Obama, a Man of the People

The mosque at Ground Zero continues to make headlines. First, New York Governor David Patterson made a good faith effort to defuse the controversy by offering to help Imam Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative find another location for his mosque. This good faith effort was flatly rejected by Rauf, which comes as a shock to exactly no one who has bothered to read about Rauf's background and connections. Then President Obama jumped into the fray, declaring his strong support for building the mosque at Ground Zero in a public speech, another piece of breaking news which should have come as no surprise to keen political observers.

(Just an aside: while Imam Rauf most definitely sympathizes with terrorism, not all Muslims share this radical ideology. Two genuinely moderate Muslims, Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah of the Muslim Canadian Congress, wrote an excellent op-ed piece in the Ottawa Citizen last week about the mosque controversy.)

The thing that I love most about Obama is that he is, delightfully, a man of the people. He shares the values, aspirations, and worldview of ordinary Americans, as the following examples demonstrate:

1. While 68% of Americans have grave concerns about a radical Islamic cleric building a mosque at Ground Zero, Obama has enthusiastically endorsed the idea. (Why do the little people still care about 9/11? It's been almost 10 years since the worst attack on our soil, folks, can we just get over it already?)

2. While being disgracefully lax in enforcing federal immigration laws, Obama is busy using taxpayer dollars to sue the state of Arizona (along with lying about the law in public speeches). Obama might be a little out of touch on this: 60% of Americans support the Arizona law, 70% oppose the lawsuit against Arizona, and huge majorities think the federal government needs to do a better job controlling the border.

3. While a significant majority of Americans opposed both the substance of ObamaCare and the corrupt, partisan procedure used to pass it (and similar majorities now support its repeal), Obama considers it a historic achievement. (Once we find out what's in the 2,000+ page bill, we'll let you know. A toast to my legacy!) His Justice Department claims that the government has a right to force people to purchase private health insurance. In a recent referendum, 71% of Missouri voters (including a majority of voters in every single county in the state) disagreed.

4. While polls repeatedly show that Americans are extremely worried about the unsustainable national debt, Obama has merrily proceeded to triple the deficit after a year in office. While polls repeatedly show that Americans believe federal spending is out of control, Obama and his Congressional allies have rammed through numerous huge spending bills costing hundreds of billions of dollars a pop -- the $787 billion stimulus, the trillion dollar health care reform bill, the auto industry bailout, the financial services reform bill, etc. While polls show Americans are worried about the imminent bankruptcy of existing entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, Obama is busy creating new ones that only make the problem worse.

5. Obama supports shutting down Guantanamo Bay and either releasing the military combatants held there or bringing them to the U.S. -- all this against the strong opposition of the public (and many Democrats). Obama supports having a civilian trial for Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, in New York City, despite the fact that his case was already virtually completed in military courts. A mere 2/3 of the public opposes such a trial, probably because they are ignorant bigots.

6. Obama supports cap-and-trade legislation, which by his own admission would dramatically increase production costs and consumer prices for electricity and natural gas. Of course, it's all in the cause of promoting "green" energy and slowing global warming. Polling has indicated the public is highly skeptical that global warming is even primarily caused by human activity, and that the public would prefer not to have their utility bills double to finance the latest breakthroughs in ethanol and windmill technology.

7. Significant majorities of Congress and the voting public have long supported Israel - both its right to exist as a nation and its special status as a close friend and ally of the U.S. Even heavily Democratic Jewish groups in the U.S. have criticized Obama' contemptuous behavior toward Israel, including several public snubs, an unwillingness to stand up to anti-Israel bullying in the U.N., and a refusal to get tough on Iran.

8. Obama registered his opposition to Prop 8 in California which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. This puts him at odds not only with a majority of voters in one of the most left-wing states in the country; it also puts him at odds with a much larger percentage of voters nationwide.

9. Polls have shown that huge majorities of Americans want their elected officials to work together to get things done, and are tired of the excessive partisanship in Washington. Obama's promise to be a post-partisan president was a key part of his appeal. Since getting elected, Obama has accomplished nothing in a bi-partisan fashion. He excluded Republicans from closed-door health care deliberations, and his party muscled all major pieces of legislation through Congress with seriously curtailed debate and with no effort to win over even moderate Republicans. He and his spokesmen have personally ridiculed and attacked news organizations and private citizens by name, repeatedly questioned the motives of his Republican critics, and explicitly played racial politics. His close allies even attacked ordinary townhall protestors exercising their constitutional right to participate in government, calling them Nazis and brownshirts.

10. Polls show that large majorities of Americans consider America to be a basically fair and decent society and a model of freedom and justice for the rest of the world. Obama, on the other hand, has made numerous speeches overseas in which he has apologized for American policies and publicly blamed his predecessor for all kinds of supposed injustices. He allowed the Mexican president to publicly attack Arizona without protest, and one of our ambassadors to China to equate U.S. human rights violations with Chinese human rights violations. He always seems to go soft on anti-American regimes like Iran and Venezuela while being harsh against American allies like Britain and Israel. His speech to a Muslim-American audience for Ramadan last week seemed to condemn a majority of his fellow-Americans for being against religious freedom for American Muslims, which is a hateful slur against America, possibly the most religiously tolerant country on earth.

11. Perhaps worst of all, Obama appears out-of-touch and indifferent to the sufferings of ordinary Americans. His administration never bothered to declare a state of emergency earlier this year in Tennessee, a state where more than a dozen people died in terrible flooding. His handling of the Gulf oil spill was pathetic. His administration was painfully slow to acknowledge the problem, painfully slow to approve state proposals to build sand barriers, painfully slow to approve and deploy equipment to the region, painfully slow to issue a public statement, painfully slow to visit the Gulf region. They never did waive the Jones Act to allow foreign oil skimmers to help with the cleanup. The few decisions Obama did make quickly, such a moratorium on deep-sea drilling, were strongly opposed by Gulf residents whose livelihoods depend on the oil industry. While Gulf coast residents were suffering, Obama was partying it up numerous times with celebrities in the White House and golfing for 5 or 6 hours every single weekend. In fact, Obama and his family have made a habit out of hobnobbing with celebrities and vacationing in the most exclusive spots (Bar Harbor, Martha's Vineyard) in the middle of one of the worst recessions in our history. With 10% unemployment, does Michelle Obama really need to be vacationing in Spain and staying in a hotel where each room costs $2,500 per night?

Obama, man of the people!!!