What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (5 page)

“The burden must have been excruciating as he sat in that classroom,” Darrell continued. “A lesser person would have been paralyzed under the weight of it. But after only eight seconds, President Bush
got out of the chair
.”

American exceptionalism is not just a vague, dreamy abstraction. It is a reality based on our extraordinary beginnings, our stunning history, and our unique foundational principles. Part of that exceptionalism has always been a government small enough and agile enough to manage whatever curveball history threw our way. The explosive growth of government and debt has taken that advantage away. But just as we have done in the past, we can restore the nation. We do not lack confidence in America. We lack confidence in our government’s policies. We did not create this economic disaster. Our government’s policies did. We do not have to meekly stand by while they tell us to get used to “the new normal,” to live with less, to accept that our children will inherit a weaker America, that we must atone for our past “excesses,” to forget the impossible dream of America. When they shrug with resignation over America’s decline, they overlook one critical thing: us.

In the age of Obama, if we don’t laugh, we cry. And there’s no crying in a book by Monica Crowley. America: it’s time to rediscover our inner Happy Warriors! And it’s time to march forward with our Happy Warrior’s battle cry to make America
America
again.

This is our challenge. This is
our
“shovel-ready job.”

Here’s what the @$%&! just happened … and how we get our groove back. Because when the unthinkable happens, we get out of the chair.

We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.

—Barack Obama, 2008

The greatest snake charmer that ever existed.

—Fidel Castro on Obama, 2010

There’s a lot about him we don’t know.

—Tom Brokaw to Charlie Rose, shortly after Election Day, 2008

Why can’t I just eat my waffle?

—Barack Obama, in response to a foreign policy question asked at a Pennsylvania diner, April 2008

In midsummer 2004, Democrats prepared to nominate the junior senator from Massachusetts and kept woman, John Kerry, for president of the United States. North Carolina senator and professional girlie-man John Edwards had run unsuccessfully for the nomination and jumped at the chance to be Kerry’s running mate. Early in the primary race, Edwards had enjoyed some traction, in large part because of the “two Americas” class warfare theme he had repeated endlessly. “We still live in a country where there are two different Americas,” he said. “One, for all of those people who have lived the American dream and don’t have to worry, and another for most Americans, everybody else who struggles to make ends meet every single day.” Edwards’s chief political strategist at the time had also recommended use of the divisive “two classes” rhetoric three years earlier, when he served as an adviser to the losing New York City mayoral campaign of Fernando Ferrer. Ferrer spent much of his campaign bemoaning the “two New Yorks.” The mastermind who came up with that particular class warfare language? David Axelrod.

At the same time that Axelrod, whose face looks like the one on a Rollie Fingers baseball card, was guiding Edwards’s unsuccessful 2004 run for the presidency, he was also advising someone else, a young man for whom the idea of America as unjust, immoral, and inherently bad was a more natural fit than it ever was for Edwards.

Axelrod saw something in this fresh political character beyond his obvious smarts and charisma. He saw someone marinated in the redistributive ideology, who believed in it deeply, and who was trying to bring about that change to his Chicago precincts. This man was living and breathing the “two Americas” concept; his biracial background symbolized it in ways no amount of rhetoric from a pampered white candidate like Edwards ever could. The redistributionist language rolled off his tongue with ease as he stoked class and racial and ethnic grievances through his work with “community organizations” such as Project Vote and ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). And yet, the most compelling activity on his résumé was a onetime appearance in 2001 on the Chicago public broadcasting program
Check, Please
, in which his great Harvard-educated mind reviewed restaurants like Dixie Kitchen & Bait Shop.

In this man, Axelrod and the kook brigade (which sounds like a fantastic bar-band) had finally found the perfect vessel for the radical transformation of America, from “two Americas” to one, remade in the European socialist model. They had discovered the staff-wielding figure who would deliver them the promised land, and it helped their cause immensely that he did not appear to be a kook at all. He cloaked his radicalism with intellectual elegance, an electric smile, and a smooth, high-end Generation X hipness. Back in his college days, that radicalism was also draped in the coolness of weed smoke, hemp necklaces, and Panama hats. What other future politician was cool enough to have taken his future wife to Spike Lee’s
Do the Right Thing
on their first date?

As the 2004 Democratic National Convention drew closer, the organizers went in search of a keynote speaker. Both political parties usually try to name a young up-and-comer whom they can showcase and promote as a new party star. Axelrod suggested the vibrant young man whose U.S. Senate campaign he was then advising. The organizers took one look at Barack Obama and gave him the floor. On July 27, Obama addressed the nation for the first time. His speech was a softer and more unifying version of the “two Americas/two New Yorks” theme Axelrod had been crafting for other candidates for years. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the
United States
of America,” he said to rapturous applause. He might as well have said, “There’s not a Burger King America and a McDonald’s America; there’s not a Nike America and a Reebok America; there’s not a Tupac America and a Biggie Smalls America.” It didn’t matter
what
he said; it was
how
he said it.

He also debuted themes that would become familiar to Americans over the next few years: “In no other country on Earth is my story even possible,” he said, as he stressed “hope” as fundamentally American, even for “a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him too.” He concluded by using a phrase that would later become the title of his presidential campaign book: the “audacity of hope,” he said, is “God’s greatest gift,” allowing him to believe that the lives of average Americans can be improved with the “right” governmental policies.

This was not a keynote address. This was Obama’s first presidential campaign speech. The audience, despite having no clue who this wispy Illinois state senator was, nonetheless went bananas during and after his speech, chanting his name and waving flags wildly. The reaction was a little
too
passionate, a little
too
over-the-top, for an unknown character. Alas: the mighty wheels of the Obama machine, led by David Axelrod, were already moving. If more people—from the Clintons to the Republicans—had been paying closer attention in 2004, they would have seen the beginnings of a well-planned, precise, and systematic campaign to elect for president a stealth kook who would radicalize the nation in ways no one could yet imagine. No matter what it took to get this man in the White House, the Axelrod apparatus was prepared to do it. From Ben & Jerry’s “Yes, Pecan” ice cream to unofficial Barack Obama urinal cakes, nothing was too low-rent for the Obama Chicago Mafia to get a vote.

After that 2004 speech, Obama was poised to become the Big Kookuna, and he relished the role. His self-regard and self-confidence in his ability to grab the brass ring were boundless. Moments before striding out onstage, the then-obscure community organizer looked out at the crowd and told
Chicago Tribune
reporter David Mendell, “I’m LeBron, baby,” referring to NBA superstar LeBron James. “I can play at this level. I’ve got game.”

From that moment on, Obama was on a single-minded mission to take the presidency in order to, in his words, “fundamentally transform” America. And in order to effect the transformation, he didn’t need merely the votes of Americans. He needed their hearts. He needed their souls. He needed their money, and a lot of it. And so, beginning with that 2004 speech, he, Axelrod, and several others launched a campaign built on a Dear Leader–esque cult of personality. It was Barack As LeBron: smooth, precise, charismatic, cool—a leader who would persuade with the full force of his talents, the liquid silk of his words, his worldly manner. He would not simply get voters to
think
about him. He would get voters to
feel
him. He would
seduce
them.

Bill Clinton was a master of voter seduction (and
actual
seduction), but he had projected a constant, cloying neediness. Clinton was a garden-variety narcissist; he needed to seduce everyone in the room in order to feel adored and validated. His favorite “seduction du jour” was the use of two words: “kiss it.” Obama is a much more sophisticated kind of narcissist; he views himself as entirely superior to everyone around him and therefore doesn’t much care what you think—except in terms of how it might affect his ambitions. Obama is the antithesis of needy. He would seduce not by begging people to love him but by convincing people that if they
didn’t
love him, they were excluding themselves from a life-changing experience.

No one who runs for president suffers from a small ego. But Obama brought something far beyond an outsized ego. His was the Death Star of all political egos. Obama’s ego was (and is) so big that it’s like an ego planet all to itself, with smaller egos orbiting it like the moons of Jupiter. He brought an unparalleled arrogance, self-assurance, and sense of his own transcendence that he worked hard to hide. But every once in a while, he would let slip just how totally awesome he thought he was. As president, he once “joked” at an Alfred E. Smith dinner that he was like Superman, sent from Krypton by his father Jor-El to “save the Planet Earth.” Later in his presidency, he told
60 Minutes
, “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president—with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln—just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history.” With that comment, Obama put George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Ronald Reagan on notice that they were now chopped liver. Even his wife, Michelle, occasionally rolled her eyes at his breathtaking hubris. While watching the masses drooling over him at his swearing-in to the U.S. Senate, Michelle Obama said, “Maybe one day, he’ll do something to merit all this attention.”

Actual achievement was for lesser mortals. In 2008, he told a group of congressional Democrats, “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.” Humility was for losers.

Becoming that “symbol of possibility” was not merely a happy coincidence. It was a well-crafted, orchestrated plan perfectly executed by Obama, Axelrod, and the few other members of Obama’s hermetic inner circle to send Americans into an irresistible political spell.

The Obama cult of personality was built primarily on five things: the dynamism of the man, the power of his personal story, the change he represented (generational, political, racial), the emotional draw of white guilt, and the call on the American heart for idealism. I won’t dwell on the lesser-known sixth pillar, which involves a miniature bust of Barry’s head, constructed out of Marshmallow Peeps. Obama brought a sense of newness to the national scene. The Clintons, quickly cast out as the old brand, were replaced by the new Obama brand that promised a different kind of politics. Different for sure: out with the dress stains and in with the Constitution stains! He would not be merely a politician or even merely a president but something more. Obama would be a transcendent figure. He would transcend business as usual, bitter partisanship, and dirty backroom dealings. He would sit above base politicking and direct things from a nobler perch. He would restore honor and camaraderie to government. The emotional pull of all of these elements combined made for an unstoppable force. Neither the once-omnipotent Clinton machine nor the opposing political party could turn back the tsunami forces marshaled and directed by Obama and his tight cabal.

The myth-making actually began in 1995, when Obama published
Dreams from My Father
when he was only thirty-four years old. (By the way, who pens their memoirs before the age of thirty-five, besides former child stars like Drew Barrymore?) The book was not merely an inspiring tale of one man’s personal journey. It served a much more profound purpose: it was a preemptive autobiographical strike. When he later entered public life, Obama pointed anyone with questions about his murky past to the memoir, so that what he had written would be taken at face value. No need for investigative journalists to dig into his past when it was all there in black and white, presented by the man himself!

The book was rereleased after his raise-the-roof speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in order to reinforce the idea that he was some sort of prodigy: a young genius with a sixth sense. He wrote boldly about his early radical associations, though he was careful to tone down their true beliefs and influences on him. His father, Barack Obama Sr. (dear God, can you believe there was actually
another
one?), was a committed communist who, while serving as a finance minister for the Kenyan government, urged the “redistribution” of income through higher taxes, even at a “100 percent” tax rate, in order to deliver maximum services to the people, and he chronically demonized corporations. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was a communist sympathizer who practiced critical theory with heavy strains of Marxism and attended a leftist church nicknamed “the little red church” because of its communist leanings. Obama’s grandfather introduced him to poet and communist Frank Marshall Davis, to whom he refers in
Dreams from My Father
as “Frank.” Davis became a mentor and father figure to the young Barack, schooling him early in the ways of radical redistributionism. Davis was a labor movement activist who worked—along with Vernon Jarrett, the father of William Jarrett, ex-husband of one of Obama’s closest confidantes, Valerie Jarrett—in the Communist Party–dominated group Citizens’ Committee to Aid Packing-House Workers. As Obama himself recalled in
Dreams from My Father
, “It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black Power, dashiki self. In some ways he was as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had created.”