http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/09/what_obama_thinks_of_americans.html
We know how Barack Obama feels about Mitt Romney. He holds him in contempt — and, speaking through his proxies, has all but called him a felon, tax cheat, and murderer.
Who cares? Trash talk is Obama’s political lingua franca. He relishes delivering these insults face-to-face while shielded by the respect his victims have for the office of the presidency — a reverence he does not share.
What should be important is how he feels about us: the American people. And how should this impact the so-called likeability gap between him and Romney as election day approaches?
In 2008, Americans questioned Barack Obama’s feelings towards Americans. His famous gaffe was the tipoff:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them[.]
So it’s not surprising then that 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.
Yawn — everyone knows about that broad-based insult. And everyone certainly knew that Obama’s “moral compass,” Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Jr., had scathing views of America and toward Americans. One was explained away as a “gaffe” and the other explained away by claims that Obama was never in the pews when a stream of anti-America invective poured forth from Wright — an excuse belied by Obama’s own words in a newspaper interview and by keen investigative work by Stanley Kurtz in his book Radical-in-Chief (pages 320-3).
But Obama’s condescension towards broad swaths of Americans was presaged years before, and it has deepened and widened over the years. In 1990, he said that “suburbs bore me.” By implication, suburbanites bore him but do have their uses — donations and votes, for example.
But Barack Obama has never been able to keep his feelings towards Americans hidden for long. Americans don’t see the contempt too often, though, because Obama’s speechwriters are more circumspect than he is on the stump.
The truth comes out Washington-style: as “gaffes.”
There is a stream of insults that has flown forth over the past few years — and have been all but smothered by the media. That is an anomaly, of course — because if there has ever been a “man bites dog” story that should compel media coverage, it would be a politician — let alone a president — who, instead of delivering paeans to the people, rebukes them repeatedly.
What have these insults been? What do they reveal? And, more importantly, why should we vote for a man who holds such a low opinion of Americans? And why do Americans like a man who clearly does not like many of us?
The Dirty Laundry List
“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Obama must have realized how this might be interpreted, so he added some nice-sounding verbiage, but the deed was done. Bill Clinton had proclaimed in his second inaugural address that “America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation” (italics mine). Barack Obama does not agree — and moreover, he says we are not a model for the world and in fact have reasons to atone to it. And Obama has assumed for us the role of atoner in chief.
Very early in his presidency (in 2009), Obama did apologize at least five times, and perhaps as many as ten times, within the first six months of his presidency. We are not worthy of respect.
Furthermore, Americans don’t think clearly. When the red tide of the 2010 midterms became visible, Obama refused to accept responsibility that Democratic policy was at fault. On the contrary, the people were.
President Barack Obama said Americans’ “fear and frustration” is to blame for an intense midterm election cycle that threatens to derail the Democratic agenda.
“Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared,” Obama said Saturday evening in remarks at a small Democratic fundraiser Saturday evening. “And the country’s scared.”
This was echoed recently by Michelle Obama, who depicted undecided voters as “confused” and “knuckleheads.”
People who watch Fox News (the most widely watched cable news outlet — and one Obama has appeared on, opposite Bill O’Reilly, over the years) are a “little stubborn” and don’t understand Obama’s policies. For good measure, he told Republicans in 2009 (pre-Sandra Fluke) that you “just can’t listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done” — as if Republicans just are mindless robots marching to Limbaugh’s tune.
Why should that matter, since Americans are poor listeners anyway?
President Obama recently said that the biggest mistake of his first term was not being a good enough story-teller, explaining that he needs to be better communicate to the American people as to why his policies mattered. (His verbal tic “let me be clear” when he prefaces a point reflects the view that Americans need to pay better attention.) Paul Ryan had some fun with this criticism during the Republican National Convention.
Was the animated version of Obama’s story about his agenda “The Life of Julia” dumbed down enough for hapless Americans? The Julia fiasco was mocked not just for its approach (the moral of the story is that all one has to look forward to is a life of dependency), but also for apparently leaving some important facts on the cutting room floor, resulting in a collection of “bogus” assumptions. Is this the type of story we are told to absorb?
Many of the stories that Obama does tell us, from his own life story (filled with fabrications) to the auto bailout “success” fairy tale to the broken promises regarding ObamaCare and the incessant peddling of tall tales known as Mediscare, lean a bit more toward fiction than fact. Should we trust a man who shamelessly abuses the facts of his own mother’s death for political purposes? As Victor Davis Hanson writes, “[i]f a writer will fudge on the very details of his own dying mother’s seeking to obtain healthcare, then he will fudge on almost anything.”
How true.
Policeman “acted stupidly” when they did their duty and investigated whether a friend of Barack Obama’s (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) was committing a crime. Since Gates is black, Obama commented that there is a “long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” So policeman not only act stupidly, but also are motivated by racism.
Barack Obama see a more pervasive sense of racism stalking the land than was evident when he gave his famous 2004 “There is no white America, no black America” speech at the Democratic National Convention. He commented recently that elections are tight when you have a name like “Barack Obama.” This is not the first time he has cast aspersions on Americans. Back in 2008, he said Americans might be reluctant to vote for him because, referring to himself, “he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.” His grandmother was fearful of black youths because she was a “typical white person,” and he quoted approvingly in his book The Audacity of Hope that “white men’s greed runs a world in need.”
Republicans are “bomb-throwers” and “hostage takers” who sip Slurpees while driving the economy into a ditch. If they want to help, though, they have to sit in the back of the bus. From there, at least they won’t be able to excavate moats and fill them with alligators to kill Hispanics slipping across the border from Mexico. Republicans are members of the Flat Earth Society, though, so how worthwhile would their input be anyway? Might as well stick with the Slurpees — if Mayor Bloomberg permits.
Guess that whole “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America” thing was “just words” back in 2004.
