Saturday, August 1, 2009

'Beer summit' revealed nothing exemplary about O

V.D.Hanson at NRO nails some on-the-mark observations on the whole kabuki theater now known as the "beer summit":

"Perhaps the beer summit will stop the president's slide in the polls, but I am not so sure, since the public is beginning to catch on that there is a pattern here. On matters racial, the public thought that in Obama they were getting an updated version of Martin Luther King gravitas, but they are learning it may be a more eloquent form of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton bathos...

"When Obama was first asked about the Gates incident — and we know he was prepped beforehand about the question — he did not suggest a beer summit, but instead used the adverb "stupidly" to describe the police action and then went into a disquisition on racial profiling as part of his preferred "teachable moment."

"The beer thing came only afterwards, when the polls went south...

"The point here is that the public is starting to sense two things: One, Obama's first impulse when speaking out on race is his most genuine and most disturbing; and two, his statesmanlike disavowals always come not out of genuine embarrassment over his initial remark (such as praising the racist Wright), but out of real concern that he is going to be hurt politically without such a "correction" — an awareness that in turn seems to engender only more anger, and leads to the next incident in the series."

Read the whole NRO post: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzFmY2RiOWZlMTk4ZGQwYTI5ZmNlY2NiMTc1MjY2OWQ=

No comments:

Post a Comment