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May 2009
Vol. 23, No. 4
Provocation
Obama: The Hollow Man
The president’s supporters regard him as a great political thinker. His detractors regard him as an evil genius. Unfortunately for him, neither is the case.
Jim Walsh is an assistant editor of Liberty. His latest book is Libertarian Nation.
Normally, I try not to think too much about presidents. The mainstream media focus excessively on them, cheapening the quality of political discourse. As a result, American citizens who are inclined to talk about politics regurgitate pointless trivia about the White House occupant and staff — things they’ve heard on National Public Radio or seen on TV.
But we have a new occupant in the White House, one whom the popular media laud as a visionary and transformative figure. To anyone who loves liberty, this overwrought praise is by itself a cause for skepticism. And skepticism is surely warranted, on many grounds.
The early days of the Obama administration have been a mixed bag of minor successes and middling failures — pretty much what an objective observer might expect from a politician with native intelligence but little experience on the national stage. The stock markets have gone lower; the general economy remains stalled. The bureaucratic captains of Big Business have worn a groove around Capitol Hill; they sense opportunity in a statist government and seek subsidies to help them survive the current recession.
Around the world, states and leaders who don’t much matter rave about Obama; those that matter more comment in a reserved manner. At home, Obama’s supporters continue their childlike focus on the man’s surface qualities — his overestimated eloquence, his physical elegance, his fashionable wife. And, inexorably, the color of his skin.
As for Obama’s critics, they have stumbled through some early efforts to vilify him. They’ve had a few successes, but they characteristically return to whining about his supposed radicalism and harping on stale conspiracy-nut stuff about his slightly-misstated oath of office, his place of birth, and his “true” religious faith. This is a losing strategy.
Obama does pose serious threats to the republic. But they have nothing to do with his being a sleeper agent for al Queda. By most accounts, the president is a decent fellow who means well. The threats he poses aren’t in his person; they’re in his politics and his philosophy . . . to the extent he has one.
There’s a rational, libertarian case to be made against the public policies that this president favors. And, because every president’s public self is a product of his policies, it’s also a case against Obama the man. At least Obama the public man. I have no interest in ad hominem attacks . . . but I have some interest in ad principium ones.
As I see it, the case against Obama can be arranged under five main headings, five main points to take away with you. These are the points to bring up in conversation, when you find yourself talking with people who’ve taken the easy path and babble about Obama’s greatness and historical significance.
People who love liberty need to make this case, in casual conversation and in public forums, as calmly and forcefully as they can. American voters may fall in love from time to time, but they are, at core, practical creatures. At some point, they will see through Barack Obama. The only question is: will this happen before or after he stands for reelection?
1. Obama is no visionary; he’s an empty vessel.
The complaints that Obama’s nontraditional childhood and young adult years made him a Manchurian candidate are delusional. That said, his background does offer some useful insights into the public man. I’ve read both “Dreams of My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope,” the two volumes of Obama’s memoirs — the first primarily personal and the second primarily political.
I reviewed “Audacity” for Liberty in the May 2007 issue, and I stand by my conclusion that it’s not a very good book. The strongest impression it leaves is that Obama is a passive character, a cipher — a more verbal version of Chance the Gardener from “Being There.” No firebrand of populism or progressivism, the president has always positioned himself as a consensus-builder and champion of compromise. That has been his approach since his days on the Harvard Law Review (where he was elected president despite his merely average grades) through his time as a community organizer in New York and Chicago and into his early elected career in the Illinois state legislature.
Champions of compromise are an important part of the legislative process; but, they tend to be more involved in sausage-making than the vision thing. Obama rose above such porky concerns by using personal traits that make him an effective campaigner — and a dangerous proposition as chief executive.
Specifically, his great political strength is the ability to allow others to project their preconceptions and assumptions onto him. It’s his genius, really: the chameleon-like capacity to look and sound like whatever an audience wants. One example of this protean skill was manifest on the campaign trail in 2008. Obama, an Ivy League graduate born in Hawaii and raised in Kansas (among other places), developed an ersatz Southern accent. This was a ridiculous affection — like the fake English accent that the singer Madonna adopted during her brief marriage to a British movie director. But the explanation was simple. Obama’s crowds wanted that accent. The American Left has made a fetish of black politicians from the South, so Obama shaped himself to carry the projection that he was part of this tradition. Jesse Jackson was so infuriated by that cultural swindle that he threatened (metaphorically, I think) to castrate Obama.
The danger in being whatever your audience wants is that you can end up losing any sense of identity or integrity. And the results can be embarrassing. In February, stumping for his statist stimulus plan, president Obama stopped at a Caterpillar tractor plant in Peoria, Illinois. There he said:
Yesterday, Jim, the head of Caterpillar, said that if Congress passes our plan, this company will be able to rehire some of the folks who were just laid off. And that’s a story I’m confident will be repeated at companies across the country.
Jim Owens, Caterpillar’s CEO and a supporter of the stimulus plan, was asked if he agreed with Obama’s remarks. His response: “I think, realistically, no. The truth is we’re going to have more layoffs before we start hiring again.”
Another downside of Obama as chameleon is that he has made poor choices of political allies and friends. That is a weakness that his critics on the Right have hit hard. They repeat the names Saul Alinsky, Jeremiah Wright, and William Ayers like spells. They portray the men behind the names as dangerous villains, but the men are not. Alinsky and Ayers are (or were — Alinsky is dead) pathetic radical poseurs driven by middle-class self-loathing. Wright is a media whore who will say outrageous things as if on command, whenever cameras roll. Their significance comes merely from the fact that Obama didn’t have the sense to distance himself from them. He claims that he didn’t know about Ayers’ criminal fugitive past when he first met him. Well, maybe the president is really that stupid. More likely, the other people in the room accepted Ayers, so Obama did too. No integrity.
A similar story with Jeremiah Wright. Obama claims he attended Wright’s church for 20 years but never heard a word of the fiery minister’s signature anti-American rants. More likely, Obama needed some local cultural credibility and could get that in big chunks by sitting in the pews of Wright’s church. The substance of Wright’s sermons didn’t matter to the up-and-coming Obama; the size of Wright’s congregation did.
A public person who will stand next to anyone will necessarily stand next to some bad people.
The president has tried to make political virtue of this promiscuity by saying that he will, in matters of foreign policy, meet with any nation and any leader at any time. This may turn out to have been campaign trail rhetoric rather than actual policy. And that’s probably a good thing. In the meantime, some nations have taken notice of Obama’s lack of philosophical integrity. After a decade of wandering in the political desert, Benjamin Netanyahu has retaken the prime minister’s chair in Israel, largely because Israelis fear that warmed-over Clinton-era foreign policy will be bad for the Jews. This is the no-win situation America faces in the Middle East. Our support of Israel is often halfhearted, which means that Israelis and their dedicated defenders in the United States are never satisfied. At the same time, Israel’s many enemies in the region consider our half-hearted support half a heart too much. This is exactly the kind of foreign entanglement that George Washington warned against in his too little regarded and too little read farewell address. And it’s exactly the kind of bad situation Obama is likely to make worse.
When we turn to domestic issues, we see the same lack of intellectual energy and integrity. The recently enacted stimulus plan included various provisions that reinstate politically poisonous welfare benefits. Why didn’t Obama see the danger in this? Because he doesn’t have the political insight.
Welfare reform was the key to rebuilding confidence in statist notions of “affirmative government.” Bill Clinton’s political successes during the 1990s were built in part on his recognition that voters didn’t trust statists to spend government money in productive ways. Clinton understood that voters worried that traditional American liberals would do foolish things, such as using government subsidies to create a nearly permanent underclass of nonworking female heads of shattered households.
As political writer Mickey Kaus has noted, Clinton didn’t arrive at these realizations because he was a clear-eyed small government advocate. On the contrary, Clinton realized that “even if welfare spending was only a tiny portion of the liberals’ spending agenda, it poisoned the rest of it.” Obama doesn’t seem to have the instincts or wisdom to build on that insight.
2. Obama’s statism comes from political expediency, not philosophy.
This is something of a corollary to point one. Obama owes his political rise to the money and logistical support of government employee unions, particularly the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and a group of teachers’ unions. The SEIU organizes janitors and other office workers — most of whom are engaged by government agencies. They were among his earliest and most ardent supporters.
The president is not some dedicated European-style socialist; he’s a political hack from Chicago who’s made grubby deals with spoils-seeking collectivist groups. Most of his elected career has been spent representing an inner-city Chicago district in the Illinois state legislature. Since the only spoils-seeking that goes on in those Chicago neighborhoods involves government contracts, his market was limited to unions representing teachers and low-level government employees.
When he started his presidential campaign, Obama had to draw heavily on this base of government-employee unions. Hillary Clinton had sewn up most of the high-end Democrats on Wall Street and in Hollywood and the Silicon Valley. So Obama attacked her from the statist Left by tactical necessity rather than idealistic commitment.
One of his first moves after he’d been elected was choosing the same Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state. In other words, he chose as head of foreign policy a woman whose main qualification is that eight years ago she spent several months “listening” to bumpkins from Buffalo whose only cogent thought was that the Bills haven’t had a solid quarterback since Jim Kelly. Admittedly, she has spent 30 years enabling her hillbilly husband’s adulteries. That may take a kind of diplomatic skill.
Madame Secretary is making an early habit of bowing before cash-rich Asian totalitarians. She makes an unlikely supplicant. But opportunism, far more than ideology, defines Obama’s administration. He’s not a communist or socialist. He’s a modern-day ward heeler from Chicago with a good fashion sense. In naming Hillary Clinton to State, he was following Vito Corleone’s advice to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
The clearest example of Obama’s opportunism is his economic stimulus plan, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. This aggregation of statist graft will hurt the economy more than if the government did nothing; but accomplishing actual economic good is of secondary importance. The principal purpose is to flood state programs and their administrative satrapies with money.
In a February letter intended for then-Secretary of Commerce appointee Judd Gregg, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the new law would help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years it would crowd out private investment, leading to a lower gross domestic product by the late 2010s than if the government hadn’t taken any extraordinary steps. According to the letter, CBO economists and actuaries used the assumption that, in the long run, each dollar of additional federal debt crowds out (that is, takes the place or prohibits issuance of) about 33 cents of private-sector capital. This is an interesting metric to keep in mind. Remember that capital is capital and debt is debt.
Obama’s stimulus plan is an orgasmic shudder of statist takings. And the K Street sharks were fast on the scene. During the absurdly short time it took the bill to move from the House to the Senate, lobbyists for big pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were adding a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California winemakers and Florida citrus growers were changing the phrase “ready to market” to the word “planted,” thus creating windfalls from a new bonus depreciation incentive. This undisciplined subsidy and spending is like driving a car with no headlights on a road at night. You might get somewhere. Or you might get wrapped around a tree.
If you don’t like the image of driving in the dark, try another: Obama’s stimulus plan is like paying your utility bills on credit cards while you spend your cash on dinners at fancy restaurants. You can probably manage that for a while. But, some months or years down the line, you’ll run out of credit on your cards, and you’ll have to pay off the balance. Oh, and you’ll also have to keep paying your utility bills. This will force you into some hard choices. You can stop eating out — perhaps stop eating — or you can declare bankruptcy.
Former U.S. comptroller general David Walker, who’s been doing good work for several years to educate Americans about their government’s spendthrift ways, has noted that Obama’s stimulus plan has no mechanism for directing expenditures. That’s left to state and local officials, who often don’t have the means or skills to spend money intelligently. The plan makes it possible to track the money, but only after it has already been spent. Walker says this is likely to result in “a series of disappointments that it’s too late to do anything about.”
Problems like these aren’t new. Sixty years ago, Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s treasury secretary, said this:
We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. . . . I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started — and an enormous debt to boot.
Does Obama, the supposed intellectual, have any knowledge of history?
The media’s “we’re all socialists now” claptrap is just that — claptrap. Much of the justification for government intervention comes from the assertion that the financial markets have failed. That is false. The markets haven’t failed; they’ve given people some hard answers about the condition of America’s debt-clogged economy. But the people want a second opinion. Or, more accurately, a do-over — one that has nothing to do with economics, or with common sense.
We don’t have much room left. We can’t keep paying the bills from our statist utilities with government credit cards. We’re getting close to a global crisis of confidence in the U.S. economy, a crisis that could involve a run on the dollar and a hyperinflation that would wipe out the American middle class. There won’t be any do-overs then. That’s the problem with opportunism: it often seems smart and cagey, right up to the point at which its context collapses.
3. Obama believes in a warped form of meritocracy.
To the extent that Obama has exhibited a political philosophy, it’s a shallow version of meritocracy. He believes in a brand-name social hierarchy, purchased retail. Like Bill Clinton, he has surrounded himself with striving Ivy League graduates who are much better at repeating the wisdom of their professional schools than at developing original ideas.
What’s wrong with this? Isn’t that the American Dream? Well, no. The dark side of manic meritocracy is the elitist idea that education and social standing give a person or group of people an inherent right to coerce others. This is wrong in many ways. The most important is suggested by the fact that our Constitution requires the protection of individuals from the tyranny of consensus, which is precisely the tyranny that Obama and his associates represent.
Liberty protects nonconformists; elitism punishes them, rewarding conformists and social strivers instead. The self-styled elites are the Pharisees of our day. They are dogmatic, shrill, and tyrannical. They don’t hesitate to use any means available, starting and ending with state power, to coerce others to do as they say.
Obama himself is a pliant conformist to the conventional pieties of the American Left. His memoirs indicate the degree to which he’s been so since he was young. Upon his graduation from the elite Punahou School in Honolulu, he didn’t matriculate in an Ivy League college. He was admitted, instead, to slightly eccentric Occidental College in Los Angeles. Oxy has a good regional reputation; but the striver Obama apparently considered his admission a grievous failure. Rather than making the best of his experience at Oxy, he sent out transfer applications and moved as quickly as he could to Columbia University, a school in the bottom tier of the Ivy League — but at least in the Ivy League.
Elitists adhere rigidly to social conventions; and their rigid adherence results in spiritual and intellectual weakness. Also, dangerously for politicians, elitism results in hypocritical exceptionalism when members of the elite fail to maintain the social conventions to which they adhere so strictly. Much ink has been spilled over candidate Obama’s ill-advised answer to some unexpectedly hard questioning from a regular citizen he met at an Ohio campaign stop. Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher (“Joe the Plumber”) complained that Obama’s proposed tax policies would make it impossibly expensive to take over an existing plumbing business. Flummoxed, Obama made what was apparently an ironic or humorous crack about the need to “spread the wealth around” by means of higher taxes.
Some commentators on the Right screeched about the Marxist qualities of the remark. But they missed the real insult in Obama’s response. It dripped with contempt for the working-class plumber who was trying to buy his own shop. The candidate didn’t take seriously the aspiring small business owner’s worries. He sized up Wurzelbacher’s appearance and banked on the idea that a blue collar voter from Ohio would instinctively support a vague income redistribution scheme.
This was a low point in Obama’s campaign. Confronted with polls that showed strong opposition to his “spread the wealth” talk, he fell back on Jesuitical word games: he insisted that there was an obvious difference between “redistributing” wealth (bad) and “rebalancing the distribution” of wealth (less bad).
Obama’s slavish elitism explains some of the poor choices he made after his election. It explains why he picked Tom Daschle, Timothy Geithner, and would-be Performance Czarina Nancy Killefer. They were bona fide members of the Democrat elite. It’s also the reason why he abandoned Daschle and Killefer. As Pharisees, they didn’t think the rules that apply to nonmembers of the elite — say, plumbers from Ohio — applied to them. Obama, as a Pharisee himself, couldn’t afford to be seen condoning their hypocrisy.
Daschle was supposed to become health and human services secretary, but his dirty laundry included more than just unpaid taxes. He had been getting $1 million a year from a big D.C. law firm — and he’s not a lawyer. He had been getting another million a year (plus the limousine and chauffeur that became the flashpoint of his tax evasion) for unspecified services to an investment firm. Why were these companies paying Daschle so much money? Because he was an elitist in good standing and would use his influence to their benefit.
Obama couldn’t defend Daschle because he’d used a lot of his own political capital defending Treasury Secretary Geithner’s failure to pay significant amounts of his taxes over a period of several years. Geithner, the former head of the New York Federal Reserve, an ally of W. Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and a maker of some of the economic policies that Obama criticized on the campaign trail, defended his deadbeat behavior with the preposterous explanation that he didn’t think he owed Social Security or Medicare taxes on moneys earned from the IMF while living and working in the United States. Obama endorsed that lame explanation because he needed Geithner’s credibility with the banking and investment communities.
It’s not the resistance to pay taxes that’s the problem with the likes of Geithner. Any rational libertarian has considered the ethics of tax resistance. The problem is the hypocrisy. I would welcome a federal government official who admitted that he hesitated to pay taxes that support waste, inefficiency, and worse. Sadly, that’s not Geithner. Nor is it Obama.
Geithner, like his boss, is at heart a bureaucratic sausage-maker. Earlier this year, he announced plans to allocate $175 billion in funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to a so-called “Mo Mod” (mortgage modification) platform.
Mo Mod is a mortgage processing program that uses algorithms to rewrite groups of home loans. It resets individual mortgages to reflect the current market value of the underlying properties, and then applies those new values to the various tranches and categories of derivative investment securities that were based on those mortgages. It’s a whiz-kid application that gets a lot of technical details right but ignores one major, philosophical problem: resetting mortgages will cause massive moral hazard in the residential real estate marketplace. It will reward and encourage bad investments.
Elitism makes the mistaken assumption that Middle America is stupid. It’s a kind of logical fallacy: I’m smart and have the degrees to prove it. You’re different from me; you don’t have the same degrees. Therefore, you’re stupid. But businesses, especially small businesses, aren’t stupid. They can’t afford to be. They’re not going to invest in equipment and new hires based on one-time stimulus checks.
4. Obama believes, as Dick Cheney did, in an imperial presidency.
There’s an irony about the claims of power that presidents make. In fact, the more powerful a chief executive is, the less he needs to make extraordinary claims of executive power. The less powerful the president, the more he hides behind political artifice.
Bush and Cheney seemed the nadir of this grasping weakness. But Obama has followed W to an unexpected degree. The man who swore to change the way the White House operated has maintained some of his predecessor’s worst practices. He has continued W’s policy of using the terms “state secrets” and “national security” to justify White House obscurantism. He has kept extraordinary rendition alive as a federal law enforcement option. He has even planned to move direct oversight of the politically sensitive Census Bureau from the Commerce Department to the White House — more specifically, to the bailiwick of his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a bare-knuckles political bully.
Some of these moves, considered out of context of the others, might make tactical sense. But together, they indicate a statist urge for a regal leader. Little wonder, then, that Obama transition team co-chair Valerie Jarrett told NBC News personality Tom Brokaw that the new president would be “prepared to really take power and begin to rule on Day One.” Begin to rule? Apparently, he was.
The president’s assertion of the “state secrets privilege” to shield the workings of the White House staff from disclosure — usually in the course of some deposition or testimony — is emphatic evidence that he wants all the powers that Bush and Cheney claimed. During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to abandon their approach to governmental secrecy and to create more transparency within the executive branch. But faced with the appeal of a lawsuit that had started against the Bush administration, Obama decided to carry forward the Bush position.
Obama’s belief in a strong executive shouldn’t come as a surprise. He and Bush are both statists, though they come to their abiding beliefs in the power of the state from different starting points along the American political spectrum. The Founders believed strongly and surely in a balance of power among the branches of government. The strong executive theory that Obama and W share is an aberration from that balanced approach. It’s un-American, in the strict constitutional sense; and it’s fascist at its logical extension.
Because of the proposed Census Bureau heist, Republican Sen. Gregg — who as commerce secretary was supposed to be a sign of bipartisanship in the Obama cabinet — declined nomination. He was replaced by Gary Locke, a Democratic hack with a long record of ethics issues, including allegations of arranging illegal campaign contributions and no-show government jobs for dim-witted family members. And recall that Locke is Obama’s third choice for commerce secretary. Before Gregg came on the scene, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson had withdrawn his name because of ethics problems. Obama’s commerce secretaries begin to resemble the drummers for Spinal Tap — a series of unremarkable guys who spontaneously combust.
The Census Bureau power grab fits with Obama’s general desire for “czars” to rule over government functions. Characteristically, the imperial president doesn’t trust his own appointments to traditional posts. Criticism of this dubious practice has come from an unexpected source. West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, who is no one’s libertarian, wrote an open letter to Obama complaining about the decision to create White House offices on health reform, urban affairs policy, and energy and climate change, taking important policy decisions away traditional cabinet departments. Byrd observed that
White House staffers are not accountable for their actions to the Congress, to cabinet officials, [or] to virtually anyone but the president. They rarely testify before congressional committees, and often shield the information and decision-making process behind the assertion of executive privilege. In too many instances, White House staff have been allowed to inhibit openness and transparency, and reduce accountability.
This may be the first time you’ve read a favorable reference to Robert Byrd in Liberty. The creep of statism has that effect on traditional political lines.
5. Obama encourages a cult of personality.
This point may say more about Obama’s supporters than the man himself. His fans — and “fans” is certainly the right word — don’t look on him as a manager they’ve hired to make sure the Department of Housing and Urban Development keeps its graft to a minimum. They regard him as spiritual leader.
Reaching back to my first point, if Obama is a sort of human Rorschach Test whose meaning is whatever the viewer projects, his election says more about the electorate than it does about the president.
Some voters wanted to elect a black man president to repay some karmic burden of debt. The justification goes something like this: American blacks won’t get the financial reparations that some of their leaders have sought, but they will get one of their own in the White House.
People who believe this are likely to natter nonsense about Obama being a “transitional figure.”
Other voters wanted to wave a white flag to world opinion. They wanted to send a signal to the world that America doesn’t want to be the global policeman any longer. Or a global leader any longer. Or the object of stone-throwing hatred any longer.
Still others — and I know you may have trouble believing this — were actually inspired by Obama’s rhetoric.
Well, politics has always been a kind of cultural shorthand: citizens care as much about the social meaning of their vote as they do about its philosophical grounding. But Obama’s supporters take this shallowness to an extreme. The best-known example: the television talk show host Chris Matthews, who made a fool of himself, talking about the sight of Obama sending chills down his legs. It’s hard to find amusement, even schadenfreude, in this. Before Obama came along, Matthews was pleasant to watch; he had a keen knowledge of the political process and took a happy warrior’s joy in hashing out the details of this bill or that campaign. But servitude to the Obama cult dashed all of that.
Clarity again comes from an unexpected place. Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver has warned that Americans should be wary of
a spirit of adulation bordering on servility. . . . Modern life, including life in the Church, suffers from a phony unwillingness to offend that poses as prudence and good manners, but too often turns out to be cowardice. Human beings owe each other respect and appropriate courtesy. But we also owe each other the truth. . . . President Obama is a man of intelligence and some remarkable gifts. . . . But, whatever his strengths, there’s no way to reinvent his record . . . with rosy marketing about unity, hope, and change.
The shallowness of Obama’s hopey “change” marketing plan has been borne out by his move from hope to fear as the principal topos of his rhetoric. Stumping for his stimulus plan, he gave up the sunny platitudes of his campaign speeches for statements like “A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.”
Political cults of personality are bad for another reason, besides their intellectual shallowness. They blur the proper distinctions between public and private life. Although you’d never know this from recent history and popular culture, America (like most functioning republics) assumes clearly-drawn distinctions between public and private lives. These distinctions apply to all citizens, not just public office holders. The blurring of public and private realms, such as we see in the idolatry of public figures as if they were revered family members or respected religious leaders, is a troubling sign for liberty.
Obama didn’t start this blur. He’s carrying forward a Clinton program. Among his many betrayals, Bill Clinton beguiled his feminist supporters into hypocrisy by making his private affairs part of his public life and getting feminists to endorse his sordid conduct. As a result, Gloria Steinem now spends her days muttering to her cats that politicians’ sex lives don’t matter.
Obama is apparently much less sordid but he also injects the private and personal into the public domain. His more wholesome personality only makes the erosion between public and private worse. Wife and kids on the cover of US magazine? Bad idea. Citizens don’t need and shouldn’t care to know the intimate family details of the executive they’ve hired to oversee the federal bureaucracy. Private affection (or a media-fueled illusion of affection) doesn’t equal efficacy in public affairs.
The erosion of the boundary between private and public realms is not accidental. Statists encourage personality cults because they want to concentrate political power in a single person, rather than spreading it across a system of checks and balances, in which people are judged by what the legitimately accomplish, not by what they or their followers claim that they existentially are.
A strong sense of privacy is essential to individual liberty. So here’s to staying confident that America’s innate sense of privacy survives Barack Obama. I believe that it — and the other first things, basic principles — will do so. He’s not transformative enough to change those things.
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