IS OBAMA TOO GOOD FOR THE PRESIDENCY? – AT 11:30 A.M. ET:  Or is it just the impression he gives?  Mark Steyn puts forward the notion that, for the first time in our history, we have a president who feels that the office is beneath him:

Many Americans are beginning to pick up the strange vibe that for Barack Obama governing America is "an interesting sociological experiment" too.

He would doubtless agree that the United States is "the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home." But he doesn't, not really: It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to.

That's not to say he's un-American or anti-American, but merely that he's beyond all that. Way beyond. He's the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he's condescending to the job — that it's really too small for him and he's just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

Pope might require a conversion.  Secretary-General of the UN might be nice, and he's sufficiently non-American to get the job. 

No doubt my observations about Obama's remoteness from the rhythms of American life will be seen by his dwindling band of beleaguered cheerleaders as just another racist right-wing attempt to whip up the backwoods knuckle-dragging swamp-dwellers of America by playing on their fears of "the other" — the sophisticated worldly cosmopolitan for whom France is more than a reliable punch line.

But in fact my complaint is exactly the opposite: Obama's postmodern detachment is feeble and parochial. It's true that he hadn't seen much of America until he ran for president, but he hadn't seen much of anywhere else, either. Like most multiculturalists, he's passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn't depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world.

Wonderfully said.  I've always been uncomfortable about the class of self-proclaimed intellectuals, especially the "multiculturalists."  There's usually nothing very intellectual or multi about them.

The U.N., Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Bono: These are the colors a progressive worldly Westerner nails to his mast. You don't need to go anywhere, or do anything: You just need to pick up the general groove, which you can do very easily at almost any college campus.

This Barack Obama did brilliantly. A man who speaks fewer languages than the famously moronic George W. Bush, he has nevertheless grasped the essential lingo of the European transnationalist: Continental leaders strike attitudes rather than effect action — which is frankly beneath them.

Finally...

s someone once said, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." When you've spent that long waiting in line for yourself, it's bound to be a disappointment.

COMMENT:  I suppose Steyn will be charged with hate speech, but it goes with the territory these days.  Great article.  Read the whole thing.

June 13, 2010