“Why he’ll never be Barack Obama again”

Esquire has a long, literary obituary of the Messiah who has lost his powers.

Stripped of its hero-worship and pretentious illusions, however, all that the article is saying comes down to this: the exposure of the ultimate black empty suit as the ultimate black empty suit.

- end of initial entry -

Jeff C. writes:

Is Obama really akin to the people described in “The Empty Black Suit”? Not obvious.

Even if your understanding of black intelligence vis a vis whites is correct, couldn’t the story be explained by his embrace of a destructive ideology?

I’ve heard that intelligence is inherited from the mother, or largely so.

LA replies:

The idea that clicked with me here was this: the black empty suit is somebody who is good at talking, at using the verbal formulae and visual cues that white liberals like to hear and see; but he lacks the substantive ability to do the job.

Obama as candidate was supremely gifted in employing the verbal formula and visual cues that press white liberals’ buttons. That he had these abilities is proved by the Esquire article itself, with its transcendental worship of the rhetoric of the Obama of 2008. I myself said many times that Obama’s supreme confidence in himself came from his belief in his ability to talk his way out of any situation. However, as it has turned out, Obama’s ability to talk was not adequate to the exigencies of the presidency. He has been exposed as a black empty suit.

I should add that I’ve never agreed with Joseph Kay’s description of Obama as an empty suit; for example, the ruthless determination with which Obama pushed through the health care bill was not the mark of an empty suit but of an effective ideologue and dictator. However, his present collapse, detailed by Esquire, does fit the pattern of the empty suit.

Jake F. writes:

I couldn’t finish it. If I’m going to read about the death of a god, I’ll stick to Balder. At least he was a hero.

I feel embarrassed for the author. For example, when I read this:

“Sure, he was cool and cerebral, but he was also confident, almost cocky, because he had the power to summon inspiring rhetoric on command, which meant that he had the power to summon us on command,”

I thought, are you so foolish as to be commanded by a man reading a teleprompter? Don’t you know you’re submitting yourself to Obama’s speechwriter? Mightn’t you just submit to Patrick Stewart as easily as Obama, if he were reading the same script? Or Alec Baldwin? Or Denzel Washington?

Reagan was an actor who became a political leader because of his substance. Obama is a chimera who became a political leader because of his acting.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 04, 2010 06:20 PM | Send