There are ivory towers and there are ivory towers. In some of them, I imagine you simply are beyond caring about either the people below, in others you don't recognize the idiocy with which you come across when you speak. Or both.
I give you the former president, Barack H. Obama, at least as quoted by his formal special advisor, Ben Rhodes, in the latter's new book. Since we know that liberals never lie, we can certainly assume that Obama actually said what Rhodes said he did, right?
This quote came right after the election of President Trump and the crushing defeat for both Hillary Clinton, the actual candidate, and Obama himself (or, in his view, "Himself"). Trying to comfort Rhodes, in his pompous, professorial manner reflecting his failure to grasp anything factual, Obama said this:
“Maybe we pushed too far. Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe ... Sometimes I wonder whether I was ten or 20 years too early.”
Oh, dear. We were simply not ready for the brilliance of Barack H. Obama, and it may be ten or twenty years before we are.
I guess we could go in one of two ways on this. First, of course, we could look at all the things that we apparently were not "ready" for. Those might include implementing a totally-unworkable health insurance system that no one wanted, or giving away $150 billion to the "Death-to-America" mullahs in Iran for no return. Or lying to the nation about incidents like Benghazi and sending surrogates out to lie for him. Or weaponizing the FBI and IRS to target Obama's political enemies. We weren't ready for that. Maybe in a decade or two we will have become so corrupt as a society that we will be, but I like to doubt that.
I prefer to look at the other dimension, which is either that Obama thought that he was somehow right in doing all that, or thought that he could say that to a toady like Rhodes and be believed. But if Barack Obama thought that he was right to do that depressing list of things he did, then what was going on for eight years in that White House?
I think the Occam's Razor approach leads to the conclusion that he told Rhodes what he actually believes; that after being coddled all his life, he failed to recognize that he got where he did only because he was, as his own VP, Joe Biden said, "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy", as opposed to other black guys, we assume from Biden's context. He didn't get there because of his brilliance or vision, but because of his father's color -- and the media's desperation to get him elected.
The media were equally desperate to elect Hillary Clinton, we can recall, but Obama had so badly peed in that well that the nation simply was -- in contrast to Obama's view -- past wanting someone like him. "Obama with a uterus" (Hillary) was no longer acceptable, after the nation had seen what an Obama without one (we assume) could do.
As usual, Obama was wrong. He was not "ten or 20 years too early", but perhaps just at the right time. The right time for the nation to see what unchecked leftism can do. The right time to see how, when it inevitably fails, the left has to turn to corruption to try to hold on to power. The right time to see that the nation prefers the pro-American economic rationalism of Donald Trump to the utterly corrupt and incompetent socialist dogma of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
I suppose every few decades the nation needs to elect a Democrat to remember how bad socialism is. I hate that we had to do it twice in Obama's case, but at least we survived and got the right guy elected to succeed him.
Yep, Obama was here at the right time. And booted out at the right time, too.
Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton