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The Light and Dark Sides of the Obama Administration

Posted: 24 Sep 2009 07:45 PM PDT

The Obama Administration has both a light side and a dark side.
Its light side is the shallow media frenzy commonly referred to as Obama's
Cult of Personality, while the actual mechanism of the policy agenda
represented by Obama's czars, advisors and assorted organizations such as
ACORN integrated into the system, remain hidden on the dark
side.

The light Obama side has been kept deliberately glittery and
surface. When Obama delivers policy proposals in speeches, he tends to
speak in generalities and be vague on the details. What he sells is not so
much a specific policy, as it is the idea of Obama, branded as a cool and
trendy bunch of folks bringing the Hope and Change express to Washington
D.C. He's the cover of the book, the shiny foil package that's supposed to
tempt you into picking up a carton at the grocery store.

The dark side though is where the
policy sausages get made. It's the side that Obama's perpetual campaign
was meant to distract the public from. That side often operates outside
any congressional or legal jurisdiction, through a crazy quilt network of
Obama's associates and friends, and various left wing activists and
organizations, structured in a variety of increasingly less formal roles,
from posts created entirely for them, to the ubiquitous Czars on down to
various advisers, whose actual influence is unclear, to organizations who
play a major role in redistributing the actual funds produced by this
deliberately convoluted policy mechanism.

These two sides, the
light side, exposed to the constant glare of publicity, and the dark side,
kept mostly hidden, out of public view. Instead Obama has played up the
irrelevant. His casual comments about celebrities, his choice of a dog,
his wife's shopping sprees-- all get played up in the media. But the
actual ways in which he runs his administration remain deliberately
hidden. The shallowness too is deliberately, it is about more than simply
selling Americans a sugary product, it's about hiding the long list of
ingredients that go into making it. And the Czars are only one of the many
real ingredients that go into making the Obama Administration.

This
two sided approach took Obama through the campaign and his first few
months in office, and while everyone ohed and aahed at how historic it all
was, the policy engine underneath was busy churning. While people watched
Obama do his soft shoe routine, hundreds of billions of dollars were being
spent, and the nature of government was being redefined. But that approach
has now hit a serious snag, because with ObamaCare, suddenly the American
people were asking for the numbers, they wanted more than a song and
dance, and a few magazine covers, they wanted to actually know the
details.

Socialism with Obama's smiling face hiding the gory
details was the original plan. That plan depended on the majority of the
American people being willing to be entertained by Obama without ever
asking him any serious questions. And that plan went down in flames at the
Town Hall meetings, where people showed up asking serious questions. Now
Obama has hit the campaign trail again, built on the same blueprint that
emphasizes vague generalities and the gosh wow power of his celebrity
appearance, backed by media and celebrity firepower. And they can't seem
to understand why it's not working.

Proponents of a socialist nanny
state tend to view the people they rule over as stupid and incapable of
serious thought. That after all is why they need to be "taken care of", to
protect them from their own folly. That same contempt for the average
American provided the architecture for the two layer administration, for
Obama's entire campaign built on iconic logos, stylized posters and
resounding but absolutely meaningless slogans. And everything that came
beneath it, the shamelessly adulatory press coverage, ObamaGirl, the iPod
attack ad, the songs, the celebrity posse and the entire artificial mass
of artwork, social media, magazine covers and plagiarized slogans that the
real campaign boiled down to.

The ObamaCare controversy and the
plummeting poll numbers should have been a wake up call, but it's a wake
up call that has gone unheard. Obama's tour of talk shows is a reversion
to type, at a time when people want the facts, they're getting more media
appearances. That is because while Obama's problem is that he has failed
to seriously and honestly address people's concerns about ObamaCare, his
people believe that the problem is that he is being outshouted by FOX
News, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. The Obama Administration is incapable
of breaking through its contempt for the American people to actually
imagine them as individuals with real concerns. Instead they are rooted in
a media shouting match model that assumes that whoever has the loudest
microphone, the most channels and the most bandwidth, wins.

It's an approach that worked during the campaign when Obama was
competing against McCain\Palin. But now he's no longer competing against
politicians or a party, but against the demand of the American people for
results. And the inability to understand and process that has destroyed
Obama more thoroughly than anything else. Instead Obama and his media
entourage have wasted time going after the already cowed Republican party
and after conservative talk show hosts, thereby only giving them more of a
platform. The negative campaign has failed. The racial scaremongering has
gone nowhere. The media smears targeting Limbaugh and Beck have proven to
be a political dead end. That is because they all ignore the fact that
Obama's real challenge comes not from them, but from the American
people.

Limbaugh and so many others, on the radio, on television
and online; have helped shine a light on the dark side of the Obama
Administration. But it was the culture of deceptiveness and the lack of
professionalism within the Obama Administration, the multitude of czars,
the lack of serious vetting, the casual attitude toward professional
ethics and the profusion of political radicals given the run of the White
House who made sure there would be plenty of cockroaches scurrying around
when the light came on. But it is not the light that is the real problem
for Obama. It is the dark side, the deceptiveness, the layers of czars and
advisers who answer to no one in particular, the alliances with
organizations such as ACORN-- and what that entire snapshot says about the
way the Obama Administration is being run that is the problem.

If
business was booming and the economy was running hot, the odds are that
few people would care. Bill Clinton clambered up through economic doom and
glooming, and survived because the times were good. The times now however
aren't good, except perhaps in Paul Krugman's New York Times column. But
the American people didn't just elect Obama as a lark, or for a moment of
racial healing or any of the other shallow and surface reasons. It may
have been why a lot of younger people came out to vote, but for the most
people concerns about the economy was on the minds of the voters. Those
voters should have paid better attention to Obama's real agenda, but it
was not the first time the American electorate was fooled by a charlatan.
It will likely not be the last. Nevertheless what they wanted were
results. And the results being produced by the dark side of the
administration are not for them.

Obama's flailing media frenzy
demonstrates his inability to understand that the issue is not how loudly
you repeat the message, but the results you actually produce. Instead what
the entire ObamaCare controversy has done is forced the public to take a
much closer look at the dark side of the administration, and they don't
particularly like what they see.

While Obama has postured as FDR, the key difference between the
two men is not in agenda, but that FDR and his advisers were not so
divorced from the reality of how ordinary Americans lived, as to try and
sell corporate bailouts and green spending as economic renewal. The FDR
Administration created a massive, often illegal, socialist bureaucracy,
but it did so in the name of helping the average American. The Obama
Administration by contrast has unrolled massive spending plans during an
economic recession that are not actually helping anyone but corporations,
environmentalists and unions. The average American need not
apply.

And despite his desire to posture as FDR, not to mention
Lincoln and Reagan, Obama is incapable of projecting that same seriousness
and grasp of not just rhetoric, but the details of government. The light
side of Obama has always projected unseriousness, in order to protect the
dark side lurking beneath. But it's the dark side from which answers come
in a crisis. The White House is not a box of cereal. It cannot be purely
wrapping that no plebian ever opens. And by trying to hide away the
details of his administration, behind a thousand magazine covers, media
appearances and glib but meaningless rhetoric, Obama has convinced those
Americans who take his light side at full value of his incompetence, and
convinced those who have investigated the dark side of his administration,
of his corruption. That is why ObamaCare has failed the public test. It is
why his poll numbers have fallen and barring a major turnaround or a new
crisis, are only likely to keep on falling.