|
How does the most powerful man in the world declare solidarity with an anti-establishment movement? Obama is nothing if not an exemplar of the kind of unearned power and fortune that the “Occupy” crowds ostensibly decry.
|
|
| The American people – always astute given a long enough time horizon – seem to have determined that the decline of the nation’s fortunes are coincident with the ineffectiveness of the Obama Administration. The Obama Administration – perpetually convinced that symbolism is a serviceable substitute for performance – has opted to respond to this disenchantment by boarding whatever populist train happens to be passing at the time.
That’s the most logical explanation for the president’s recent decision to embrace the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, the protests that have taken to streets throughout the nation to prove that there’s a correlation between poor personal hygiene and poor civic hygiene.
The protesters – who don’t think twice (or perhaps even once) about the internal contradiction of tweeting on the evils of capitalism from the finest products produced by Silicon Valley – rage against an amorphous elite, claiming that 99 percent of Americans are victimized by a shadowy one percent, an elite cabal that sets the rules for the world in which the rest of us merely live.
The president is on their side, telling ABC News earlier this week, “I understand the frustrations that are being expressed in those protests." If that’s true, it puts him one step ahead of the demonstrators, who, a month after the protests began, are still trying to determine exactly what they want (one recent cry from the streets of New York has been to “nationalize the Fed,” proving that any noun will do in the language of the left).
Yet how does the most powerful man in the world declare solidarity with an anti-establishment movement? Obama is nothing if not an exemplar of the kind of unearned power and fortune that the “Occupy” crowds ostensibly decry.
He is a graduate of some of the nation’s most elite schools who never seems to have distinguished himself academically. He served as the president of the Harvard Law Review without ever publishing an article under his name. He lectured at the University of Chicago Law School (a tenure that has fed the inflated notion that he is a “constitutional scholar”), though one highly esteemed colleague of his there told me that Obama’s appeal in the classroom was based solely on personality and that students who actually knew the subject matter regarded him as intellectually shallow.
He became a multi-millionaire on the sales of two autobiographies that read as paeans to his own grandeur. And he was elected to the United States Senate and the presidency based almost entirely on his capacity behind a microphone. In short, Obama is the one percent.
Perhaps, though, the president is not quite as out of step with the movement as he appears at first blush. For “Occupy Wall Street’s” real priority seems to be less about afflicting the comfortable than severing the link between their contributions to society and their success.
The protesters have called for higher wages regardless of skill, single-payer health care, free college education and universal debt forgiveness. In essence, they demand that the fruits of a productive society be provided – at the expense of an unidentified third party – for those who refuse to generate that same productivity. In doing so, they show a philosophical congruence with an administration that has repeatedly demeaned the private sector as morally inferior to government work, proposing to subsidize the educations of public-sector workers over entrepreneurs and lambasting those who dream of life in the corner office.
A vibrant society, however, is contingent on the efforts of its productive class. In reality, it is the very private sector so loathed by the “Occupy” protesters – not the endless army of bureaucrats that the Obama Administration hopes to cultivate – that are the “public servants.” It is they who provide the goods and services that their countrymen want at a reasonable price; and if they don’t, they face the penalty of abject failure. It is they who get up early and leave their families behind to provide the medicine, build the universities and pay the wages that the protesters believe they are entitled to as a natural right.
In the end, it will be they who provide the sheer grit and innovation that rights a listing economy – despite the best efforts of an undiscerning president and his sophomoric acolytes in Lower Manhattan. |
