979: “Carter, exhausted, drops out of race,” accompanied by a photo of the leader of the free world in running clothes, with a stricken look on his face, bent over in pain. He had gone on a six mile run in extremely high temperatures, and couldn’t handle it, and so got himself photographed in such a pathetic and humiliating posture. A leader who puts himself in a position like that is a leader who has lost his mojo. And the same is true of Obama many times over, when he organizes an economic forum (where presumably the participants are carefully screened) and a very confident and well-spoken middle class black lady politely yet devastatingly batters him over the head like a street gang beating their victim into unconsciousness. (Of course I don’t mean to compare Mrs. Hart to street thugs—I’m trying to convey her crushing, merciless effect on Obama.)

Or, as Mark McKinnon at The Daily Beast writes, “It’s bad enough when the opposing party is banging on you, but when your core supporters say they’re ‘exhausted’ from defending you, that is code blue.”

Comments

Indian living in the West writes:

It is unreasonable and inhuman to expect one man to “change” anything to such an extent.

But to be fair, Obama has been hoisted by his own petard. He promised all this drivel and now he cannot deliver. In football (soccer to Americans) that is called an “own goal.”

Karl D. writes:

There are already cries from the Left that Velma Hart was a right wing “plant”. Like the old saying, denial is not a river in Egypt.

LA writes:

Many commenters at Lucianne.com were foolishly praising Hart as some kind of conservative hero. There was nothing conservative in what she said. Like other thoughtless Obama voters on the left, she expected some vague, measureless fulfillment from his presidency. It hasn’t occurred, and now they’re upset. And can we believe that she’s living on or on the verge of having to live on hot dogs and beans? She and her husband still have their executive-level jobs, right (she’s the chief financial officer of a private organization that deals with veterans)? So the significance of the comment was not that Hart said anything so great or insightful about the economy, it was simply the ruthless putdown of Obama by a together black woman face to face on national TV, where she was calling him on his b.s. promises of some marvelous change, whereas instead we have this extended deep recession.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 21, 2010 12:35 PM | Send