Suckered by Obama

I have been at pains on this blog to point out the dereliction of judgment that led many of the smartest people in this country to support Barack Obama.

Now more and more of them are stepping forward to offer their mea culpas. They were suckered into vouching for a man who was not even remotely qualified for the job.

David Brooks now declares that he was a sap for believing in Obama. Tina Brown now tells us that Obama was not ready to be president.

And Wall Street bankers, not the group that first comes to mind when you think of politically correct progressives, are looking elsewhere for a candidate this time.

We take note of the fact that these same bankers, the ones that Obama has been excoriating for three years now, are now suffering the indignity of seeing their neighborhood occupied by Obama supporters who at least knew what they were voting for.

Commenting on Wall Street’s disillusion with Obama, Mark Steyn explains: “Gee, aren't you the fellows who, when you buy a company, do something called ‘due diligence’? But you sunk everything into stock in Obamania Inc. on the basis of his ‘perfectly creased pant leg’ or whatever David Brooks was drooling about that day? You handed a multitrillion-dollar economy to a community organizer, and you're surprised that it led to more taxes, more bureaucracy, more regulation, more barnacles on an already rusting hulk?”

Some few intellectual types are still clinging to their Obamania. They are whining about how Obama was simply too moderate, too sensible, too centrist, to work with Republican extremists.

Such thinkers keep failing to recognize that these same Republican extremists had no influence at all during the first two years of the Obama administration, and that our community-organizer in chief showed them the back of his hand.

This notion of Obama the centrist is being hawked by no less than Hendrik Hertzberg, chief political commentator at The New Yorker.

You remember Hertzberg. He used to write speeches for Jimmy Carter. He was an author of Carter’s “malaise” speech, widely considered one of the worst political speeches of all time. In liberal precincts this qualifies him for a genius award.

So, now Obama is whining about how soft America is, and Mark Steyn, like Jonah Goldberg before him, explains that only a soft country could have elected Barack Obama president.

Steyn writes: “After all, a key reason why 53 percent voted for a man who was not, in Tina Brown's word, ‘ready’ is that Tina and all her pals assured us he was. Occidental, Columbia, Harvard Law, a little light community organizing, a couple of years timeserving in a state legislature: That's what America's elites regard as an impressive resume rather than a bleak indictment of contemporary notions of ‘accomplishment.’ Obama would not have withstood scrutiny in any society with a healthy, skeptical press. Yet, like the high-rolling Wall Street moneybags, they failed to do due diligence.”