BARACK: THE SILVER-FOOTED ORATOR

“He can’t he’p it; he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” These words, ungraciously spoken by former Texas Governor Ann Richards about George H. W. Bush at the 1988 Democrat convention, may now be transferred to The Great Barackster--the primary difference being that the latter’s rhetorical lapses have a distinctly Marxist twist.

The Obamameister wants “typical white person(s)” to know that he, the bi-racial Harvard lawyer and Chicago pol, feels their pain—that he’s more than a silver-tongued demigod eager to pass out bottled ambrosia to swooning groupies. Unfortunately, The Exalted One, unlike The Arkansas Empathizer, hasn’t mastered the dramatic trick of biting his lower-lip and projecting that teary-eyed, beaten-dog look that works so well on voters seeking sympathy (and on women craving a man-boy to mother).

Absent these affective illusions, The Dalai Obama can’t simply say that he’s moved by people’s distress. And highfalutin’ language doesn’t play well in Painsville. Consequently, His Holiness must explain to Bay Area devotees why blue-collar Pennsylvanians aren’t swarming like good disciples to his side. The reason for this reluctance, The B. H. Oracle explains, is that these lunch-bucketeers are embittered and have poured their anger into pointless political and spiritual preoccupations.

Here are The Audacious One’s ipsissima verba: “It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Put more directly, Herr Obama might have spoken as follows: “You Yahoos don’t really care about illegal immigration or gay marriage. What you hate is a government that hasn’t improved your economic status in decades. All that time and effort you put into protesting against abortion and for gun rights is just an expression of your frustration over the forces of globalization. And since no intelligent person takes seriously the things a preacher says in the pulpit, what you naively believe is commitment to a higher spiritual power is actually a misdirected protest against the capitalist devils who’ve reduced you to pawns in a hellish game of outsourcing and downsizing.”

Perceptive auditors will hear the words “opiate” and “delusion” echoing in the vast cranial spaces between those prominent Obamanian ears—intellectual tidbits derived from Marx and Freud during The Great One’s formative years in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Or perhaps The Eminent Explainer got his economic reductionism second hand from Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas?—a condescending treatise that berates heartland hayseeds who can’t see the leftist truth in front of their eyes and who forfeit their economic birthright for a mess of values-voter pottage. Indeed, Frank might have subtitled his snooty work “False Consciousness on the Plains.”

Personal experience, of course, also informs The Blessed One’s view of religion, since for him and his spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “faith” is clearly more about “street-cred” and black identity than it is about the tenets of a religion whose name is deceptively appended to a political organization in clerical drag.

Unwilling to admit an error, His Infallibleness doubled down on stupid by putting out a revised edition of his “religion as emotional compensation” dictum—a creed The Opportunistic One doubtless embraces with pure faith.

"So I said, well you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country."

This “clarification” was accompanied with the now-omnipresent non-apology, apology: “…if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that.”

This formulation stealthily puts the onus for offense on the linguistic sensitivities of the offended. The Intractable One then strengthened this penitential reversal by insisting that “the underlying truth of what I said remains.”

Though His Barackness may not be aware of it, Fyoder Dostoevsky also knew a thing or two about psychology, faith, and despair. In The Brothers Karamazov the Russian author employs a dramatic courtroom scene to show that psychology is “a knife that cuts both ways." Thus, what I would like Comrade Sigmund Obama to analyze is the pathology of bitterness and victimization that motivates the likes of Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson—a bitterness that transforms racial grievance into personal power but systematically undermines the reasonable hopes their followers cherish. Or does bitterness only explain the actions and beliefs of folks who don’t share the Democrat Senator’s political agenda?

Great Obama Buddha, open thy mouth and insert again thy silver foot!