Post-American Presidency (2 page)

Obama’s perspective, his worldview, is of enormous import. It tells
us who he is and why he is doing what he is doing. America did not shape Barack Obama. Instead, he was influenced and indoctrinated by many who despised America. These were his early influences, and many of them have been lifelong influences. Throughout his life and his political career, Obama has been consistent—right up to and into his presidency.

This book lays out in painstaking detail the political views of the people he has selected to help him govern this nation and the domestic and foreign policies he promotes. It is all a result of how he was brought up, of what shaped his mind and heart. It is all a result of what drives him.

What drives him is not American. He said it himself: “I was a little Jakarta street kid” who found the Islamic call to prayer to be “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”
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For the most part, Barack Obama has carefully distanced himself from any sign of patriotism or national pride throughout his political career and his presidency.

In his mind, apparently, to be a forthright believer in American exceptionalism would be unfair, chauvinistic, maybe even bigoted. On Barack Obama’s playing field, there is no American exceptionalism. (The irony here, of course, is that his presidency would have been impossible without it.) There are, in the appointments he has made and the policies he has chosen, many indications that for Barack Obama, there is no good, no evil, only equivocation and moral relativism.

Unlike Obama’s childhood homeland of Indonesia, America is not tribal. American identity is not based on race or creed or color. It is a shared value system. The idea of America is freedom and individual rights—a historical first.

Ayn Rand articulated the essence of American exceptionalism when she wrote in a letter: “America’s founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more—nothing less. The rest—everything America achieved, everything she became, everything
‘noble and just’ and heroic and great, and unprecedented in human history—was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle.”
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This is anathema to Barack Hussein Obama. Witness his sanction of Ahmadinejad and the bloody putdown of the Iranians yearning to be free. Witness his abandonment of democracy in Honduras. Witness his betrayal of Eastern Europe by scrapping the essential missile defense program. Witness the ethnic cleansing of Jews from parts of Israel. Obama does not subscribe to the principle of man’s individual rights—and this is the key, the key to this country and its very nature. The United States is the nation of enlightenment, of the power of the individual.

But this is not Barack Obama’s point of reference.

Barack Hussein Obama did not grow up breathing these ideas. He spent a good portion of his childhood in Indonesia, and when he did move to the States to live with his grandparents when he was twelve, it was not to the continental United States, but off the mainland in Hawaii. Hawaii had only just become a state two years prior to his birth, and many on the island were not happy about it. So not only was it a nascent state, but many within it were hostile to the idea of America.

Obama’s absentee father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., was a member of Kenya’s Luo tribe.
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Obama, Jr., went so far as to oppose our ally in Kenya, President Mwai Kibaki, and to campaign for his fellow Luo tribesman, Raila Odinga, a violent socialist who claimed to be Obama’s cousin.

You have to grow up in America to
get
America. Or you have to escape tyranny, oppression, and suppression and live the dream by emigrating to America. Obama is missing the DNA of the USA. It’s just not in him—through no fault of his own.

Barack Obama’s “third-grade teacher Fermina Katarina Sinaga, now sixty-seven, has perhaps the most telling story. In an essay about what he wanted to be when he grew up, Obama ‘wrote he wanted to
be president,’ Sinaga recalled.
‘He didn’t say what country he wanted to be president of.’”
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Barack Obama has no desire for America to win—hence his refusal to use the word “victory” in any of his remarks concerning the military operations in which the United States is currently engaged. His desire to make peace with the Islamic world was a legitimate goal in this age of jihad. But he seemed to have no effective way to attain this goal in light of Islamic intransigence—and so his every move made matters worse.

Obama sees himself not just as another American president. He announced during his Inaugural Address that he had far more sweeping plans: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”
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Remaking America? Into what?

Since he has taken office he has been hard at work to do just that: destroying the free-market system and nationalizing major segments of the U.S. economy, restricting dissent and the freedom of speech in general, turning against longtime friends of the United States, and above all subjecting America to the determinations of foreign authorities.

This is a deeply troubling presidency—and a dangerous period in American history.

The period of the post-American presidency.

He himself said it in April 2009. During a visit to London for a summit of the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (G-20), a reporter asked Obama: “[C]ould I ask you whether you subscribe, as many of your predecessors have, to the school of ‘American exceptionalism’ that sees America as uniquely qualified to lead the world, or do you have a slightly different philosophy?”

It was a question Ronald Reagan once answered without ever
having been asked it. He said: “With all its flaws, America remains a unique achievement for human dignity on a scale unequaled anywhere in the world.”

But Obama offered no similar avowal of American uniqueness. Instead, he equated American exceptionalism with the national pride that a citizen of any nation could feel: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Then, perhaps realizing how much he had just trivialized the achievements of the greatest republic and most magnanimous nation the world had ever known, Obama avowed: “I’m enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world.” He even allowed for the possibility that there were some reasons that Americans should not be embarrassed by their nation’s history: “If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don’t think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.”

Embarrassed? Who would even think such a thing? Except someone who
is
embarrassed by America. It’s as if the most beautiful girl in the world walks into the best party, bedecked in the most magnificent dress and finest jewels, and someone whispers to her, “Don’t be embarrassed.”

Obama even acknowledged that “we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.” But in saying that he may have sensed that he was venturing into areas where he didn’t want to go, so he backtracked: “Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we’ve got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen
my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that we’re not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us.”

It was a defining moment. Barack Obama could find some praiseworthy aspects of America—but in saying that he was careful to say also that every country could say the same, apparently in equal measure, and while the U.S. Constitution and system of government—“though imperfect”—had some “exceptional” features, well, other countries also had “wonderful qualities.”

In other words, America was nothing special. Just another country. Former vice president Dick Cheney summed it up: “There’s never been a nation like the United States of America in world history, and yet when you have a president who goes around and bows to his hosts and then proceeds to apologize profusely for the United States, I find that deeply disturbing. That says to me this is a guy who doesn’t fully understand or share that view of American exceptionalism that I think most of us believe in.”
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Even when Obama does refer to America’s essential goodness, as he did in his 2010 State of the Union address, it is only to advance his commitment to socialist internationalism and redistribution of American wealth: he wields Americans’ empathy and compassion like a club to manipulate us into funding bad foreign policy and despotic regimes.

In a seminal moment for modern historians and active political observers like myself, a snapshot came across the newswires, showing presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama crossing an airplane tarmac, mid-gait, and holding Fareed Zakaria’s American epitaph,
The Post-American World
. In the photo, Obama is holding his place in the book with his finger, as if he didn’t dare put it down and wanted to dive back into it as soon as he could.

Zakaria describes his book this way: “This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” In it, he details the era he hopes we are entering now—a world in which the United States would “no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures.” He asserts that the “rise of the rest” is the “great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems.”
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It was at the moment that photo went out over the wires, back in May 2008, that I began calling him “post-American Obama” and, subsequent to the election, the “post-American president.” The book predicting America’s inevitable decline turned out to be a veritable blueprint for Obama’s presidency. Obama seems determined to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obama went to work from his first day in office to make Zakaria’s wishful thinking about America’s decline become a reality. As the most powerful man in the world, he would level the playing field, even if it meant cutting America off at the knees. Good and evil would be made equivalent, with evil sanctioned by the world’s only remaining superpower: democracy and tyranny, dictator and elected leader would be given the same moral sanction.

Obama has been working fast. He was elected president by a wide margin. If he had governed as a left-of-center president in the mold of Bill Clinton, he would have been certain of reelection. Most observers saw him as another Democrat politician in this mode. Cheney remarked: “I saw him when he got elected as a liberal Democrat, but conventional in the sense of sort of falling within the parameters of the national Democratic Party. I think he’s demonstrated pretty conclusively now during his first year in office that he’s more radical than
that, that he’s farther outside the parameters if you will of what we’ve traditionally had in Democratic presidents in years past.”
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He could have in due time repaid the many favors he owed to his various special interest constituencies—including trial lawyers, labor unions, banks, and insurance companies—and governed as a successful president, boosting our country’s stature worldwide, and waving the flag proudly. This doesn’t mean he couldn’t have found success implementing his plan to change the nation radically—but everyone expected that he would go about it slowly, careful not to alienate any of his supporters or cause undue alarm among his opponents.

Instead, he traveled around the world and denigrated American achievements and American uniqueness. He reached out in friendship to our enemies and the enemies of freedom and individual rights, including Hugo Chávez and even Fidel Castro, and offered Russia a significant boost on its way to returning to superpower status by selling out Eastern Europe. He catered to—and fawned shamelessly over—Islam and Muslim countries, making preposterous statements about how much the United States owes Islam, and even about how America was a Muslim country.
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Obama clearly believed that doing all this would bolster his image in other countries. But he was taking a calculated risk: that his apparent lack of concern for American national security, and for America’s historical achievements and place in the world, would backfire and anger Americans. Nonetheless, he took the risk. He must have believed that he was powerful enough and popular enough to neutralize any domestic political backlash that may result—and he certainly had the mainstream media on his side, as he did during his presidential campaign, to cover for him, make excuses for him when he failed, and obscure the full scope of what he was doing.

Barack Hussein Obama had chosen the path of the post-American
presidency. He seemed to envision himself as more than just the president of the United States, but as a shaper of the new world order, an internationalist energetically laying the groundwork for global government: the president of the world.

The problem for Americans was that in his quest for internationalism and global socialism, Obama was leaving the United States twisting in the wind. He was treating America as a stepping-stone to help get him where he wanted to go, and he seemed willing to do anything to destroy America’s prestige in the world.

Domestically he is just as destructive. Americans worry about the extraordinary national debt that he has helped increase exponentially, and which is leading us to economic ruin. Obama doesn’t seem concerned about this at all: his plans include a $200 billion second stimulus program and various socialist programs that will further drain the nation’s resources, including nationalized health care and the cap-and-trade plan.