Looking For A Picture On A Blank Screen

Maureen Dowd is waiting for Obama to show signs of a pulse but, per Shelby Steele, she is missing the point of His Obamacy.  Over to Ms. Dowd:

Before he left for vacation, Obama tried to shed his Spock mien and juice up the empathy quotient on jobs. But in his usual inspiring/listless cycle, he once more appeared chilly in his response to the chilling episode on Flight 253, issuing bulletins through his press secretary and hitting the links. At least you have to seem concerned.

On Tuesday, Obama stepped up to the microphone to admit what Janet Napolitano (who learned nothing from an earlier Janet named Reno) had first tried to deny: that there had been “a systemic failure” and a “catastrophic breach of security.”

But in a mystifying moment that was not technically or emotionally reassuring, there was no live video and it looked as though the Obama operation was flying by the seat of its pants.

Given that every utterance of the president is usually televised, it was a throwback to radio days — just at the moment we sought reassurance that our security has finally caught up to “Total Recall.”

Looking to Obama for leadership is like looking in the mirror, which in Ms. Dowd's case may not be such a great idea.  Over to Mr. Steele:

Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If "hope and change" was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.

...

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called "individuating"—that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.

He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.

Mr. Obama's ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle. To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as "ideological," and by promising to deliver us from the "tired" culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be "post-ideological," "post-racial" and "post-partisan," which is to say that he defines himself by a series of "nots"—thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

But then Mr. Obama always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol. He always wore the bargainer's mask—winning the loyalty and gratitude of whites by flattering them with his racial trust: I will presume that you are not a racist if you will not hold my race against me. Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan and yes, Tiger Woods have all been superb bargainers, eliciting almost reverential support among whites for all that they were not—not angry or militant, not political, not using their moral authority as blacks to exact a wage from white guilt.

Mr. Steele offered a similar argument back in March of 2008 and used Obama's own words against him:

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."

Reaching back three years to December 2006 we can find even more on Obama as a self-described "blank screen":

Obama is humble in all the right places. Before a thousand swooning fans in New Hampshire, he says, Evita-like: "This isn't about me. This is about you." One gets the impression from his public appearances and book, "The Audacity of Hope," that he doesn't even get a haircut without first consulting his wife.

What Obama really thinks should be done about health care and the terrorist threat remain secrets that his book does not unlock. His two years in the Senate certainly haven't revealed any bold policy ideas.

This leave-them-guessing strategy slips out in the book's prologue. "I serve as a blank screen," Obama writes, "on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." He notifies readers that "my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete." It takes some doing for a politician to write a 364-page book, his second volume, and skate past all controversy.

In Mr. Steele's telling the whole "No Drama Obama" routine was born of necessity.

Comments

[Mike Myers]

Blank Screen? Empty Suit? Synonyms for Dear Leader

[narciso]

And we can feel so confident that the head of the NCTC and the designer of the watchlist will be chairing the review

[Jim Miller]

"My last LUN was a post by Jim Miller...is that the same Jim Miller that posts here sometimes?"

Yep - I post at my own site and at Sound Politics. (Just put up a brief post on Fund's WSJ piece on Democratic transplants in upstate NY. Hope to have the CO2 and crescent wrench post out this Sunday.)

[PD]

I mean, how stupid, shallow, and arrogant one could be for not to prepare in advance for Wright affiliation questions?

I took this to mean that he found Wright's remarks to be unremarkable and thus that no preparation was needed. Why prepare if you are unaware that anyone else might find Wright's sermons anything other than good common sense?

Which, if I am correct, is further indication of just how much of a disconnect there is between how this country is seen by Obama compared to most of the rest of us.

[narciso]

Right, PD they were in his neighborhood, what's the problem, I made a comment about Reverend Wright comparing him to Reverend Bacon of Bonfire, and some else agreed with
me, dubbing him 'the mad mullah of Chicago'

[glasater]

Heh!---Dem Recruits Head for the Exits

[squaredance]

Oh of course Obama is a dolt. He is a front-man for some dark forces--most certainly not "effete elites" assuaging guilt and turning their noses up to the middle classes. They are just another set of dupes.

If he had that sort of brains, the course of his live would be much different. Just look at him, he cannot even extemporaneously speak.

[Ann]

Good Stuff Here:
Breitbart And Coulter Take Down Flight

Evil Stuff Here:
U.S. Releases 'Dangerous' Iranian Proxy Behind The Murder Of U.S. Troops

[J.Peden]

"...In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades."

By now I wouldn't be surprised if everything "Climate Scientists" have alleged or "proven" turns out to be either irrelevant, false, or the exact opposite or what's happening in the real world. They too seem to want to deny reality as their main goal, in order to control it.

[sbw]

They too seem to want to deny reality as their main goal, in order to control it.

Bingo!

Concise, precise, and accurate.

[Sir Toby Belch]

On "connecting the dots"...you can't do
that with muslims, only Hindus.