Faux Mea Culpa

More Talking Needed

The Achilles heel of all venal politicians and pretenders to leadership is that they have had to make their way to office by employing lashings of "spin" which then becomes their biggest liability. President Obama is a perfect illustration of the syndrome.

We well remember his spinmeister skills on the campaign trail as he sought to deflect criticism from the Hillary Clinton camp that he was soft on defence and terrorism. Obama, of course, as a US Senator had been persistently and consistently opposed to any international US military activity period. But, facing Clinton's criticisms he needed some spin. So, in a master stroke he pronounced that the war in Iraq was bad (thus reiterating his well documented opposition to that war), but then declared the conflict in Afghanistan was the real war that the US had to fight, and by golly, he was going to do it.

Obama, of course, did not believe this for one moment, but the demands of image building, spin, framing to win popular support are relentless. And a false image has piranha teeth when it returns to bite as it inevitably does. His war making in Afghanistan has cost him a great deal of political popularity. It has cost many Americans their lives. It will cost him (and the country) far more in the years to come.

Somewhere along the journey all venal politicians actually come to believe their own press. They disconnect from reality. President Obama appears now to be profoundly disconnected from the real world.

Confronted with the Democrat's loss of a Massachusetts' federal Senate seat, Obama has manfully shouldered some blame--sort of. He trotted out a derisory mea culpa which, whilst amusing, betrays his self-capture by a virtual unreal world. According to the Times Online

Mr Obama acknowledged last night that his bond to voters had weakened. “If there’s one thing that I regret this year is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people,” he told ABC News.

He said that Americans had become consumed by a “feeling of remoteness and detachment” from Washington. “That I do think is a mistake of mine,” Mr Obama added.

OK, so Obama believes (apparently) that if he had spent more time talking with American voters they would not be so mad at him. They (presumably) would have become more comfortable with the vast increase in government spending and the explosion of debt. They would not feel so detached and alienated from their government. The implication is that Obama thinks that copious rhetoric would have maintained his political support, despite his now deeply unpopular policies.

Nothing could be further from the truth: hence his disconnect with reality. Patterico tots up the numbers:

Meanwhile, CBS reports that in his first year in office, President Obama gave 411 speeches, comments and remarks, conducted 42 news conferences, appeared at 23 town hall meetings, 7 campaign rallies, and 28 political fundraisers, and granted 158 interviews … plus trips to 30 states and 21 nations, and meetings with 74 foreign leaders.

Over four hundred speeches, comments and remarks in the first year--that is more than one a day! One hundred and fifty eight interviews--virtually one every other day. And he thinks he did not "communicate" sufficiently. What can be going through this man's mind, if he genuinely thinks that he has failed to communicate enough, and that is the reason the Democratic party has been humiliated in Massachusetts? Probably he is hankering back to the heady days of campaigning when people swooned over him and were impressed by his rhetoric--which would indicate he has now become captured by the charade of his own hype.

Has it not registered with this man that the more you talk, the less effective it is? We all know that when it comes to talking, less is more. Surely he must know this? Maybe not. But in any event he is clearly not getting the real message from his party's trouncing in Massachusetts. If that were to continue he would already be a lame-duck president: it would be over. We suspect it is.

Ironically, this would be good news. The US economy would do far better in the next two years if the Government were to do less.