This post over at Marginal Revolution is getting a lot of attention. Steve Sailer is filling the comments thread, which always brings out a lot of responses. The discussion about Obama is following the usual path. Even his supporters struggle to accept that he is a bright guy. That’s always been a strange thing about Obama-mania. The concept of the “first black president” overwhelmed any discussion of the man. His biggest fans know little about him. other than his skin.
There’s something else which will make Obama an inscrutable curiosity for generations to come. The man lacks the usual traits we associate with leadership. There’s no evidence of physical courage. He is an awkward klutz, who is timid and aloof. All of our post-war presidents have been manly, for lack of a better word. He also lacks the risk taking trait. Again, even his biggest fans describe him as excessively cautious. He is also indecisive. This is something his fans loath about him.
That may be why his critics say he is average. He’s smart enough to know he is not smart enough so he waits until the smart people decide. Then he jumps on their idea as if it is his own. That’s a possibility, but being a genius has never been a desirable quality in leaders. Obama is at least as smart as Bush or Clinton, which is to say smart enough. The decisiveness of Bush and Clinton was more than enough to overcome whatever intellectual challenges they faced.
Obama is our first alien president. Everyone in the ruling class is alien to normal Americans, but Obama is alien to the aliens. By the time a candidate is nominated, we know everything there is to know about him from birth to that moment. With Obama, we’re still not sure about large swaths of his life, including where he was born. He never tells stories about his youth or about when he was starting out in life. No one shows up on TV talking about their friendship with Obama.
It’s as if he exists conceptually, but not tangibly. That really is the way to imagine Obama as a president. he is an avatar, a creation projected on the screens of our common culture. When his time is up, the projector will be turned off and he will go away and be forgotten. That’s because he was never a person, but instead a guy who ticked the boxes for a campaign operation. Nice guy who took direction well and never tried to improvise. He read his script as written.
For Obama to have been born in a foreign country: (1) Obama’s relatives would have had to have been rich enough (and they weren’t. In 1961 Obama’s grandfather was a furniture salesman, and his grandmother was a low-level employee in a bank [she did not become a vice president until 1970], and his father went from Kenya to Hawaii on a free flight) and dumb enough to send their daughter at high risk of stillbirth to a foreign country to give birth—-—despite there being fine hospitals in Hawaii; (2) Obama’s mother would have had to have traveled overseas ALONE (since… Read more »
Re: “including where he was born.” Answer: Obama was born in HAWAII. In fact, Obama has shown his HAWAII birth certificate twice, the short-form (the official birth certificate) and the long form. He has shown both the images on the Web and the actual physical copies. The official physical copy of the long form was passed around in the White House press room. THREE Republican and several Democrat officials in Hawaii have confirmed the facts on Obama’s birth certificate and repeatedly confirmed that they sent both the short form and long form to him. And Obama’s birth in Hawaii in… Read more »
Every person has his own secret identity. Conqueror, patriot, martyr, etc. Obama’s is the Liberator. His secret self is the Black Liberator, risen from obscurity, suffering slings, arrows, and jail time from his people’s oppressors, rising in the end to lift up his people (as Nelson Mandela did). This is the Black Liberation theology he heard in church for twenty years. Except that he didn’t suffer, he was pampered all along, and traded off of his mysterious undefinable background for easy bennies all along. Now he represents “his” oppressed people, blacks and gays. The enemy, the republicans, never quit, they… Read more »
He’s as queer as a $3 bill. That’s what the Dems are hiding.
> including where he was born.
This is dumb.
>It’s as if he exists conceptually, but not tangibly.
This is brilliant.
Just to be clear, I’ve never thought the place of his birth was of any importance. The Founders conception of citizenship meant a citizen at birth. Being the child of a citizen was all that would have mattered.
That said, it is another weird log on the weirdo pyre. Not having a birth certificate is not normal.
Obama is to leadership the same way a “boy band” is to musicianship.
He looked the part (or someone’s idea of what a leader looks like) and the Democratic marketing and hype machines got to work on grooming / manufacturing an image for him. It hasn’t worked out too well for the country but I suspect it won’t be the last time this strategy is used.