Why Has Obama Never Recognized the Tea Party?

KoKo

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Wed Aug-03-11 11:26 AM
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Why Has Obama Never Recognized the Tea Party?

David Bromwich

Professor of Literature at Yale

Why Has Obama Never Recognized the Tea Party?

We had thought the country was in disastrous condition in 2008, and that Obama was the man to pull us out of it. We were misinformed. Instead of turning from the Bush-Cheney policies and the Paulson-Geithner policies and treating them as an aberration, he ratified the former by opening a chapter of new wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and rewarded the latter by turning the infection-carriers into certified physicians. Who was Barack Obama after all? A young politician who excelled at giving sonorous utterance to prepared words (every mass address of the 2008 campaign was done with a teleprompter) and who could defend with ad-lib competence a law or program developed by a suitable conglomerate of others. But Obama lacks the ability to explain a policy or a predicament. He cannot argue. He cannot occupy a position and fight to hold it. He cannot mimic or humor or deflate, or detect those hidden points of leverage that may reshape a public discussion by the force of wit and invention. Not will not, but cannot. It is a kind of ability impossible to hide.

He does not use the authority he has; what hope from entrusting him with more authority? The coming social catastrophe, whose seeds are borne by the terms of a new austerity directed against the poor, the weak and the unlucky, was facilitated by a Democratic president and a Democratic senate with public opinion on their side. And yet, by the end of the discussions Obama had worked himself down to a position where only surrender was possible. We have had two and a half years of his presidency now, and if the strength was there, we would have seen it. That is why so many Democrats contemplate a vote for Obama in 2012 with a sense of appalled inevitability.

President Obama is a charming listener and a pleasing talker. All the evidence from Harvard, from Chicago, from his brief and uneventful career in the Senate tells the same story. The gift required of a leader in a time of crisis -- that is, to explain the reason of public matters honestly and answerably -- was what we looked for in 2008. Six presidents among the original founders had that gift; but they were the race of giants before the flood. Lincoln, too, had the gift in words he wrote himself; FDR had it in words written by others; Kennedy, at the end of his life, was beginning to show it. Obama likes to compare himself to Lincoln but the president he most nearly resembles is Clinton -- but it is Clinton without the knowledge of politics, without the passion for politics, without the sheer tenacity of devotion to the game of politics. Clinton beat his Tea Party and humbled their leader within a year of their midterm victory, and their only revenge was an impeachment which they also lost. Obama has awarded his opponents a hostage, the economy, which they won't release in a year, or two years, or ten.

We mistook Obama for a man of strong convictions. Why? Because he has an aesthetic admiration for people with strong convictions, people with names like Gandhi and King. Yet the emotion of conviction -- a feeling that will not let you go -- is foreign to him now and probably always was. The broad programs to which he thought he adhered, and talked as if he believed in, he has sold down the river. In his recent press briefings, he has seemed shaken and depressed. He has wondered aloud why he should go on being president. This may be the first time a sitting president who sought re-election has made such a confession in public. So the Democratic Party is leaderless. And the enthusiasts of the Tea Party, who did not deserve the debt-ceiling victory Obama handed them, do deserve the explanation that he has denied them. An explanation and an argument addressed to something more than people who cling to their guns and religion, people who are bought off by big money, people who swallow the ridiculous ads they see on TV. Who now will dare to tell them why anyone thinks differently?

MORE of ARTICLE...Clips of Obama re the TeaParty at..........

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/obama-tea-party-debt-deal-_b_916694.html