Tiger and Barack

by Paul A. Rahe

Pictures are, they say, worth a thousand words – and sometimes this is really so.

Do you remember the photograph of Bill Clinton on the cover of Cigar Aficionado, brandishing a stogie?  If you do, my bet is that you are laughing now. At the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, that photograph got a lot of mileage.

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Well, on the cover of this month’s Golf Digest, there is another photograph well worthy of attention.

In it, thanks to the wonders accomplished by Photoshop, Tiger Woods appears dressed as a caddy, bending over Barack Obama as the latter squats and considers a putt. In the magazine itself, Mr. Woods provides the President with golfing advice.

The juxtaposition is apt. These two men are a lot of alike. Both are Americans of African descent, but neither is an African-American as the term is ordinarily used – for neither is descended from a New World slave.

In his chosen profession, moreover, each of these men is exceedingly accomplished; and in the recent past, both have been dazzlers, commanding respect, admiration, and even adulation.

Nor do the similarities end here, for, as it turns out, neither man is what he purports to be, and neither commands admiration in the fashion that he once did.

The gap between  the image that Tiger Woods so carefully cultivated and the life he actually led is a matter perhaps best left to the tabloids.

That between the image once projected by Barack Obama and the reality with which we have had to live is another matter, worthy of attention and reflection – for, like it or not, our fate is tied up with his.

As a candidate, “No Drama Obama” presented himself as a moderate, promising that his administration would be the most transparent in history, that it would be bipartisan, and that there would be no tax hikes – except on high earners.

There were indications, to be sure, that something else might be in the offing. In her stump speech early on, Michele Obama repeatedly asserted that Americans are “cynical” and “mean” and have “broken souls” and that the lives “that most people are living” have “gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl.”

These words were not reassuring.

For his part, Mr. Obama repeatedly pledged to “transform” America; and, in his exchange with Joe the Plumber, he spoke of “spreading the wealth around.”

Moreover, it was hard to believe that a man so long comfortable with the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers and with the racist demagogue Jeremiah Wright would prove to be a middle-of-the-road president.

But, with the help of the mainstream media, Mr. Obama managed to persuade a sufficient number of Americans to overlook his suspect associations, and he proved to be a master of indirect communication, intimating one thing in coded language to his radical supporters while saying something entirely different to those not in the know.

If Obama has gone down in the polls further and faster than any first-year president in the last half-century, it is because his pose as a moderate proved to be a fraud perpetrated on the American people, and the same fact explains the precipitous decline in television viewers for CNN and the other networks that flacked – and still flack – for the Democratic Party.

Obama’s is, in fact, the least transparent and most bitterly partisan administration in American history. The so-called stimulus bill was written behind closed doors and voted into law by Congressmen who had never read it. The Republicans were not consulted when it was drawn up, and the bill itself showered with gold a great variety of constituencies associated with the Democratic Party.

The Department of Justice has in the last eleven months operated in an openly partisan fashion, and the national debt has increased to a level that will require draconian tax increases down the line.

Moreover, no sane American believes that any of the healthcare reform bills under consideration will do anything but accelerate the increase in medical costs, and they all know that it will eventuate in massive tax increases.

Barack Obama is like Tiger Woods in one crucial respect. He bamboozled us, and he has now lost our trust. Whether either man can recover the admiration he once basked in remains to be seen.


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Posted Dec 16th 2009 at 3:32 pm in Culture, Obama, Politics | 55 Comments