Well, Robert Tracinski is right. Barack Obama is boring: and one major reason why he’s boring is because Barack Obama is utterly predictable. Take yesterday’s speech.
No, really: please take yesterday’s speech. I got bored with it four years ago.
This is the president’s favorite false alternative: either we do things “alone,” or government does them for us “collectively.” What this world view leaves out, of course, is the voluntary cooperation of private individuals, particularly their cooperation in the free market. Which is to say that he excludes from his world view the actual majority of human activity.
But this is the basic false alternative of every Obama speech, and it is the flimsy intellectual foundation of his entire presidency. Individualism and the free market always mean doing everything “alone,” and the only alternative, the only way of doing things “together,” is a giant government program.
That is what “this moment” turns out to be all about: “My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it—so long as we seize it together.” No seizing moments on your own. You can only seize it if you brought enough for everybody.
It is instructive that the President has been on the national scene for about a decade at this point, and yet the only bits of rhetoric of Barack Obama’s that anybody reliably remembers are all from the times when he’s – pardon my French – being an asshole.
Moe Lane
It is rather amusing to here the “if it’s not government, it’s just one person” BS. My 100,000 or so co-workers would disagree.
My favorite part of the speech was when he said, “nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all societies ills can be cured through government alone” and then proceeded to list all the government programs he wants to save so that they can continue to cure all of society’s ills.
As long as he creates a voting majority for his cronies, nothing else matters