By Kyle-Anne Shiver
One can only shake the head in wonder at why Barack Obama, the brilliant-beyond-brilliant presidential candidate, has flopped so badly in the same type of campaign-stump venues he enchanted with fairy dust a mere two years ago.
Perhaps, as he opined himself in The Audacity of Hope, the throngs loved him in '08 because he was a "blank slate" upon whom voters cast their own pictures. Now that he has an actual record of governance, his audiences are no longer fodder for easy bamboozling. In '08, the people saw what they wanted to see; reality bites back in 2010.
Or perhaps Obama's current flop is the natural result of overexposure through constant in-your-face public appearances, even on entertainment television, so that his once-exceptional aura has hit the trash-bin of history. Familiarity breeds contempt; force-fed familiarity breeds a national demand for barf bags.
However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Alinsky-style community organizing philosophy sees our community organizer in chief as exactly what he was trained to be. Both off the stump and on it, the community organizer is not a doer, but a talker. The community organizer is condescending and arrogant, but he is so far above the station and education of those he is sent in to organize that he gets away with his arrogance.
The community organizer is hired by outsiders to infiltrate a town considered by others ripe for organizing. The organizer's first priority is to ingratiate himself with the community insiders. To this end, he is instructed to employ manipulative tools, such as adopting the locals' dialects and particular phraseology. He is taught to adapt purposely and sell himself as one of them. The organizer's job is always one of deception -- from start to finish. Deceit is the organizer's middle name.
Second, the organizer is tasked with "rubbing raw the sores of discontent." He is to take any complaint he overhears and blow it out of proportion, talking about it to no end, never letting up on the horrors of the people's plight.
Once the people are agitated, angry, and so aggrieved that they are downright desperate, the organizer steps in with the carrot of "hope."
And in the organizer's bevy of solutions, there is but one answer to desperation, one available source of "hope" for the people: government money.
Our community organizer-in-chief played this hand with great finesse on the campaign trail. But he walked into a national arena already primed for his appearance. For the previous seven years at least, the mainstream media had beaten George W. Bush, the Republican Party, and every conservative "right-wing" Christian "wingnut" to a bloody pulp. Then, along came the housing bubble burst on the tail of the bank debacle, a crisis undeniably set in motion by the Democrat home-ownership push over the past forty years. With all of these crises going on and a "never let a crisis go to waste" attitude, Barack Obama walked into a community whose "sores of discontent" were already rubbed plenty darned "raw."
So when he took his deceptive oratory on the campaign trail as a political blank slate and offered up the "hope" and "change" that would make all our problems go away, the American community bought his lines faster than you can say "snake oil." In '08, Obama looked like Al Gore at a global warming tent revival, smiling, passing the hat, basking in the glow of ethereal hope, and laughing all the way to the bank.
But the community organizer is and always has been nothing but a used-car-salesman-type middleman. The community organizer's job is not getting things done, not improving conditions for real people, but talking a good game and somehow forcing government money out of the hands of the haves and putting it into the hands of the have-nots. He is a middleman sent in to make the sale and take a handsome cut from the pilfered money.
In '08, when Barack Obama sent tingles down the legs of media big-shots with his salesmanship, his favorite shtick was the economic pie metaphor. Obama delivered his "I'm gonna get you have-nots your rightful piece of the pie" metaphor gig on stage after stage, in town after town, and it was a huge hit. One woman gushed that she couldn't wait for him to be president so she would no longer have to worry about putting gas in her car or paying her mortgage.
But it didn't take even a Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist to find out that Obama's community organizing in Chicago had left people no better off, and sometimes worse off, than before he had brought his silver tongue into town. As an Illinois state senator, Obama had managed to wrangle millions of housing money for a poor Chicago neighborhood. Then he jumped into bed with slumlord (and now convicted felon) Tony Rezko, and within a few short years, those once-glowing housing units were being condemned as uninhabitable -- without working lights and water.
That piece of the pie turned into nothing more tangible than pie in the sky for thousands of naïve people.
Now that our community organizer-in-chief has given away all our pie and handed out IOUs for more pies than the country can ever hope to bake, he stands around dumbstruck because, ladies and gentlemen, he never had the slightest clue how those ingredients got from farm and factory to the grocery stores to the pantry to the hardworking hands that made them. He's now become baker-in-chief, and he doesn't have a single recipe for more pie, much less the skills to make one.
So this year, the community organizer-in-chief left behind the losing pie metaphor and treats his audiences to a different stand-up routine about the car in the ditch. He dons the down-low dialect, as he has been taught to ingratiate himself with the audience. (They are not supposed to remember Martha's Vineyard and all the country club golfing.) He warms up the shrinking, increasingly skeptical crowds with cutesy word-pictures about the Democrats rolling up their sleeves and gettin' down and dirty in that ditch while Republicans stand around fannin' themselves and sippin' on a Slurpee -- and then seems flummoxed as Democrat poll numbers show that this time around, the community organizing shtick can't close the sale.
It's almost painful to watch a man so out of his depth that he has reduced the Presidency of the United States of America to stand-up, comedic salesmanship. And he is falling flat even at that.
It's enough to make a grown woman cry. It's enough to make a citizen yearn for the slow-talking, never terribly witty but utterly sincere George W. Bush. And it ought to be enough to wise up an entire generation of American citizens.
Barack Obama is the natural culmination of the Democrat-socialists' attempts to transform genuine civics and statesmanship into nothing more substantial than tacky political theater. The results of this dimwitted tomfoolery are painful. And the consequences will be felt for a hundred years.
Our only hope now is for the voters to give our community organizer-in-chief a powerful set of brakes for his socialist dune-buggy that runs on heaps of other people's money. Then we must pray, hope, and pray some more that we can find a president in the next go-round who possesses a lot more in his head than a silver tongue. A great pie recipe would seem to be at the top of the list.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at www.kyleanneshiver.com.
