Beware of cheap imitations

With all the changes currently taking place in the White House, MSM pundits have become rapturous over what they perceive to be President Obama’s latest masterstroke. As they see it, his nearly complete cleansing of original advisors for a collection of more “centrist” advisers is the reflection of a gentler, kinder Barack Obama who is totally committed to working in a bipartisan fashion.

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The New York Times' Jeff Zeleny and Jackie Calmes say Obama wants to "recharge his administration" in an "effort by the White House to bring on experienced Washington hands with records of bipartisan deal making as it faces the realities of a Republican-controlled House, a slimmer Democratic majority in the Senate and a resurgent grass-roots conservative movement." In other words, he wants to cooperate with the Republicans. Reuters’s Caren Bohan and Alister Bull say the departure of economic adviser Paul Volcker and the appointment of William Daley as chief of staff is an effort to "mend frayed ties with the business community, [which they see as a] shift [of] focus of the economic panel to one that has a greater focus on business outreach," they write. Matthew Yglesias agrees. “So if you're going to create an economic policy team for Barack Obama ... it seems to me that it’s extremely prudent for a president to desire that the majority of his economic policy team be composed of people with previous executive branch economic policy experience. That means basically a lot of 'Rubinites' plus various exceptions around the margin.” Um, that’s all well and good and very scholarly, but if one looks at the basic personality of Barack Obama, the community organizer, friend of William Ayers and acolyte of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, then those views of the president’s actions certainly don’t mesh. What seems a more appropriate motivation for Mr. Obama’s recent changes of advisers is that the “shellacking” the Dems took in November was a serious wake-up call. Obama’s statement that he’d rather be an effective one-term president than an ineffective two-term president is disingenuous, to say the least. Obama wants that second term, effective or not, and is prepared to do anything to get it. Ergo, the new face of the White House. He has basically tossed his core supporters under the bus in order to recapture the independent vote in the 2012 presidential election. After all, who is the left going to vote for in 2012? The Republican candidate? So while the public abandonment of his leftist base is ruthless and devious, there’s little risk of the president losing them next election. In the same manner that candidate Obama pulled the wool over Americans’ eyes in with the “hope and change” bit, he is now attempting to pull the wool over Americans’ eyes through efforts to portray himself as a bipartisan moderate. But like it says on the Sham-Wow ad, “Beware of imitations.” Barack Obama is not now, has never been and will never be anything but an extreme liberal leftist. You can paint a tomato white, but if afterwards you slice it in two, the inside will still be red.