Sometimes I love her sometimes I wonder which side of the bed she got out of, left or right, but Peggy Noonan pretty much nails President Barack Hussein Obama and the state of America in this most recent article. I cut and pasted my favorite portions, if you want to read the article in it's entirety, just click here.
Dear Mr Cameron, welcome young friend. Welcome to America. Bring your bright, dashing self to our shores. Speak your piece with affection and modesty and go home a wiser man.
As for your own leadership, here is some advice. Do not imitate Mr Obama. He has been a disappointment; learn from his mistakes.
Here are the things he got wrong. In the middle of an economic crash, and in the middle of record-breaking federal budgets and budget deficits, Mr Obama started a new entitlement. This struck people, by which I mean almost everyone, as off-point. We are in a crisis, part of the crisis involves spending money we don't have, and our answer is to spend more? It wasn't a policy, it was a non sequitur.
It's the faculty-lounge problem again: people in business deal with real things, people in faculty lounges deal with ideas, abstractions, theories; they're swayed by this school of thought and that; they're macro. Businessmen must be micro: "Hey buddy, I'm trying to open a dry cleaners over here!"
So: you get only one chance to make a first impression, and President Obama made one over the past 18 months, and it wasn't good. He's losing the room.
Advice on your visit? Love America. It not only deserves it, at the moment it needs it. Our morale is low. Do you want to help preserve what has been called the Special Relationship? (Actually, I don't know: do you?) If you do, then when you speak here, speak of your love for this great nation. We don't, not in a deep way and not enough. Even our President doesn't. He tries, but he can't get it right because it's all so abstract to him. He associates patriotism with nationalism. But patriotism springs from legitimate love and gratitude, nationalism from shallow aggression and conceit. Obama confuses the two, can't get them straight in his head, and winds up saying little, badly. People don't like this, either.
Anyway, when you speak of America speak with love. People will hear you. It will break through the clutter, as your media obsessives say. It will be a new message, or one Americans haven't heard in a while done well, and truly. And don't focus-group it. Mean it.
2 comments:
Very well said
FD, that's what I'm saying, depending on which side of the bed she gets up on determines what I think of her! This article was spot on! VN8
Post a Comment