The Chickens are Coming Home to Roost

If there was any doubt about the influence of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and Frank Marshall Davis on the beliefs of President Obama, those doubts have been obliterated by Obama's anti-American remarks in various foreign locales of late, including the controversial claim that we are not a Christian nation. Yet even this blatant evidence may not be enough to swing the national tide against this cult of personality leader.

If Bill Clinton did nothing else useful in his presidency, he did leave a political template for his Democrat successors to follow-dirty but nonetheless effective. First, always blame your political enemies for the things you have done. Obama and his allies in Congress have become masters at doing this and, as an example, there is still only a stubborn truth-seeking minority who hold the true perpetrators of the financial crisis-Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Obama, Nancy Pelosi and other Democrat leaders-responsible. At most, the majority of Americans believe that both parties share the blame equally, which can be shown not to be the case for anyone who cares to investigate the historical record.

Second, give the public a few "Sistah Souljah" moments in which the president or candidate (often interchangeable terms for a Democrat) has a momentary departure from liberal orthodoxy and sounds or acts like a conservative. Clinton's public and face-to-face lambasting of the controversial, arguably racist black entertainer went over big in Middle America, as he knew it would. And he also knew that in spite of his anti-Souljah rant, he had the black vote in his pocket, so there was little if any downside to his action. A rebuff from Jesse Jackson, whom Clinton didn't care for or need at the time anyway, didn't mean much to him.

Obama's recent Sistah Souljah moment was the brilliant action by Navy Seals to free Captain Richard Phillips from the thug Somali "pirates" who were threatening to execute him unless they received a large ransom payment. What happened behind the scenes to lead Obama to his decision to authorize the use of force, we will probably never know. The drive-by media have no interest in exposing the potential equivocating and indecision involved in arriving at that authorization. Their bottom line concern is that Obama gets the credit for a successful ending to his first international crisis, even as he and Hillary Clinton blather on about getting the world community to resolve such crises by diplomatic means versus what has been proven to work-the use of force. What Obama hopes is that the public will remember the brave actions of the Seals and attach him to that for a long time to come. In so doing, the public unwittingly gives the president a "get out of jail free" card to use the next time he makes an outrageous statement about America or prints a few more gazillion dollars to finance his socialistic schemes.

Finally, the big lesson of the Clinton presidency is to continuously be in the campaign mode. Obama has already shown that he's learned this lesson well. Being in campaign mode allows a president to maintain the "us-against-them" mentality among his supporters that gains traction for his programs and makes him less vulnerable to critiques that stick. Of course, "us-against-them" is precisely the opposite of what the so-called unifier Obama promised in the real campaign only a few months ago. But this circles back to the strategy of blaming the enemy-by fixating on Rush Limbaugh and other conservative critics as the real source of divisiveness, Obama hopes to remove that stigma from himself.

By carrying out the above strategies, Obama can then conduct his foreign and domestic policies largely as he wishes, because he throws enough bones at the public to keep them off-balance about his true intentions and uses the blame game to prevent blame from attaching to him.

As a for instance, an almost certain outcome of his current Latin American "blame America first" tour is some type of loosening of the long-running embargo against Cuba. Never mind that the dictatorial Castro regime has done nothing to earn this change of status; the current Castro brother is just a less charismatic, more toned-down version of the other, but that has had no impact on the repressive political climate there. However, when the day of relaxing the embargo comes, the drive-bys and Democrats everywhere will proclaim that it's long overdue; that it was America's fault that Cuba had to act the way that it did. And unfortunately, a large segment of the American public will buy that fallacious argument.