OAD: Obama Adulation Disorder

posted at 10:15 am on November 24, 2009 by Howard Portnoy
[ Media ]   

Whenever writers on the left express their disenchantment with the president, they do it gently. First they don their kid gloves, the same ones they used to caress BO with words of praise and admiration during the campaign. Then they write. (“Mr. President, Sir, Your Most Eminent of Holinesses, if I might be so bold as to say. . .”) It’s an interesting psychological disorder — one that ought to be as rich a source of dissertation topics for future PhD candidates as the temperament of Obama himself.

Take Richard Cohen’s lastest round of soul-searching in a column interestingly titled “Missing Barack Obama.” Cohen’s main argument is that Obama’s decisions so far in his young presidency lack the moral clarity Cohen claims to have seen in Obama during the campaign. (There is something obscene about mentioning Obama and morality in the same sentence; you expect mirrors around you to start cracking.)

But Cohen is unable to register even the most reserved, the most qualified of grievances without effusively celebrating Obama, the man and the president. In the very first sentence of the article, for example, Cohen tells us that in his circle he is “known as the guy who always had some reservations about Barack Obama.” Ouch, Richard, that’s pretty brutal. You sure you’re allowed to write that in a family publication? Not to worry, though, because by sentence 2, he has begun his atonement for lashing out so grievously at his beloved president by reminding anyone who will listen that he voted for Obama “with both glee and enthusiasm.”

He moves on to Obama’s so-called “race speech” in Philadelphia. (Remeber that?) Cohen apparently had a moment of moral clarity himself when Obama unburdened himself on the American public, essentially blaming the country for his own decision to sit in the pews of a black nationalist church for 20 years, listening to some lunatic spew anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-you-name-it venom week after week. Cohen didn’t like the speech at first — even though, he hastens to tell us, he saw both style and dignity in Obama’s sniveling. (In fact, he has since reread the speech and now understands that it belongs in the National Archives, next to the Declaration of Independence.)

In fairness to Cohen, he does go on to critique several of Obama’s recent actions and decisions, such as his bowing to the Japanese emperor, his snubbing the Dalai Lama, and —worst of all — his agreeing to let his attorney general try the mastermind of 9/11 in a criminal court. But this is today’s column. Wait a day. Cohen is sure to see the error of his ways and prostrate himself in front of the White House, hoping to receive Obama’s forgiveness.

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