Obama’s rhetoric is seductively narcotic but his lack of principle is disturbing

- Rob Schwarzwalder Barack Obama offers something for everyone.

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On the personal side, he was born in Hawaii with maternal roots in Kansas and Washington State. He is descended on his mother’s side from Irish immigrants and one of his distant relatives was an early 19th century Supreme Court Justice. His American family has endured scalping by Indians and the vicissitudes of rugged farm life. He is even distantly related to George Bush, Harry Truman and — my personal favorite — Dick Cheney. On his father’s side, he descended from the Luo people of Kenya, an agrarian people who live by the Lake Victoria. His father, the first Barack Hussein Obama, earned a Ph.D. and was a self-espoused Marxist. Raised for several years in Indonesia and comfortable with awakening to site of minarets and the baleful call to Islamic worship, he was “born again” in a liberal Chicago church and called Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church “my house.” Educated at an exclusive Hawaiian prep school, Occidental, a top-tier liberal arts college in Los Angeles, Columbia University and Harvard Law School, he cut his political and professional eye-teeth in unsavory atmosphere of Chicago’s ward politics. A lover of basketball, he likes arugula salads. While in law school fraternized with the conservative Federalist Society. His maternal grandfather and great uncle fought in the Second World War. His mother was a sociologist who sent her son to live with her parents while she completed her Ph.D. The President’s speeches reflect much the same eclecticism. He is for a strong defense but has an almost unguarded confidence in his capacity to negotiate with the world’s ugliest tyrants. He supports Israel but argues for the existence of “Palestine.” In his State of the Union message, he eschewed big government but now presides over its most deliberate and extraordinary expansion in American history. He is a stout advocate of civility in public discourse but has surrounded himself with political brutes. For him, America is a secular nation, as he told the Turks; or a Muslim one as he implied in his media-acclaimed Cairo speech. It is certain he does not consider it a Christian nation — in his inaugural address, he spoke of our “patchwork” heritage, and to this day he seems reluctant to acknowledge our Judeo-Christian heritage. A self-described believer that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, he now wants to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and opposes state efforts to prevent gay unions. The question of when life begins is “above his pay grade” but as President, he has promoted the farthest Left positions possible on abortion availability and funding. A comparison to Theodore Roosevelt may be in order. TR also was a man of an exceptionally diverse background. Born to a Knickerbocker father and a Southern belle mother, a cattleman in North Dakota, a college boxer at Harvard, a New York City police commissioner, soldier, governor, ornithologist, big-game hunter, explorer, international diplomat, friend of Booker T. Washington, woodsman, sailor and the first President to fly above American soil and travel underwater in a submarine, TR was at home almost anywhere. He could relate to people of every station, of every creed and of every race. In these things, the Republican Roosevelt and the Democratic Obama are similar. Crossing myriad socio-cultural divides, the ground on which they stand is common, in one way or another, for just about all of their fellow citizens. Theodore Roosevelt was a demanding President who offered stark and distinct choices to the American people. A skillful politician, he nonetheless took defining and even strident stands and fought for them with characteristic vigor. He was divisive, which is to say he was a leader. Unlike the Rough Rider, Obama is smoother. He talks a great deal about being candid but almost always avoids the roots of our thorniest problems, preferring instead to acknowledge that the disagreements exist and then glossing them over with bromides and grand restatements of principle. With Obama, the one hand always counterweighs the other, leaving him to honest-broke in a self-consciously Solomonic fashion. Solomon, though, was wise. Obama is merely a man of the Left who talks nice. He offers something for everyone, personally and politically, and into him we can read our own stories, aspirations and hopes. But mirrored identification and weariness of political conflict is no excuse for intellectual surrender or disinterest. Such conflict is intransigent and persistent. Mollifying rhetoric won’t make it go away. The political narcotic that is Barack Obama is not evil, only dangerous. And as the debasement of our political culture and loss of our national security continue, we serve neither ourselves nor our children well to be lulled by it Rob Schwarzwalder is a Senior Vice President at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. He is a former Lincoln Fellow in Constitutional Government with California’s Claremont Institute, has served as chief of staff to two Members of Congress and was a presidential appointee in the George W. Bush Administration.

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