Our Leaderless Nation

Obama was a “blank screen” all right, not because he was new on the scene, but because he had cultivated an inoffensive and unchallenging blankness. It was political camouflage. During his days in the Illinois senate, Obama had carefully avoided controversy by repeatedly voting “present” rather than taking a position on polarizing issues. Friends of Obama had spared him the rigors of vigorous campaigning in both the primary and general election phases of his run for the U.S. Senate by tarring Obama’s opponents with the details of their messy divorces. Obama arrived in the U.S. Senate without ever having taken a tough stand on any issue of consequence.

Likewise, Obama’s reputation as a deep thinker is the fruit of tireless self-promotion and deception. Though he successfully campaigned for the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, Barack Obama never contributed anything of consequence to the Harvard Law Review or any other law review.

On page four of The Audacity of Hope Obama puffs himself up this way:

“By all appearances, my choice of careers seemed to have worked out. After two terms during which I labored in the minority, Democrats had gained control of the state senate, and I had subsequently passed a slew of bills, from reforms of the Illinois death penalty system to an expansion of the state’s health program for kids.”

It’s a load of crap. The “slew of bills” Obama takes credit for were mostly the stolen intellectual property of other Illinois state senators. During his stint in the Illinois senate Obama was widely despised as a so-called “bill jacker.” He had struck a deal with the president of the Illinois senate, Emil Jones, that went something like this: If Jones would groom Obama for a run for the U.S. Senate, then Obama would repay Jones for his efforts by using his influence in Washington to funnel tax dollars back to Springfield and the pet projects of Emil Jones. As part of Obama’s grooming, Emil Jones repeatedly snatched draft legislation away from its true authors and allowed Barack Obama to present this legislation to the public as his own. No wonder his fellow senators dismissed Obama as a punk and a jerk.

But surely Obama’s masterful way with words is evidence of the richness of his intellect, right? Well . . . no. In truth, he’s more of an actor than an intellectual; Obama uses a teleprompter the way a cripple uses a crutch. Obama’s reputation for eloquence is rooted in the eloquence of others.

Barack Obama pays his chief speechwriter a whacking salary of $172,200 a year, equal to that of Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, because without speechwriter Jon Favreau’s golden prose Barack Obama rapidly lapses into wonkish policy-jabber.

But didn’t Barack write two fat self-admiring autobiographies before he had accomplished anything? Well . . . no. Not if the modern science of text analysis is given its due.

We live in a time when college professors regularly bust cheating college students by using sophisticated computer programs that detect plagiarism. Such programs rely on the fact that each author’s literary style, no matter how pedestrian, is a linguistic “fingerprint” closely akin to the author’s ingrained manner of speaking.

A recent illustration was reported by The Times of London, which tells us how Brian Vickers, a professor at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London used a computer program called Pl@giarism to analyze a previously unattributed play titled “The Reign of King Edward III,” which was published anonymously in 1596. This software program had been developed by the University of Maastricht to keep students honest. Professor Vickers used it to compare the unattributed play to the plays of William Shakespeare. The program identified 200 matches of phrases of three or more words in length thereby confirming what other scholars had long suspected: that Shakespeare was the author of the anonymous play. Other scholars had already included it in “The Riverside Shakespeare” and “The Oxford Shakespeare” anthologies.

Likewise, both of Barack Obama’s autobiographies have been subjected to both traditional literary analysis and computer analysis. The results convincingly demonstrate that each of these texts was authored by a different intellect. Indeed, by two very different sorts of intellect. The two books are wildly dissimilar in reading level, in average number of words per sentence and in selective literary allusions and imagery. According to the best science available it can be said with confidence that Barack Obama could not have written both The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father. [For a more detailed exposition of this topic see “Barack Obama: Famous & Unknown” in this series.]

Mr. Obama’s personal history strongly suggests that he did not write Dreams from My Father, which is far and away the more sophisticated and literary of the two texts. Even the idea to write Dreams was not his own – a literary agent had approached Obama with the idea; it was she who wrangled a fat advance and dangled it in front of Barack, who had not previously written anything but a few horrid free-verse poems that even he has dismissed as junk.

For over a year thereafter, Barack Obama dithered and struggled to get something on paper that was less horrid than his trashy poems. He even fled his digs in Chicago to seek inspiration in far-off Indonesia, his boyhood homeland. Nothing worked. He returned to America empty handed. Finally, in disgust, his publisher dumped him.

After that, the same clueless literary agent wrangled Obama another, much smaller, advance of $40,000 from another publisher to write the same book. Obama snatched the cash, but he continued to struggle with creative writing. He was, after all, a performer, not an author.

Then, suddenly, only months after making the acquaintance of his Hyde Park neighbor William Ayers, the long-struggling Barack Obama handed in a ready-to-market autobiography written in a high literary style. Ayers and Obama hit it off from the first handshake – Ayers was the former wing commander of a rogue communist bomb group called the Weather Underground that had bombed the Pentagon, police stations, the home of a judge and was preparing a dynamite bomb intended for a soldiers’ social in Fort Dix when it detonated ahead of schedule and demolished a Greenwich Village townhouse – and Obama was a committed leftist who would become the most left-leaning of all fifty U.S. senators, even outflanking Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist.

Though subsequent literary and computer analyses of Barack’s two books have debunked the myth of their common authorship, a similar comparison of Dreams from My Father with the book Fugitive Days by William Ayers reveals the two texts to be virtual literary twins. The two texts are a tight match on both reading level and average sentence word count. The book Dreams is riddled with the nautical allusions, some of them quite obscure, that are a William Ayers trademark. As a young man, William Ayers had been a merchant seaman; he has repeatedly mentioned how formative his experiences at sea were for him; it was the time in his life when William Ayers most resembled one of “the workers” extolled by the communists.

Of course, there is that vanishingly microscopic possibility that a guy who had never written anything but a trashy poem about apes in a cave stomping on figs (I’m not making this up) could have miraculously written a lengthy and highly stylized text in a voice that was nearly identical to the evolved style of an author whom he had recently befriended. There is that lingering sliver of doubt. All it would take to clinch the matter is for either Barack Obama or William Ayers to admit that the polished author William Ayers had, in fact, written Dreams from My Father. But what were the chances of that happening?

Well . . . never underestimate the power of human vanity to force hidden secrets into the sunlight. The October 8th, 2009 issue of the New York Times included a 13-column-inch article tucked away on page A19 that attempted to debunk “conspiracies spooling out” on the Internet that William Ayers is the true author of Dream from My Father. It was an exercise in damage control. Time’s employee Kate Phillips did her best to convince Time’s readers that William Ayers was merely being playful or ironic when he told two different reporters on two separate occasions that he was, in fact, the author of Dreams from My Father. Kate Phillips was careful not to mention any of the scientific analyses that lay behind the Internet “conspiracies.”

On the first occasion Mr. Ayers was approached by Anne Leary at Reagan National Airport. She reported that Ayers had confirmed his authorship of Dreams. On the second occasion Mr. Ayers was approached at the Baltimore Book Festival where he was promoting his recently written Race Course and asked, once again, about his authorship of Dreams. On that occasion Ayers said to the inquiring Will Englund:

“Here’s what I’m going to say. This is my quote. Be sure to write it down: Yes, I wrote Dreams from My Father. I ghostwrote the whole thing. I met with the president three for four times, and then I wrote the entire book.”

William Ayers then added: “And now I would like the royalties.” Of course he would! In recently disclosed financial statements, Barack Obama revealed that he had garnered $9 million from sales of Dreams as of March 2009. By sorry contrast, sales of Ayers’ most recent effort are sluggish and the reissuance of his earlier opus, Fugitive Days, went straight to the bargain bins. It must be galling for someone so egotistical as to imagine that he could bend America to his will with dynamite bombs to witness another supreme egoist, Barack Obama, raking in the cash and basking in adoration for a book that Ayers himself had authored. Ouch.

Mr. Ayers’ outbursts are more than Freudian slips of the tongue; they are expressions of conscious anger and frustration. Making his bitterness all the more unbearable is his knowledge that Dreams from My Father cemented Obama’s image as an authentic progressive in the minds of America’s voters – only to have Obama refashion himself, after the election, into something more like Bush 2.0 on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was William Ayers on the evening news looking small and disheveled, out on the street and denouncing Obama’s plan to send another 30,000 more American troops to pound the ground in Afghanistan. For the frustrated William Ayers it is Vietnam all over again.

Here’s a thought: just maybe this die-hard communist’s recent public pronouncements that he was the true author of Dreams from My Father were intended as a warning to Mr. Obama that unless Obama returned to the narrow path of progressivism, Mr. Ayers would out him for the hollow-suit teleprompter-dependent performer that he is. Without ghostwriters such as William Ayers and the lavishly-paid Jon Favreau, Barack Obama would be an actor without a script. Without his hired choreographers little Barack just couldn’t tap dance.

Spreading the Blame

Whenever a challenge arises, Barack Obama convenes a committee to study the problem. That way he can point the finger of blame at others when things go haywire. That way Obama is never wrong about anything; that way he can always claim to be the hapless victim of other people’s incompetence.

A case in point would be America’s hideously high rate of unemployment. First Barack swore that if Congress passed his stimulus package (without reading it) unemployment would never rise above 8 percent. The Democrat majority in Congress granted Barack’s Big Wish. After that, unemployment rose to 10 percent – which is 25% above what Barack assured us would never happen. Then unemployment went above 10%, and that only represented those people who were applying for unemployment benefits. That number did not include all those people who have given up looking for work and all those previously self-employed people who cannot apply for unemployment benefits.

If we include all of these desperate people, then the true rate of unemployment in America is 17.5%. If we also include all the folks who can’t find full-time employment, or are working two or more jobs for which they are wildly overqualified, then the real number of unemployed and underemployed and misemployed Americans is about 25%. This is close to Great Depression numbers. So what was Barack Obama’s response? He convened a Jobs Summit to chat about the problem.

The Jobs Summit

Conspicuously absent from Obama’s conclave was anyone who had previously voiced any criticism of Barack Obama, such as the Chamber of Commerce. Nowhere to be seen were the National Federation of Independent Businesses or the National Association of Manufacturers. There was no one there to represent American small businesses – enterprises with 500 or fewer employees. That’s weird, because small businesses create seventy to eighty percent of all jobs in our country. Small businesses created 14 ½ million of the 22 million jobs created between 1993 and 2008. There was absolutely no discussion of tort reform or regulatory reform or any mention of reducing burdensome taxation on employers so that they could better afford to hire more employees.

So, who did Barack invite to his Jobs Summit? He invited representatives from the teachers’ union and the left-wing radical Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) even though unions don’t create jobs. Obama invited reps from such lumbering giants as FedEx, Boeing, ATT and the steel industry – the sort of old-school elephants that won’t be a robust source of future employment. Obama invited Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist who thinks Obama is not throwing nearly enough of the taxpayers’ earnings down the already discredited “stimulus” rat hole. Also given a place of honor at Obama’s jobs powwow was the wacko Van Jones, Obama’s one-time “green jobs” czar, who had confessed to a belief that the Bush administration had conspired in the 9/11 jihadist airliner attacks on the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon and the failed assault on the White House itself by United flight 93. Seated nearby was Jeff Jones, who is most renowned as the founder of the violence smitten Weather Underground. Yup, that Weather Underground – the one that attracted bomber nut boy William Ayers – the guy who ghostwrote Obama’s “autobiography” and who launched Obama’s political career from his very own Hyde Park living room. It’s a small world. But I digress.

The lesson here is that Obama has no clue how to create jobs. Since his inauguration millions of private-sector jobs have been obliterated; during that same period government employment has skyrocketed, which is really bad news. Government employment sucks the life’s blood from the necks of private sector employees through onerous taxation. Worse yet, the typical government employee is paid well over $70,000, while the average private sector worker earns about $45,000. Obama’s latest gimmick is to hire 1.4 million census workers and keep them pushing their pencils long enough to qualify for unemployment benefits which are funded by small business owners. It’s a leftist two-for-one: a million census temps become dependent on the taxpayers and small businesses are further impoverished, which further diminishes their ability to offer new private-sector jobs. It’s all about growing government and increasing the power of the bureaucrats.

Thanks to Barack Obama, small businesses have no incentive to hire more workers; small businesses can’t invest in anything; they can’t see any way forward; there is no growth path in front of them. That’s because short-pants Obama has shown no leadership; he has dithered and vacillated. A real leader would have told business owners what the rules will be going forward and made a diamond-hard promise that those rules will not change for a long time to come. A smart leader would stop stifling capital formation by reducing taxation on small-business employers. Right now, businesses are anticipating a damaging tax increase in 2010, plus damaging new healthcare costs, plus damaging union activities due to Democrat “card check” legislation, plus damaging new energy costs due to Democrat “cap and trade” legislation. Simply freezing the whole healthcare - cap & trade - taxation - unionization package would create an amazingly fertile environment for private-sector job creation. But what are the chances of that happening?

Obama Needs an Adult Administration

It was not unusual for fifty or sixty percent of the upper reaches of previous administrations of both political parties to be composed of men with practical business experience. Even the light-weight Kennedy administration included about 30% men with real-world business experience. Now compare that with the super-light-weight Barack Obama whose administration includes less than 10% of people with any knowledge of how America’s employment mechanisms really function.

In other words, Barack Obama has surrounded himself with people who are as clueless as he is; he has no one within earshot who can tell him how to save America’s private-sector, the place where 80% of jobs are created. Instead, he listens to union bosses who encourage him to grow the government. That’s because over half of all union workers are also government employees. Bigger government means richer union bosses and richer union bosses make bigger campaign donations to Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats. You could almost hear the door slamming on any chance that Obama’s Jobs Summit would create a single private-sector job. The leftist theorists who pack the Obama administration do best what Obama also does best: chew the fat. They are not the experienced people of action we so desperately need during this economic crisis.

For example: the world’s greatest industrial power really ought to have well-scripted trade agreements with other nation states, but during the first ten months of his presidency Barack Obama has dithered on the matter of free-trade pacts. His only moves on trade have been some showboat trade retaliations that were popular with his liberal base, such as imposing penalties on Chinese tire imports. Before his recent whirlwind tour of Asia, Obama seldom mentioned international trade. Fred Bergsten, a former senior Treasury Department executive and current director of the Peterson Institute of International Economics, put it bluntly: “There is no trade policy.”

Making matters worse, the dithering Mr. Obama has allowed previously negotiated trade agreements with South Korea, Columbia and Panama to languish in Congress with no support from our chief executive. Obama has demonstrated his lack of vision for America as a great trading nation. Unlike every previous president since World War II, Obama has failed to pursue free-trade agreements that would open foreign markets to American products.

Obama’s foot dragging is an echo of the Democrat Party’s reluctance to buck the unions. No fewer than 128 Democrats in the House of Representatives are now pushing legislation that would require a sweeping review of the economic impact of existing trade agreements before any new agreements are made. That’s bad news; it means we’re losing foreign markets to more competitive nations. Exports would create jobs and invigorate our economy which is now stalled due to diminished consumption and a sluggish real estate market. With unemployment above 10% we desperately need to revitalize our international trade; we can’t do that without trade agreements. If we’re not moving forward, then we are sliding backward.

Other nations don’t share Barack Obama’s lack of dynamism. India, for example, is now negotiating trade deals with Japan and the European Union, while making overtures to our neighbor to the north. When asked if India would also pursue agreements with the United States, India’s ambassador to Washington, Meera Shankar, demurred:

“We would be open to looking at a study that examines the costs and benefits of a similar arrangement with the United States, but I think this is something that can proceed only on the basis of a suitable comfort level on both sides. And at the present juncture, we are not sure if that exists in the United States.”

He was being very diplomatic, but coming as it did from the representative of the second most populous nation on our planet it was a stinging smackdown for Barack and his team of amateur economists.

It’s the same story with healthcare. During his long campaign Obama promoted himself as a game-changing visionary, but to this day no one knows what his vision of healthcare is. That’s because he punted healthcare into the lap of Congress and promptly left the field, returning only occasionally to do a little cheerleading from the sideline. With no leader to guide them, our congressional fever swamp produced five possible visions of our nation’s economic future. Whichever version Obama signs into law at the big photo op, it will be utterly free of his fingerprints.

America desperately needs a mature leader. There will be another presidential election in 2012. Will a patriotic adult with some practical experience please step forward.