Not one of us

This WSJ op-ed from Dorothy Rabinowitz, The Alien in the White House, is quite insightful. Rabinowitz notes the ‘disenchantment’ of some regarding BHO’s response to the oil disaster in the Gulf, then goes on to explain why the nation as a whole is now feeling less and less confident in the man’s ability to lead:

…it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans’ leader, a man of them, for them, the nation’s voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn’t lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.

Those qualities…were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

Rabinowitz hits the nail on the head here. What the people are sensing (and what many of us have known since the moment Obama showed up to run for President) is that Barack Obama cannot represent Americans, or our country, because of his allegiance to a thoroughly un-American (and really, un-Western) ideology.

There is nothing American about redistribution of wealth, government running businesses, federal power to control energy usage by the economy and the populace or to mandate that the citizens buy or not buy certain products (health insurance and Edison-style light bulbs come to mind). There is also nothing American about apologizing to foreign dictatorships and enemies while backhanding longtime allies such as Great Britain, Israel, and even France. Obama may be a Chicago boy, but his mindset is better suited to places like modern Venezuela and North Korea, communist China, and Third Worldism in general, the same Third Worldism that has destroyed Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Kenya. As Fred Siegel recently put it in a review of The Bridge in National Review,

“Seek ye first the political kingdom,” argued (Ghana’s destroyer) Nkrumah, “and all else shall be added unto you”: Seize political power and from it wealth will follow. This is a political adage that has worked, to a degree, in machine-run Chicago.

Third Worldism is deeply statist but not necessarily socialist. It combines identity politics with the drive for economic redistribution. For the civil-rights movement as it moved from pursuing legal equality to advancing black power, Third Worldism provided what seemed to be a promising path to follow. It was the framework within which the young Barack Jr. emerged intellectually.

…to the extent that Third Worldism…assumed that wealth was merely a matter of seizing the mechanism of government to enhaqnce one’s allies, it produced outcomes ranging from harmful to disastrous. Like much of the Arab world, Third Worldism wanted transformation without change, wealth without new cultural habits.

This fantasy of wealth without work, of just taking over and fundamentally transforming one thing into another like turning a frog into a lion, is what Obama believes in, at least in part. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in cities like Detroit, Philly, Chicago, St. Louis (we got turned around downtown during our Route 66 trip, and you know you are in a very rough part of town when the side streets are all blocked off with concrete berms) and so forth, Third Worldism doesn’t work even in prosperous nations like America. One cannot take wealth from the industrious and give it to the non-industrious and expect things to remain on an even keel. The world simply doesn’t work that way.

Rabinowitz also suggests that the president’s anti-American, anti-American way mindset (and I do mean “set”) leads him to believe that he and his staff can insult the nation and her people with impunity on America’s own and other shores, from insisting that the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed be held somewhere in New York City, if not Manhattan itself, to retaining dolts like Michael Posner who say, without being chastised later, that American and China are the same when it comes to human rights atrocities.

(Posner’s) is a sensibility and political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America’s moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity.

…But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

Even Woodrow Wilson and FDR, two of the worst and most horrid presidents this nation has ever had, at least seemed to have some respect for the Founders and an affection for America, however slight (and based on their actions and words, it’s slight). I don’t remember reading about either one insulting the troops or not knowing how to pronounce “corpsman”. As this administration continues, however, can the people be blamed for wondering why Barack Obama, who offers evidence of his disdain for America, her history, and her principles daily, wanted the office at all other than to destroy the nation he claimed he wished to lead? He is, very simply, not one of us, and it has everything to do with his ideology and nothing to do with where he was born.