The folly of Obama's National Prayer Breakfast comment

Leaders have to earn the right to criticize their own team. If you’re a winning quarterback who has sacrificed tremendously and succeeded — if nobody can doubt that you believe your team and your teammates are the best — then you have earned the right to call your guys out. It’s why Kobe Bryant and Tom Brady can get away with yelling at their teammates while DeMarcus Cousins can’t.

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Obama has been more frank than any president in modern history in admitting to America’s mistakes. His fans love this about him — he’s a clear-eyed pragmatist who isn’t afraid to apply rigor to analyzing the faults of himself and his countrymen, the president’s supporters say. Maybe. But as a result, in the eyes of millions of conservatives, Obama has hardly built up a reservoir of trust that would grant him the moral authority to deliver Americans and Christians a scolding message about injustices in their collective pasts. My liberal friends might disagree — and claim that Obama’s introspection and candor make him the perfect messenger for self-reflective realism — but the many Americans and Christians who find themselves on the wrong side of these criticisms would surely not give the president the benefit of the doubt. Fair or not, a Republican with a flag lapel pin is probably better positioned to challenge Americans and have this moment of reflection. The saying “only Nixon can go to China” is an apt one. Nixon’s anti-Communism bonafides were beyond reproach — nobody would expect him to go soft on the red menace — a fact that gave him the space to do the unexpected and to reach out to China. It may not be fair, but it’s much harder for a Democrat to pull of this kind of maneuver, and this is likely especially true of Obama.

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