[ilbegone]

There was great essay in the paper the other day by Victor Hanson Davis in which he summed up the president perfectly.

However, the best paragraph was edited and revised by the time I got to the electronic version a couple days later.

As my best recollection and certainly paraphrased, it stated that Obama views America not as an energetic and productive country with a unique constitution and notions of freedom to be dispensed throughout the world, but has the notion that our history is one of class struggle and oppression of the minority. Obama was trained as a lawyer and has spent his whole working life around lawyers and those people like to lecture.

It is my observation that people who like to lecture are deaf to anyone who doesn't agree with them.

He obviously is on a quest to remake our country into something he believes it should be regardless of public approval. Just one more example of the old quote "the public be damned".

And, if the voters don't agree with him, he'll import some who will in exchange for taxpayer funded freebies.

This joker needs to be a one term president.
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Hanson's essay, the edited paragraph is bolded:

Opinion: Victor Davis Hanson:

Drop the 'teachable moments' and get back to nation's business

By Victor Davis Hanson
Posted: 08/19/2010 10:02:50 AM PDT
Updated: 08/19/2010 07:45:22 PM PDT

The president of the United States has it hard enough without needlessly wading into, and fanning, local controversies. The economy is battered by sluggish growth, high unemployment, record annual deficits and near-unsustainable national debt. More than 50 percent of the people now disapprove of Barack Obama's handling of these problems.

So why weigh in on hot-button issues that can only polarize people without solving anything?

Last summer, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a scholar of African-American literature and history, got into a silly dispute with a local policeman. For some reason, Obama rushed to judgment and gratuitously announced that police Sgt. James Crowley and the local Cambridge, Mass., police had acted "stupidly." For relish, he added that police wrongly stereotype in general. Obama supporters wrote off the entire psychodrama as a "teachable moment."

Arizona recently passed a bill designed to enforce existing immigration law and stop the enormous influx of illegal immigrants into the state. Various groups, including the federal government, quickly made plans to sue the state. Yet various polls indicated that 70 percent of Americans agreed with the Arizona law, and dozens of states were planning similar legislation.

Nonetheless, the president also jumped into that acrimony -- well before the law went into effect. Obama and his attorney general alleged that Arizonans were promoting stereotyping, even though police were forbidden to question the immigration status of those who had not come into prior contact with law enforcement.

Most recently, Obama pontificated about the proposed mosque next to ground zero in Lower Manhattan, in what his supporters might call a "teachable moment." The issue is not a legal one. Both sides recognize the legal right of Muslims to build mosques anywhere that local zoning ordinances permit them. Instead, the controversy pertains to common decency, and the nature of the funding and proponents of the project.

No matter: The president instead lectured his mostly Muslim audience that America respects the rights of all religions -- again, not the issue in question. A day later, in embarrassment, he backtracked a bit.

Where to start with all these teachable moments?

All these controversies involve issues addressed at the state and local level, with presidential action unnecessary. In such contentious matters, why intervene when Obama cannot do much other than polarize millions?

We have learned that Obama has a bad habit of impugning the motives of those with whom he disagrees. In the Gates case, he rushed to condemn Crowley and the police. Arizonans were not to be seen as desperate citizens trying to enforce federal law, but instead derided as bigots who harass minorities when they go out to get ice cream. And in the mosque case, the president disingenuously implied that opponents of a ground zero mosque wanted to deny the legal right of Muslims to build religious centers.

Note that all three issues poll badly for the president, and belie his former image as a conciliator and healer.

Again, why does Obama go off-message to sermonize about these seemingly minor things that so energize his opposition and make life difficult for his fellow Democrats?

First, off-the-cuff pontificating on extraneous issues is a lot easier than dealing with a bad economy, two wars and heightening tensions abroad. Sermonizing is a lot different from rounding up votes in Congress, fending off reporters at news conferences or dealing with aggressors abroad -- and it can also turn our attention away from nearly 10 percent unemployment and a heavily indebted government.

Second, Obama has spent most of his life around academics, lawyers, journalists and organizers. That insular culture tends to pontificate and lecture others far more than do action-oriented business people, soldiers, doctors and farmers -- the doers who are few and far between in this administration.

Obama should remember that successful presidents build bridges to solve national and international problems. They leave polarizing local controversies to divisive community organizers and partisan activists.


VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is a syndicated columnist affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/c...nclick_check=1