The Best on Barack Obama

Americans who don’t savor the prospect of a President Barack Obama need to realize he is where he’s at because of the failures of the Republican Party. If elected Republican leadership had been doing their job for the past decade or so, there is no way such an inexperienced, unaccomplished and radical left-winger would be taken seriously by enough voters to make his election to the most important office in the world a possibility.

It’s bad enough this country had to suffer through Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Today, Republicans have no excuse for not learning from those two experiences and changing their ways.

When Republicans at the state and national level continually fail to advance a domestic policy agenda, and continually fail to fully explain and defend their foreign policy, the results are theatrical candidacies like Barack Obama’s. A year ago I wrote, “Audacity or not, he’s not ready,” and one year later that’s still the case.

Serious critics have been warning state and federal Republican candidates and office holders for a long time that if the debate isn’t going to be about something, it’s going to be about nothing.  And no one has campaigned better on nothing than Barack Obama.

There are countless ways to articulate a reform agenda, but Republicans seem stuck in rhetoric from the 1980s. The only problem is that the Ronald Reagan is no longer President, the Cold War is over, and an entire generation of newly mal-educated Americans are now of voting age.

This website has not only chronicled the leadership failure of our party, it has outlined the solution.

Words spoken by Republican President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War nicely sum up the challenge facing his party today: “We must change our tactics, or lose the game.”

A few years ago Kerri Houston and Merrill Matthews Jr. wrote in a piece in Investors Business Daily titled “All Politics is Marketing,” that –

“Public policy isn’t determined by truth and lies. If it were, we would already have a low, flat income tax rate, personal retirement accounts instead of Social Security, no capital gains taxes or double taxation, school choice and many other conservative policies.”

Still today, the GOP completely ignores the simple fact that it’s “not enough to have the best policies” – those policies have to be communicated effectively so an emotional connection is made with the public. When they don’t connect, the Democrats sell personalities, however flawed or vapid.

Today we launch a new feature – “The Best on Barack.” It will report some of the better passages being written and said in the media about Illinois’ own junior senator.

While Hillary Clinton is still in the fight, nothing yet has occurred to dissuade Democrat primary voters from continuing their long-overdue rejection of the Clintons.

Of course getting to know Barack Obama is only part of what is needed. Let’s not forget that we knew a great deal about Bill Clinton before the November 1992 election but he won anyway.

Let’s start with New York Times columnist David Brooks, who wrote “When the Magic Fades” back on February 19th, 2008.

Brooks gave a name to a new national phenomenon: “Obama Comedown Syndrome” (O.C.S.).

“The afflicted had already been through the phases of Obama-mania – fainting at rallies, weeping over their touch screens while watching Obama videos, spending hours making folk crafts featuring Michelle Obama’s face. These patients had experienced intense surges of hope-amine, the brain chemical that fuels euphoric sensations of historic change and personal salvation…

Up until now The Chosen One’s speeches had seemed to them less like stretches of words and more like soul sensations that transcended time and space. But those in the grips of Obama Comedown Syndrome began to wonder if His stuff actually made sense. For example, His Hopeness tells rallies that we are the change we have been waiting for, but if we are the change we have been waiting for then why have we been waiting since we’ve been here all along?”

In addition to “The Chosen One” and “His Hopeness,” Brooks used a few other good nicknames for Obama, including:

The Hope Pope

The Presence

The Changemaker

The High Deacon of Unity

Brooks also asked some very good questions, including these:

“How is a 47-year-old novice going to unify highly polarized 70-something [U.S. Congress] committee chairs? What will happen if the nation’s 261,000 lobbyists don’t see the light, even after the laying on of hands? Does The Changemaker have the guts to take on the special interests in his own party – the trial lawyers, the teachers’ unions, the AARP?”

Brooks wrote that those who suffer from O.C.S. know that most of Obama’s “hope-mongering is vaporous,” but they like him anyway because “they still know something about his soul, and he knows something about theirs.”

Click here to read the column.