The Alien Amongst Us
Two years into his presidency Mr. Obama seems unable to connect with the average American on something as fundamental as his birthplace and religious beliefs. According to Pew Research, an overwhelming number of Americans (61%) either don’t know what religion he follows or believe that he is a Muslim. Mr. Obama’s disconnect to the average American has been noted previously, as reflected by his plunge in approval ratings (see Obama’s Approval Ratings Plunge).
The poll on Mr. Obama’s religion was conducted prior to his recent strong endorsement for building a mosque on Ground Zero in Manhattan, leading to the expectation that future polls will show further confusion about the President’s core beliefs and background. Mr. Kohut, president of Pew Research, stated that “People have told us consistently that they want religious politicians. I think it’s an important element of how people see him, how he’s viewed personally.”
Doubts On Obama's Fundamental Beliefs
Where Was The President Born?
Another indication of the President’s lack of credibility with the public are CNN poll results that show a startling 27% of Americans doubt that Mr. Obama was born in the United States. Questions regarding Mr. Obama’s birthplace persist despite the posting of Obama’s birth certificate on the Internet by his staff during the election campaign. Mr. Obama’s recent strong support for a Muslim mosque to be built next to Ground Zero victims in Manhattan is only likely to enhance the public perception that Mr. Obama’s views are alien to American culture.
The public doubts on Mr. Obama’s birthplace and religion may be completely misguided, but speaks volumes for Mr. Obama’s inability to honestly let us know who he is and what he actually believes in. In the final analysis, Mr. Obama’s fundamental problem is the fact that the public is beginning to feel extremely uncomfortable about their President.
It should come as no surprise that the President strongly endorsed building a mosque on Ground Zero in Manhattan. Nor should it come as a surprise that he later tried to backpedal and obfuscate his original defense of the mosque when various groups expressed outrage at his position. Perhaps the President is merely trying to tell every side what they want to hear - perhaps worse, he simply lacks any real convictions on the matter due to the absence of a core set of values or beliefs.
James Taranto of Wall Street Journal gives a great critical summation of the back and forth retractions issued by the White House after Mr. Obama’s original endorsement of the mosque, and concludes that Mr. Obama “is a stubborn man without conviction”. Mr. Taranto’s analysis is definitely worth the read - excerpts from his article follow:
So why did nearly everybody construe the Friday remarks as a strong endorsement of the Ground Zero mosque? Blame the professional left, which, in its characteristic neo-McCarthyite style, has sought to portray all criticism of the mosque project as, to quote Sargent, “un-American” and the critics as an undifferentiated lunatic fringe that rejects the First Amendment, at least as it applies to Islam.
Obama is a man of the left, so when he deployed the left’s rhetoric about the First Amendment, allies and adversaries alike assumed that he also intended to level this accusation at the mosque’s critics. They might well have been right about this, but if so, the president quickly made clear he does not have the courage of his convictions.
In doing so, and despite himself, he managed to make an important point. It is not a “clever little dodge” but a principled position to say that while the mosque’s developers have a right to build it near Ground Zero, doing so is not the right thing to do. Freedom of religion does not mean freedom from criticism.
Obama, however, made this point in a way that showed him to be small and weak, offering it not as a defense of the mosque’s critics but of himself against them. Imagine if on Friday he had not only pandered to his guests by defending their constitutional rights but also challenged them by saying forthrightly what he acknowledged evasively on Saturday: that building a mosque near Ground Zero may be unwise even though the law clearly allows it. That would have been presidential.
Instead we got what sounded like a strong endorsement, followed by a backpedaling denial that it was any such thing, followed in turn by a denial that the earlier denial was backpedaling. The president stands behind everything he said but denies that he said much of anything.
Barack Obama is a stubborn man without conviction.
Once again the President has shown a mindset that is alien to the common sense values of the average American. Even worse, our accidental President was not shown the capacity to listen or learn even as his poll number plummet.
More On This Topic: Sacrilege at Ground Zero - Washington Post
Location matters. Especially this location. Ground Zero is the site of the greatest mass murder in American history — perpetrated by Muslims of a particular Islamist orthodoxy in whose cause they died and in whose name they killed.
America is a free country where you can build whatever you want — but not anywhere. That’s why we have zoning laws. No liquor store near a school, no strip malls where they offend local sensibilities, and, if your house doesn’t meet community architectural codes, you cannot build at all.
These restrictions are for reasons of aesthetics. Others are for more profound reasons of common decency and respect for the sacred. No commercial tower over Gettysburg, no convent at Auschwitz — and no mosque at Ground Zero.
Build it anywhere but there.
The President’s wife has been taking a severe beating in the press after taking a luxurious vacation to Costa del Sol. The New York Daily News demonized Mrs. Obama, portraying her as a “modern-day Marie Antoinette”, spending extravagantly as the US sinks into an economic abyss.
Sacrifice is something that many Americans are becoming all too familiar with during this economic downturn. It was a key theme in President Obama’s inaugural address to the nation, and he’s referenced it numerous times when lecturing the country on how to get back on its feet.
But while most of the country is pinching pennies and downsizing summer sojourns - or forgoing them altogether - the Obamas don’t seem to be heeding their own advice. While many of us are struggling, the First Lady is spending the next few days in a five-star hotel on the chic Costa del Sol in southern Spain with 40 of her “closest friends.”
Mrs. Obama’s trip was obviously not a public relations coup for the White House but one must admire the refreshing honesty exhibited by her flamboyance. The trip was a blatant admission by the Obamas of the obvious fact that they are better than us, richer than us and certainly more powerful than us. All people are not equal regardless of what the politicians tell us in their wonderful speeches.
Michelle Obama was probably incredulous at the venomous press reaction to her trip - after all, this is how she lives every day of her life. The President and his wife are routinely surrounded by an army of servants 24/7 to attend to every conceivable need. The imperial life style of a President is not routinely reported in the press - maybe it should be.
Recent Census Bureau data is certain to ignite further debate over the issue of illegal immigration. According to The Wall Street Journal, although illegal immigrants make up 4% of the US population, they are reproducing at twice that rate, accounting for 8% of all US births.
“Unauthorized immigrants are younger than the rest of the population, are more likely to be married and have higher fertility rates than the rest of the population,” said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew in Washington, D.C.
The report, based on Census Bureau data and analysis of demographic characteristics of the undocumented population, also found that the lion’s share, or 79%, of the 5.1 million children of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S. in 2009 were born in the U.S. and therefore citizens.
Amid a heated national debate over illegal immigration, some Republican politicians have been calling for changes to the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” in order to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to unlawful residents.
Late last month, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham announced his support for reconsidering automatic U.S. citizenship for babies born to undocumented immigrants. He said the status quo enticed people to enter the country illegally and have children to qualify for U.S. benefits.
As the debt of the United States grows to levels that are clearly becoming unsustainable (see US Is Bankrupt And We Don’t Even Know It), the huge cost of providing free education to children of illegal immigrants needs to be reevaluated.
According to WikiAnswers, the national average cost per student in public schools is $9,666. The cost of educating 5.1 million children of illegal immigrants is costing the nation over $49 billion per year. The issue is complex since illegal immigrants also produce numerous economic benefits to the nation, which must be taken into account when evaluating the situation. Nonetheless, with many State governments on the verge of bankruptcy and legal US Citizens suffering economically, the country is no longer financially able to provide free education to an unlimited number of children born of illegal immigrants.
More On This Topic: Cost of Illegal Immigration In California Estimated At Nearly $9 Billion
The President’s criticism of “fat-cat bankers” has been relentless. Since taking office, Obama has seized every opportunity to flame the public hatred for bankers by portraying them as being greedy and insensitive.
Obama Criticizes Fat-Cat Bankers-Bloomberg - Dec 14, 2009 - “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall Street,” Obama said in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” program.
“The people on Wall Street still don’t get it,” Obama said. “They’re still puzzled why is it that people are mad at the banks”.
Recently, Obama’s “pay czar” again publicly excoriated bankers for their greed.
TARP Pay Czar Criticizes Big Bank Bonuses - LA Times - July 24, 2010 - The Obama administration’s pay czar on Friday came to the same conclusion about fat Wall Street bonuses that average Americans have already reached: There’s no logic behind them, except greed.
Still, the findings sparked outrage from some in Congress, renewed calls for reining in Wall Street compensation and raised the prospect of re-energized efforts to impose hefty taxes on such bonuses.
President Obama said the “lavish bonuses” highlighted the need for provisions in the recently enacted financial regulatory reform that address executive compensation…
Does Obama really care how much bankers get paid or is he simply seizing a political opportunity to increase his poll numbers? As usual it’s not clear what Obama’s real values are, but flogging bankers hasn’t helped, as his poll ratings drop to all time lows (see Obama’s Approval Ratings Plunge).
Perhaps the cynicism is unwarranted - maybe bankers are indeed “greedy” and “just don’t get it” - maybe Obama truly feels that bankers are being unjustly enriched at the expense of the public. I would like to believe Obama’s motives are pure, but if so, where is the moral outrage when it comes to public officials blatantly looting the public treasury?
Although disclosure of public officials giving themselves outrageous pay and benefits in Bell City, California has outraged the public, not a word of recrimination has come out of the White House. The shameless looting of taxpayer monies by public officials sworn to work for the interests of those who elected them is almost beyond comprehension, as reported by The Wall Street Journal:
For an illustration of everything wrong with the nation’s public pensions, look no further than the compensation in Bell, California.
Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo stepped down three weeks ago after news broke that he was making $800,000 a year to oversee the blue-collar town of 40,000. Now the Los Angeles Times reports that records show Mr. Rizzo’s compensation was double that amount—some $1.5 million a year. That number included the 28 weeks of vacation and sick time Mr. Rizzo was allowed annually—at a cost of $386,000. Good work, if you can get it.
Mr. Bell’s comp also spiraled up thanks to the city’s contributions to his pension and other retirement plans. Mr. Rizzo is in line to collect at least $600,000 annually in guaranteed pension payouts upon retirement, thanks to California’s generous formulas based on time served and compensation. Those payouts—which could add up to tens of millions of dollars over Mr. Rizzo’s lifetime—help explain why the Golden State is currently $6.2 billion in the hole for retiree pension and benefit payments.
These paydays are the inevitable result of the dominance of government unions in city and state politics. While most private workers have 401(k)-type plans that rise and fall in value with economic growth, unions negotiate guaranteed payouts that stay lucrative whether or not the cities can afford them.
Bankers are not elected by the public and do not directly work for the taxpayers. Bankers may owe the public some accountability, but elected officials should certainly be held to a higher standard. If Mr Obama is looking to improve his poll standings, how about some outrage over public officials who breach the public trust and enrich themselves at public expense? Mr Obama should take a page out his banker’s book and propose taxing Mr. Rizzo’s ill gotten gains at 100%.
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