Do It for the Gipper

posted at 9:22 am on March 21, 2010 by Howard Portnoy
[ Healthcare ]    printer-friendly

I’m no psychologist, but it doesn’t take a professional student of the mind to recognize the hideous pictures that obviously play 24/7 inside the skull of Barack Obama. Whether his mental deficiencies are, as Glenn Beck opines, the result of both his parents abandoning him to pursue Marxist dreams is quite beside the point. Here is a man for whom the difference between truth and falsehood is not merely unimportant but nonexistent.

How else to explain the demand he made of his Congressional base yesterday in the 111th hour of the health care debate (talk about your seasons in hell!):

Don’t do it for me. Don’t do it for the Democratic Party. Do it for the American people.

That little nugget contains a doctoral dissertation’s worth of analytical material and then some. First, the sheer balderdash in the selfless wish expressed in the opening sentence. When is anything not for or about him? From the minute his presidency began to go south, “This is not about me” has become his credo. In any case, this bill’s passage would be almost entirely for him. The future of his presidency and his place in American history hangs on it.

But what really sets this remark apart from almost any other he has made to date is the last sentence.

Do it for the American people?

Does this man ever listen to the words that come out of his mouth? Even in the bizarro world that Obama occupies, there has to be some acknowledgment on some level that the American electorate is strongly opposed to this legislation. The latest Real Clear Politics aggregate has 49.1 percent of voters opposed and only 40.4 percent in favor of passage. This is and for some time has been one of the least popular legislative initiatives in the history of the country. Is this man insane? (An optimistic reading is that his teleprompter was broken and that he meant to say, “Do it to the American people.”)

If, God willing, this misguided legislative effort fails today—and there is hope that it still might—it will be interesting to watch Obama as he way too belatedly moves on. Then again, I suppose the $64,000 question is will he move on?

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