THE OBAMA MENTALITY - AT 8:51 A.M. ET:  Victor Davis Hanson, one of the great essayists of our time, has looked at the Obama persona, and finds it heavily influenced by the halls of ivy, poison and otherwise. 

Now, I happen to love academic people, but I'm not starry eyed.  The president has hung out with a class of academic who would gladly flunk me, and probably most of our readers as well.  Hanson explains:

If you are confused by the first nine months of the Obama administration, take solace that there is at least a pattern. The president, you see, thinks America is a university and that he is our campus president. Keep that in mind, and almost everything else makes sense.

Yeah, that's right.  He makes the rules and we pay the bills.

In his limited experience, those who went to Yale or Harvard are special people, and the Ivy League environment has been replicated in the culture of the White House.

Note how baffled the administration is by sinking polls, tea parties, town halls, and, in general, “them” — the vast middle class, which, as we learned during the campaign, clings to guns and Bibles, and which has now been written off as blinkered, racist, and xenophobic. The earlier characterization of rural Pennsylvania has been expanded to include all of Middle America.

For many in the academic community who have not worked with their hands, run businesses, or ventured far off campus, Middle America is an exotic place inhabited by aborigines who bowl, don’t eat arugula, and need to be reminded to inflate their tires. They are an emotional lot, of some value on campus for their ability to “fix” broken things like pipes and windows, but otherwise wisely ignored.

Ignore them at your peril, as the polls are showing.

The tragic burden of an academic is to help the oppressed, but blind, majority.

In the world of the university, a Van Jones — fake name, fake accent, fake underclass pedigree, fake almost everything — is a dime a dozen. Ward Churchill fabricated everything from his degree to his ancestry, and was given tenure, high pay, and awards for his beads, buckskin, and Native American–like locks. The “authentic” outbursts of Van Jones about white polluters and white mass-murderers are standard campus fare.

Professor Hanson's disillusionment continues:

Some wonder where Obama got the idea that constant exposure results in persuasion. But that too comes from the talk-is-everything mindset of a university president. Faculties are swamped with memos from deans, provosts, and presidents, reiterating their own “commitment to diversity,” reminding how they would not “tolerate hate speech,” and in general blathering about the “campus community.”

And...

University administrators worship private money, and then among themselves scoff at the capitalism that created it. Campus elites, looking at a benefactor, are fascinated how someone — no brighter than they are — made so much money, even as they are repelled by a system that allows those other than themselves to have pulled it off.

I've noticed that liberals, especially on campus, are impressed by two things - style and money.  Substance is well behind.  Thus we see (a standard academic phrase) that it's common practice at Columbia University in New York to bash Dwight Eisenhower, who was Columbia's president briefly, in the late forties, because he didn't have an academic style.  His wisdom and experience didn't count for much.  And his wife's hairdo was inappropriate.

Many of the former Professor Obama’s problems so far hinge on his administration’s inability to judge public opinion, its own self-righteous sense of self, its non-stop sermonizing, and its suspicion of sincere dissent. In other words, the United States is now a campus, we are the students, and Obama is our university president.

COMMENT:  I just wish some of the Obama team could play football.  Or badminton or hopscotch.

But remember, there are wonderful college professors as well, even at decidedly liberal institutions.  They slip in somehow.

September 24, 2009