Why Obama threw away the broad-based support he enjoyed at the beginning of his presidency

The liberal Long Island Newsday has joined the many papers which endorsed Obama in 2008 but now endorse Romney. Its editorial closes with this telling observation:

Although he was elected in a time of economic turmoil, Ronald Reagan’s greatest achievement wasn’t his tax plan or his economic theories. His success came from emotional leadership, the ability to bring us together and reignite our confidence in the virtues and future of the nation. This is what FDR did. It is this that Barack Obama has failed to do.

Elected with a significant mandate and his party briefly in control of both houses of the Congress, Obama squandered the support of the nation.

Newsday’s remark about Obama’s squandering the support of the nation reminds me of a question I raised during the 2008 campaign. There were, I noted, two contradictory things that were true about Obama. On one hand, he was a life-long leftist with an obvious racial-socialist, anti-white, anti-American agenda. On the other hand, he seemed to want to be loved by everyone. And it wasn’t definite in my mind whether as president he would pursue leftism or love. If the latter, he would throw his leftism under the bus, as just one more stepping stone that had helped him get where he was and now could be discarded.

As it happened, of course, once in office he opted immediately for leftism, which was not a surprise. But, which was truly a surprise, he also immediately abandoned the charm which had been one of his main selling points and changed into a very unpleasant, off-putting personality, for which there is no presidential precedent of which I am aware.

And here is the thing about Obama that the centrist-liberal publications which have now turned against him (as well as the mainstream conservative publications which have always opposed him politically, though they at least initially found him personally likeable) will never grasp. What his choice of leftism over love, of hostility over charm, of class warfare over coalition-building revealed about him is that, at bottom, he is an alienated nonwhite whose fundamental feeling toward this historically-white and still majority-white country is dislike. And that is the reason why he has pursued the seemingly perverse course that has turned off many of his former supporters who sit on the editorial boards of centrist-liberal newspapers. However, it is also the reason why, in this nation in which almost half the voters are now either nonwhite or white-leftist, he stands a very good chance of being elected to a second term.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 04, 2012 01:55 PM | Send