The liberal elites who are denigrating Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican National Convention last night are only hurting themselves. Swing-state independents and undecideds like Clint Eastwood a lot more than they like liberal elites. They will only harden in their support for Clint’s folksy commonsense the more it’s contrasted with the cheap and scornful hyper-partisanship of the Daily Kos and HuffPo crowd.
I thought the premise was brilliant. Clint seemed a little nervous, a little out of his element, but that only made him more relatable, more like the kind of guy you’d have a beer with. (Seriously, who wouldn’t want to have a beer with Clint Eastwood?) But the premise was perfect.
To everyone who has not consumed the Kool Aid, Barack Obama seems strikingly insubstantial. ”Senator Present” from Illinois became a U. S. Senator who was more interested in campaigning than legislating. Then he became an empty promise in the 2008 campaign, a micron-thin veneer of glitz and glamor over a hollow core, an empty screen onto which everyone projected their wishes. Six weeks after the inauguration, when he was thoroughly in the honeymoon phase and largely still campaigning against President Bush and on behalf of a stimulus, he uttered one of the most vapid and immature things I have ever heard from a President, when he told a bunch of television anchors at the White House: “I like being President, and it turns out I’m very good at it.”
That’s humility and wisdom for you: six weeks into a four-year term, and he’s already prepared to declare himself “very good at it.” I guess that’s what happens when you’re the kind of guy who gets a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing. Thank goodness he likes being President, though — because, you know, it’s all about him.
President Obama has consistently been absent, more concerned about branding than leadership, with image and atmospherics than truly rallying the troops and harnessing our resources and solving our most pressing problems. He turned over the task of crafting solutions on the stimulus bill and the health care bill to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, who predictably butchered it. He botched the budget compromise with John Boehner and withdrew from the process. When he thought that partisan gridlock in Congress might make him look bad, rather than forging into the gridlock and navigating a way forward he withdrew to the White House and played over 100 rounds of golf.
