Constancio Asumen, Jr.
The Repugnant Obama Paradigm
November 11, 2009

Having introduced this locution in an earlier article, I hasten to stake my claim as the one to have originated the phraseology. Thus, if and when it wiggles itself into an unheralded immortality in the hallowed pantheons of political discourse, there should be no mistaking on who first minted it.

Mistaken attribution may not lead to a distortion of history with momentous repercussions on the subsequent unfolding of events. But accuracy in reporting is important; otherwise injustice becomes an acceptable integral part to the praxis and history of scholarship. Becoming so would, ipso facto, defeat the very sine qua non of history.

For instance, the catchy "nattering nabobs of negativism" is often mistakenly attributed to Vice President Spiro Agnew just because he was the first on record to have uttered it in public. However, it was minted behind the scenes by then speechwriter William Safire, whose “On Language” column justified The New York Times being delivered to my doorsteps for several years.

The Agnew attribution may not have changed the course of history. I however deem it an injustice to Safire’s contribution to the national political discourse in particular, and to language scholarship in general.

I have come to the inevitable conclusion that President Obama’s ascendancy to the Oval Office was made possible mainly by a failure of the majority of the American electorate to recognize a multitude of patterns concerning Barack Hussein Obama, the individual, his modus operandi, and its cumulative impact to our national polity. These include, among others, his associations, his teleprompter enhanced eloquence, his penchant to obfuscate information obstinately, his flair for the dramatic and sensational, etc., in endless litany.

Granted, there were countless enablers along the way. But the genius of Obama lies in his gambit that taken as a litany, or a laundry list of seemingly harmless lapses of judgment, his modus operandi could not harm him politically. He was in effect counting on the statistical certitude that the majority of the electorate could not muster a gestalt perception of himself as a politician. Therefore Americans as the electorate are inherently incapable of knowing how harmful Obama is to America.

It is a certainty because the electorate as a collection of minds and individual conscience and consciousness, constitute a few drops of genius in a bucket of mediocrity. This is not to denigrate the intelligence of the American electorate. It is just to recognize the undeniable brutal reality that statistically, the nonchalant John and Jane Doe “cannot care less” amongst us do vastly outnumber the “you never can fool me” Einstein and Heisenberg amongst us.

To invoke the original far-reaching conclusive formulation of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in its entirety, "Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality. Trying to pretend that inequality does not really exist has led to disaster. Trying to eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes has led to disaster. It is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as life is lived: understanding that each human being has strengths and weaknesses, qualities we admire and qualities we do not admire, competencies and incompetencies, assets and debits; that the success of each human life is not measured externally but internally; that all of the rewards we can confer on each other, the most precious is a place as a valued fellow citizen."

I deem it pointless to dwell again on the litany of sins. Aside from having peripherally dealt with it earlier elsewhere myself, the internet literature alone is replete with brilliant and incisive documentation. To single out the most notable few I recently found: Victor Davis Hanson has repeatedly analyzed Obama’s lapses in judgment. Thomas Sowell pointed out with unmistakable emphasis how ruinous Obama’s czaring of America is to the country. Joan Swirsky pushed the envelope even further by delving into who could possibly be calling the shots.

The enablers demand revisiting because they, too, constitute a pattern. It requires getting to the forest without being distracted by the trees. The so-called main stream media, exemplified to notoriety by the “tingling legs” of Chris Matthews, being blatantly functioning as a de facto propaganda outlet for Obama does not need any journalistic sourcing. That the “hope and change” mantra took political traction, thanks to the acolyte media has become a common knowledge.

It is however usually under-appreciated that the Clinton Paradigm ushered in with facility the arrival of the Obama Paradigm. The ultimate political insider Richard Morris architected triangulation as an effective tactical maneuver to attain the strategy of political survival. This enabled the Clinton presidency to recalibrate its bearings, to survive Newt’s “Contract for America” revolution and introduce a new standard for Presidential behavior. The Clinton era effectively corroded the nation’s sensibilities.

After the nation have accepted the mantra that the Lewinsky Affair was about “only just sex,” “everybody does it,” “does not amount to impeachable behavior,” the crush and burn methodology of Rahm Emanuel became as benign to the nation as a cub scouts fire drill. On his inauguration speech, Obama enjoined the nation to help him remake America and more than half of the nation gave him a standing ovation.

Little did the applauders suspect that what he had in mind was to convert America to be the leading debtor nation after a long tradition of being a reliable creditor nation. Little did the nation suspect that what he had in mind was to downsize the private sector, the very dependable engine of wealth creation, in order that union and government bureaucracies, become the undisputed purveyor of the perverted “golden rule,” that he who has the gold makes the rules.

As a matter of pedagogical illustration let us take the recently passed House Bill which is popularly deemed the PelosiCare version of ObamaCare. I had neither the latitude nor the forbearance to deal with the thousands of pages of the full text. Hence, I searched the CRS summary page for the text strings “establish” and “prohibit.” The search returned ten hits for “establish” and five hits for “prohibit.”

Without going into a tedious and toilsome cost-benefit analysis of the implications of the search result, it is safe to conclude that at the very least, when PelosiCare becomes the law of the land, we are guaranteed five more constraints to what can be done, without fear of violating the law. Whether they be czars, commissions, committees, or panels of sorts, there shall be ten more units of bureaucracy to function as instruments of governance.

Let me remind, in passing, all those who breathed a sigh of relief on the report that Sen. Lindsey Graham pronounced the Bill a DOA (dead on arrival) in the Senate, to take the relief with the proverbial grain of salt. The venerable Senator issued a similar verdict on the Sotomayor confirmation. She was then the nominee. She is now Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Would calling Senator Graham’s office for an explanation serve any purpose? I suspect it would be an exercise in futility.

Finally, recognizing a paradigm is one thing; being cognizant of its enduring legacy is quite another. I deem it proper and fitting to apply the modifier repugnant to emphasize the reality that every facet of the Obama agenda has the guaranteed effect of undermining the principles which serve as the foundation of Americanism, the vaunted last best hope of mankind on earth.

In the process of redistributing wealth, no amount of benevolence and good intentions can compensate for the brutal reality that spreading the wealth around, reduces the total wealth, and eventually simply leaves you with exactly nothing to redistribute. Herein resonates with frightening alacrity the repugnance of the paradigm that most appropriately describes President Barack Hussein Obama, who just also happens to be my President.