Potemkin Village People

It’s interesting how many times Obama makes speeches using human props in efforts to prove his point. I recall being nonplussed watching him the first time in front of the White House with thirty or forty people lined up behind him, all dressed in white lab coats.

Initially I thought he may have been speaking to a convention of butchers till I noticed that many had stethoscopes slung around their necks, medical style. That’s when I realized that his spiel was about his proposed new medical law and how he claimed “most” healthcare professionals were totally in support. Two thoughts ran through my head as I scanned the neat rows of white clad props backing Obama’s pitch: the first was, “are these people really doctors?!” and the second was, “if they are really doctors, why aren’t they off healing the sick instead of propping up a snake oil salesman?” At that time, I was more inclined to believed that the white-coated men and women were paid actors, rather than real physicians. Since then, nearly every Obama speech has involved human props of some sort as visual aids attesting to the gravity of what the Great Man is saying. If he wants to talk about programs like cutting back on military preparedness, he invariably does it at some National Guard station flanked by a couple of hundred troops that had been ordered to attend. Thus, the overall affect Obama thinks he conveys is that somehow his policies are supported by the troops.

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When he is looking to “invest” in the expansion of government, his speech is usually augmented with visual aids such as firefighters, police officers or teachers, as if those were areas in which Obama really wanted to invest, as opposed to hiring 16,000 new IRS goons. We can readily identify the firefighters and cops by their uniforms. Not so much the “teachers,” so they need an added sprinkling of plausibility through the addition of a handful of school age children. Most recently, the prop du jour was one Rebekah Erler, who sat beside the First Lady during the State of the union address. Obama used her to illustrate how she had suffered under the evil Bush regime 7 years ago and after 6 years of Obama “economic” programs, has finally escaped the bonds of poverty. What Obama didn’t say, yet perhaps implied, was that by being a campaign organizer for a Democrat Senator, Rebekah and her husband Ben were able to make their lives better. We now know that Erler is a professional political prop on call to the White house whenever the Great Man wants to demonstrate just how well his “policies” are working. Last June, Obama documented “a day in the life” of Erler to illustrate that he’s perfectly capable of talking directly to all the little people in the middle class. Like the hastily erected and totally unpopulated “Potemkin Villages” that Russia’s Catherine II used to tour, Obama’s props don’t really illustrate the achievements that the President’s policies have crafted, but the utter stupidity and contempt with which President Obama views his fellow citizens.