Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012) (27 page)
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Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
Tags: #Non-fiction, #Political Ideologies, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science
BOOK: Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012)
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Still, for me this is all a side issue. My real interest is elsewhere. In his classic work,
Imagined Communities
, Benedict Anderson reflected on the anti-colonial leaders who had come to power in many Third World countries. He offered this observation about them: “One should . . . not be much surprised if the revolutionary leaderships, consciously or unconsciously, come to play lord of the manor.”
10
Now that’s an arresting statement. Why is this behavior unsurprising? And how do the new leaders themselves make this transition?
Imagined Communities
, Benedict Anderson reflected on the anti-colonial leaders who had come to power in many Third World countries. He offered this observation about them: “One should . . . not be much surprised if the revolutionary leaderships, consciously or unconsciously, come to play lord of the manor.”
10
Now that’s an arresting statement. Why is this behavior unsurprising? And how do the new leaders themselves make this transition?
We can gain some insight into this topic by examining Obama’s June 2011 press conference in which he railed against the owners of corporate jets. Six times he singled them out for attack, according to the subsequent news report in
USA Today
. And what was Obama’s purpose? He was attacking a tax break that allows corporate jet owners to depreciate their planes two years faster than commercial jet owners. As Obama well knew, the actual benefit to the Treasury from eliminating the tax break would be minimal. Yet Obama clearly conveyed by his remarks how much he disdains these fat cats. A few days later, the legal scholar Richard Epstein pointed out a little anomaly. Obama himself travels on a jet. It’s called Air Force One. “For those who are not up on the details,” Epstein wrote, “Air Force One is not a single plane, but it is a code for whatever jet the president flies at any given time. In fact, there are two specially equipped Boeing 747s capable of whisking the president and his entourage away at a moment’s notice anywhere around the globe.” Air Force One, Epstein added, comes with an operating cost of between $60,000 and $181,000 per hour. That’s not counting all the planning and support services involved. To rub it in, Epstein writes, “Just think of the number of college scholarships and food inspection programs this nation could fund if it had the moral courage to make the president fly first class commercial on international long hauls, take Amtrak for shorter trips, and use Skype for critical one-on-one negotiations.”
11
USA Today
. And what was Obama’s purpose? He was attacking a tax break that allows corporate jet owners to depreciate their planes two years faster than commercial jet owners. As Obama well knew, the actual benefit to the Treasury from eliminating the tax break would be minimal. Yet Obama clearly conveyed by his remarks how much he disdains these fat cats. A few days later, the legal scholar Richard Epstein pointed out a little anomaly. Obama himself travels on a jet. It’s called Air Force One. “For those who are not up on the details,” Epstein wrote, “Air Force One is not a single plane, but it is a code for whatever jet the president flies at any given time. In fact, there are two specially equipped Boeing 747s capable of whisking the president and his entourage away at a moment’s notice anywhere around the globe.” Air Force One, Epstein added, comes with an operating cost of between $60,000 and $181,000 per hour. That’s not counting all the planning and support services involved. To rub it in, Epstein writes, “Just think of the number of college scholarships and food inspection programs this nation could fund if it had the moral courage to make the president fly first class commercial on international long hauls, take Amtrak for shorter trips, and use Skype for critical one-on-one negotiations.”
11
Epstein is being sarcastic. He is not calling for Obama to stop using Air Force One. His point is that just as the president may have good reason for using a corporate jet, even one that costs tens of thousands of dollars per hour, so too corporate jet owners may have good reason for owning and flying in private planes. I would also add that corporate jet owners may get modest tax breaks, but in general they are paying for their own planes, while we are the ones who are paying for Obama’s plane. Most striking about Obama’s attitude is not that he detests corporate fliers—whom he portrays as the illegitimate beneficiaries of tax breaks—but that he seems totally oblivious to his own 100 percent flying subsidy.
Now why is that? One way to answer this question is to think of Obama himself as the CEO of a big corporation: the Federal Government. The Federal Government is the largest corporation in America. Has it been performing well? Actually, it has been performing miserably. It is drowning in waste, incompetence, and debt. If it were a private corporation it would long ago have gone bankrupt and shut its doors. In the private sector, there is predictable outrage when CEOs whose companies are doing badly nevertheless get lavish bonuses, perks, and benefits. How, then, can Obama justify appropriating rewards to himself when his corporation has accumulated $5 trillion of debt on his watch? By ordinary standards Obama seems like a shameless hypocrite for doing what he faults other CEOs for doing. Our error, however, may be to use ordinary standards in evaluating Obama. Let’s remember that he judges himself by his own standard, the anti-colonial standard. By that standard, Obama is succeeding. He seeks to increase the size of his corporation and reduce the power of the other corporations, and he has done that. He intends to use debt to level the gap between American affluence and global want, and he has done that also. Once again, Obama is doing all this not because he wants what’s bad for America. He wants what’s good for America, but he has a very different view of what’s good for America than most Americans do.
What I find most problematic about Obama playing lord of the manor is not that it leads to extravagance and waste—although it does—but that it leads to the arrogance of power. David Brooks addressed the issue of how Obama views his own power in a recent column, “The Pragmatic Leviathan.” Brooks recalls that when he was in college he read Thomas Hobbes’s great work,
Leviathan
. “On the cover was an image from the first edition of the book, published in 1651. It shows the British nation as a large man. The people make up the muscles and flesh. Then at the top, there is the king, who is the head and the mind.” Brooks sees an analogy here to Obama: “He has come to seem like the sovereign on the cover of
Leviathan
—the brain of the nation to which all the cells in the body and the nervous system must report and defer.”
12
Leviathan
. “On the cover was an image from the first edition of the book, published in 1651. It shows the British nation as a large man. The people make up the muscles and flesh. Then at the top, there is the king, who is the head and the mind.” Brooks sees an analogy here to Obama: “He has come to seem like the sovereign on the cover of
Leviathan
—the brain of the nation to which all the cells in the body and the nervous system must report and defer.”
12
In other words, Obama is the Indispensable One and we are his subordinates. Or, to use a term drawn from the colonial and anti-colonial literature, Obama is the Big Daddy. The Big Daddy is the Great Leader who makes our problems his own and takes it upon himself to solve them. Solving them is obviously supremely challenging, and therefore who can begrudge the Big Daddy a special set of privileges that are not available to anyone else? No wonder that Obama feels comfortable in asking of others what he doesn’t ask of himself. Don’t they realize that they are not like him? Big Daddy operates by his own rules, living above the normal restraints, even in some cases above the law. America seems to be the only Western country today that is being ruled by a Big Daddy.
One of Obama’s Big Daddy traits is that he surrounds himself with “czars”: there is an auto czar and a border czar, a climate czar and a domestic violence czar, an energy czar and a technology czar, an Afghanistan czar and a Mideast czar, a regulatory czar and a stimulus czar, a science czar and a pay czar. What’s with all these czars? Do we live in czarist Russia? I think Obama relishes the idea of czars because they suggest administrative officials who are accountable to no one but him. He is the Supreme Czar and they are the Little Czars. Together they will tell the rest of us little people how we should live.
It may seem unfair to brand Obama an autocrat on the Russian model. But Obama has repeatedly shown that he has an autocratic streak. On at least two occasions, he has shown that if he doesn’t like a law, he just doesn’t enforce it. Recently Obama said that he would selectively apply the immigration laws so that if illegal immigrants came here as children, and pose no security threat, they will not be deported or prosecuted. Now if this is a wise policy, Congress should make the necessary change to the immigration laws. But instead of urging Congress to change the law, Obama implements the parts of the law he wants to and ignores the parts that he wants to. In a similar vein, Obama announced that his administration will not enforce the Defense of Marriage Act (outlawing gay marriage) because he doesn’t think it is constitutional. Now the Defense of Marriage Act was passed with overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress and signed into law by President Clinton. It has withstood all legal challenges so far, and obviously it is the Supreme Court, not Obama, that determines the constitutionality of legislation. It seems obvious that we cannot have a president who enforces only the laws he agrees with, and yet this is precisely the president we do have.
13
13
Behind such policies there is an attitude, captured in Obama’s recent remark, reported in the
New York Times
: “Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China.” Ah yes. That’s because the president of China is basically a dictator. He doesn’t have to answer to Congress, and he is largely unaccountable to public opinion. He just does what he wants, and I’m sure he has lots of little czars to help him execute his grand designs. Obama so desperately seeks this kind of power that he blurts out one of the most imprudent remarks of his presidency, and the
New York Times
obligingly buries it in the last line of a long article on Obama’s Middle East policy.
14
New York Times
: “Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China.” Ah yes. That’s because the president of China is basically a dictator. He doesn’t have to answer to Congress, and he is largely unaccountable to public opinion. He just does what he wants, and I’m sure he has lots of little czars to help him execute his grand designs. Obama so desperately seeks this kind of power that he blurts out one of the most imprudent remarks of his presidency, and the
New York Times
obligingly buries it in the last line of a long article on Obama’s Middle East policy.
14
When I served in the Reagan White House, I enjoyed listening to the band play “Hail to the Chief.” Yet Reagan always emphasized that the White House was the people’s house, and that he worked for the American people. With Obama, however, we have a leader who fancies himself as the overlord of America. His attitude, not dissimilar from that of his father, is less one of a democratic leader than one of a Third World dictator or hereditary tribal chief. He harbors grand visions of himself as the savior, setting right the problems not only of America, but also of the world. If we re-elect him, we are choosing to be governed by a man who has become a legend in his own mind, a law unto himself, America’s Big Daddy. Under those circumstances, “Hail to the Chief” takes on a totally different connotation.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SURVIVING OBAMA
On this earth one place is not so different from another.
1
—Barack Obama,
Dreams from My Father
Dreams from My Father
T
he most dangerous man in America currently lives in the White House.
he most dangerous man in America currently lives in the White House.
He’s dangerous not because he wants to do what’s bad for America. He’s dangerous because what he thinks is good for America is actually very bad for America. Here’s a way to think about it. Imagine if we were in charge of the Los Angeles Lakers. We hired a coach, who began to call plays for the team to lose. He did so not because he hated the Lakers, but because he thought it was wrong for the Lakers to win so much. He didn’t like the dominance of the Lakers, believing it would produce hubris in the team and was also unfair to the other teams. If we had such a coach, there is little doubt that we would not renew his contract. But we would also ask ourselves how we hired this guy in the first place.
How did we get Obama? Are the American people to blame for putting him in? I don’t think so. People didn’t know Obama, so they voted for him based on what he told them. He appealed to their hopes and aspirations, and they were noble hopes and aspirations. So the public was deceived. Obama was no ideological centrist, no unifier—he never intended to be. He had a completely different agenda all along, one that he knew even most Democrats would not support. So Obama has, from the beginning, disguised his true ideology and his true agenda. Only an investigation of his background and an examination of his actions have helped us to ferret him out.
So now we know him. Or at least we know a lot more about him. We can see where he came from, and we can understand what he is doing. And while we can project, based on his current actions, where he is likely to go in the next four years, we cannot really know what he has in store for America. Presidents don’t always reveal themselves in their first term; they have to build constituencies and focus on re-election. Only after Obama is re-elected will he be truly free to move in whatever direction he chooses, unconstrained by public opinion. In ways that we have foreseen and ways that we have not, he can complete the job of remaking America.
How should we respond to Obama? We shouldn’t despise him; I don’t. In some ways, I feel sorry for him. He is a victim of the most terrible parental abandonment. He responded to that abandonment with a certain creativity and determination. He’s a fractured soul, still seeking, as he admits in his book, to be worthy of his father’s love. He discovered that his father was a profoundly flawed man, and he knew it would not be good to copy his personality. So he embraced what he thought was the best of his father: the anti-colonial ideology. That ideology was supported by his mother, a profoundly flawed woman. Throughout his life Obama sought surrogate fathers or mentors who could reinforce and develop his anti-colonial worldview. That worldview is now embedded in his psyche.
I understand Obama’s deep attachment to anti-colonialism. Colonialism was a brutal system, which came about because of the immense military superiority of Europe to non-Western cultures. The English writer Hilaire Belloc summarized the European advantage:
Whatever happens, we have got
the Maxim Gun, and they have not.
2
Once the Europeans established their domination, they did not hesitate to use force in order to maintain it. Sometimes the gun was used on pretexts that were whimsical, even recreational. The British explorer Henry Morgan Stanley, for instance, reported that as he piloted his boat
Lady Alice
across Lake Tanganyika, “the beach was crowded by infuriates and mockers . . . . We perceived we were followed by several canoes in some of which we saw spears shaken at us.” So Stanley got to work: “I opened on them with the Winchester Repeating Rifle. Six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking.” Another British explorer, Richard Burton, once remarked that Stanley “shoots Negroes as if they were monkeys.”
3
Lady Alice
across Lake Tanganyika, “the beach was crowded by infuriates and mockers . . . . We perceived we were followed by several canoes in some of which we saw spears shaken at us.” So Stanley got to work: “I opened on them with the Winchester Repeating Rifle. Six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking.” Another British explorer, Richard Burton, once remarked that Stanley “shoots Negroes as if they were monkeys.”
3
One of Obama’s first acts as president was to remove a Winston Churchill bust from the White House. Churchill was a lifelong colonialist. He was a cavalry officer with the Malakand Field Force fighting on the northwest frontier of India. He rode with Lord Kitchener at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan. He championed British rule in India and scorned Gandhi as a troublemaker and a fraud. And when Churchill was re-elected in the 1950s, he suppressed the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya, which resulted in the arrest of Obama’s father Barack Sr., and the detention and torture of his grandfather Onyango Obama.
4
So President Obama has good reason to hate Winston Churchill.
4
So President Obama has good reason to hate Winston Churchill.
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