Move Over, Slick Willy!

By Alan Caruba

Does it seem to you that Obama is seeking to dominate the news cycle with a lot of appearances on television? If so, you’re right. This is a presidency that understands that a large portion of the population will respond to the mere fact that he is on television, but not to the specifics of his message.

Even so, he is a masterful orator. He is so relaxed, so smooth, so apparently in control of his alleged facts, and has such a light touch when he needs it to inject a bit of humor that he challenges the likes of former President Bill Clinton for the moniker of “Slick.”

The contrast with former President George W. Bush is particularly sharp. Bush was one of the least articulate speakers, subject to all kinds of distracting quirks when he spoke, prone to malapropos, and an accent that most people associate with good ole’boys having a beer at the local bar.

Despite that, we tend to forget that Bush got most of his bills through Congress, especially spending bills like the Medicare Prescription program and “No Child Left Behind”, a liberal education program for which few have anything good to say. He was, however, unable to convince either Congress or most Americans that Social Security is a ponzi scheme that must inevitably fail.

Obama is utterly charming and beguiling and he knows it.

He has arrived at the Oval Office with one of the thinnest resumes for any actual achievement, other than running for office, of any prior President. At least Clinton and Bush had been governors, a common platform for the leap to the White House.

I hear from a lot of people who say the same thing. Obama scares them.

They have good cause. Few people are aware of the influence that Frank Marshall Davis had on the adolescent Obama. Davis was a newspaper journalist, poet, and organizer for the Hawaii Communist Party, part of the CPUSA. Born in Kansas, living much of his life in Chicago, he moved to Hawaii in 1948. He would claim that he had been “brain-washed for years after the Bolshevik revolutions.” An Afro-American, one can easily see how Obama would identify with him while being raised by his white grandparents.

When you combine the way Obama was marinated in communism during his teen years and, after an Ivy League education, followed his mentor’s footsteps to Chicago where he studied the techniques of “community organizer”, Saul Alinsky, the separate threads of Obama’s path to the White House begin to come together. Alinski literally wrote the book on how to deceive people into accepting communism.

Little wonder the inclusion of a major revision in healthcare was discovered buried deep in the so-called “stimulus” bill. The socialist healthcare programs in Canada, in England, and elsewhere are a horror. Imposing a socialist healthcare program on America has nothing to do with job creation and everything to do with expanding an ever growing and ever more intrusive government bureaucracy.

And yet Obama’s actual election margins are slim. He won by 53% in the general election with 46% of the voters choosing other candidates. Very nearly half of the voters did not and presumably still do not support him. They are the ones who are scared and they should be.

“We won” in a constitutional republic does not mean you are free to govern by executive order and with a majority in Congress that is determined to impose the largest spending bill in the history of the nation.

The refusal to compromise, a rush to impose legislation without the traditional debate and discussion process, and a cult around the man in the White House is a danger to the republic.

With less than a month in office, Obama has managed to unify the Republican Party in ways we have not seen in decades. They understand the danger even if they don’t have the votes to deter it.