Barack Obama, Shape-Shifter

By Alan Caruba

With the advent of the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birthday on Sunday, it was perhaps predictable that Time Magazine would photoshop a picture of Obama and Reagan as if they were standing together. “Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan” was the cover line.

Obama would have been twenty years old when Reagan took office and, of course, he not only never met Reagan, but he was no fan of his conservative policies.

In a stinging rebuttal to the Time cover, Sean Linnane, a blogger at Stormbringer, noted that, in Obama’s memoir, Dreams of My Father, Obama wrote “When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change. Changes in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds…”

One of those “dirty deeds” involved hastening the fall of the Soviet Union; the mother ship of all liberals and crypto-communists.

No surprise that Obama couldn’t answer his classmates “directly” because Obama had been against many of the policies of Reagan and Bush before he was for them. He has virtually replicated Bush’s Mideast policies and now it appears he is going to make the same errors with Egypt as Jimmy Carter did with Iran.

Obama has been on the cover of Time Magazine so many times that they ought to change the name of the magazine to Obama. Back in 2009, a cover showed him as the reincarnated Franklin Delano Roosevelt, offering America a New Deal.

FDR’s New Deal stretched out the Great Depression that began in 1929 over ten years until the U.S. declared war on Japan and Germany in 1941. His Social Security program has been looted by Congress and now is on the brink of insolvency along with the later Medicare program. The Supreme Court threw out elements of FDR’s stimulus programs as unconstitutional. Yes, history can and does repeat itself.

When Obama announced his run for the Democratic Party nomination, he did so on the steps of the Old State Capitol in downtown Springfield, Illinois to launch his campaign on Feb.10, 2007. The conscious effort to identify with Abraham Lincoln was and remains a part of the constant “packaging” and “branding” of Obama.

So we have Obama as Lincoln, Obama as FDR, and now Obama as a fan of Ronald Reagan just in time for the latter’s birthday centennial.

Obama is the ultimate Star Trek “shape-shifter.” Depending on the place and the circumstances, Obama consciously seeks to present himself as a reflection of whomever he is addressing.

A quick search of Google images will produce a photo of Obama wearing a yarmulka (skull cap) while standing at the Wailing Wall in Jeruselem, placing a small written prayer in it as is the custom for Jews!

Millions of words have been written and uttered to describe who and what Obama is, but aside from being a dedicated Marxist intent on destroying the United States with intolerable debt, unrelieved unemployment, and naked support for powerful unions, Obama does not appear to have many core values other than the empowerment and enrichment of Barack Hussein Obama.

The role of Time Magazine and other mainstream media in this manipulation of the American public’s perception of Obama is obscene.

Obama, however, has a problem. Americans have rejected Obamacare. The House has voted to repeal it. And Senate Republicans are getting help from disaffected Democrats in dismantling it. His “green” policies for electric cars, high speed rail, and power generation by wind and solar are a laughingstock.

On the world stage, he is seen as a weakling and friend of Islam to the detriment and endangerment of Israel, the most steadfast ally of the U.S. in the mideast.

All this Hollywood-style imagery that Obama has depended upon for so long no longer works as it did during the giddy days of his campaign for the presidency. His speeches ring hollow on the ears of all but his most besotted supporters.

Long after he’s gone from the public stage, people will be asking who was Obama? And who is Obama?

© Alan Caruba, 2011