Nobody questions Barack Obama’s talent as an effective orator — it’s more a question of what he says than how he says it.
With or without those omnipresent teleprompters, the president is failing to connect to the majority of his fellow Americans, mainly because they emphatically disagree with most of the snake-oil policies he’s trying to sell them.
It is now becoming apparent that the public is anything but happy with Obamacare, which they are beginning to understand inserts the government snack in the middle between themselves, their doctors and institutions that provide medical care for the American people.
That’s the same meddlesome government that loses tons of money delivering the mail and fails to make the trains run on time — a feat even Benito Mussolini, one of the most inefficient dictators in all history, was anecdotally able to accomplish.
Our new system of socialized medicine, nowhere near fully implemented, is already bearing the bitter fruit of out-of-control costs, now planted firmly on the shoulders of the American people.
And that’s only the beginning.
Of late, the president has begun to show his impatience with the American people who, in their ignorance, are failing to show their appreciation for his valiant attempts to bestow upon them the blessings of European-style Marxism, despite the fact that it has failed wherever tried.
Flitting from one backyard to another, democratically attired with open collar and shirt sleeves, he is preaching to his faithful supporters, carefully screened to keep the less-than-slavishly devoted from intruding on his folksy approach.
Even now, in his fervor to advance his peculiar Europeanized agenda, he pushes forward, fully aware that he his dooming his party to near-extinction in the Nov. 2 congressional election.
Some of the more-cynical of our cadre of political observers are suggesting that he is secretly overjoyed by the harbinger of doom hanging over his supporters in Congress, relishing the prospect of running against those villainous Republicans on Capitol Hill for obstructing his heroic and selfless efforts to improve the lot of his fellow Americans.
Harry Truman, allegedly a sure-loser in the 1948 presidential election, turned the tables around by creating an ogre — the GOP controlled “do-nothing” 80th Congress — which he insisted was standing in the way of his efforts to create that year’s Democratic Party vision of Heaven on Earth.
Mr. Obama sees himself poised to recreate the Truman surprise in 2012 by lambasting the current version of a do-nothing Congress, which he rightly surmises will be under GOP control in at least one of the houses of Congress.
He may be correct in that assumption but I very much doubt it.
The bloom is off the Obama rose, except for those misguided Obama devotees who still see him as the 21st century’s messiah.
It’s really amazing when you think of it. This gifted orator who swept across the electoral landscape like an awesome tornado, leveling most opposition and creating a heavily Democratic controlled Congress just short of two years ago, is now on the verge of seeing his party shorn of control of Congress.
And nobody can legitimately suggest that it is anything but his fault.
He has led his troops into a political Dunkirk without the prospect of deliverance. There’s no Churchill to rescue them. And as his party’s leader, he seems perfectly content with the disaster that looms ahead for Democrats.
All this is not to say that he relishes the prospect of a Democratic free-fall; simply that he is sufficiently cynical to appreciate the opportunities inherent therein.
It is the misfortune of the Democratic Party membership that they failed to recognize that their standard bearer was — and is — deeply immersed in a narcissism that allows him to believe he is their superior in all things political and they had better heed his words, delivered with or without a pair of teleprompters.
They will pay the price on November 2, and it will be a whopper.
(Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. E-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.)