PRESIDENT OBAMA STRAYED off-autocue the other day and proved, contrary to his image, that he’s no natural orator. Or, perhaps, particularly smart. In a speech in Virginia he entertained a whooping audience by laying into the wealth-making business owners of the US by claiming they had nothing to do with their own success. “You didn’t do that,” he said. “Somebody else did that.”
Much back-tracking has since taken place, much “explanation” that conservatives have taken his words out of context or been selective with the quotes. He wasn’t talking about businesses, they say, he was talking about infrastructure, and that’s a state thing, man. Other folks did that. That’s why the rich need to pay more of their “fair share” for it.
Unfortunately for Obama the context approach just makes it worse. If he was talking about state infrastructure he deliberately forgets the tax dollars those businesses contribute to its creation and maintenance. If he was talking about the general social and political context, that is, of a country built on the belief in individual endeavour and the willingness to take risks, then he’s just spat in the face of a whole nation. Neither of those is a good political move and both are dishonest.
The meaning of Obama’s words is unequivocal and only the most ideologically-blind (or stupid) could construe it as anything but a naked assault on individual enterprise. Entrepreneurs are well aware of the “context” in which they work; they don’t need lessons from professional politicos about their own society. When our very own Will Hutton rises to defend Obama and criticise Romney for being a successful entrepreneur in The Observer you know the liberal cage has been rattled – because the truth has been revealed.
To the liberal mind only the collective has legitimacy or power. The idea of individual success is unbearable. That doesn’t apply to the individual who is a progressive, of course, like Obama, who has no career of private enterprise to boast of and only a string of unsubstantiated “successes” sealed from public view. I bet Obama believes he’s special. His followers certainly do. The rest of us wonder how on earth he got to such a position of power, given his obvious lack of experience and competence, his eagerness to shine his own ego at the expense of others and his inability to talk coherently without an autocue.
Perhaps in his case he’s right, though, and he didn’t get there by himself. Maybe somebody else did that for him, including writing his autobiographies and inventing girlfriends and family history. When he’s gone, it won’t be the vapid rhetoric of “hope and change” that remains of him, but “you didn’t do that” and “somebody else did that”.
