Obama Doesn't Know Americans Very Well

So says Dorothy Rabinowitz in this piece from the Wall Street Journal. We join in progress as she is discussing some of the media handwringing over the vocal protests against Obamacare:

There was no such hand-wringing over the decline of civil debate, during, say, election 2004, when cadres of organized demonstrators carrying swastika-adorned pictures of George W. Bush routinely swarmed about, and packed rallies. There was also that other “breakdown of our media culture,” that will dwarf all else as a cause for embarrassment, the town-hall coverage included, for the foreseeable future. That would be, of course, the undisguised worshipful reporting of the candidacy of Barack Obama.

That treatment, or rather its memory—like the adulation of his great mass of voters—has had its effect on this president, and not all to the good. The election over, the warming glow of those armies of supporters gone, his capacity to tolerate criticism and dissent from his policies grows thinner apace. His lectures, explaining his health-care proposals, and why they'll be good for everybody, are clearly not going down well with his national audience.

This would have to do with the fact that the real Barack Obama—product of the academic left, social reformer with a program, is now before that audience, and what they hear in this lecture about one of the central concerns in their lives—his message freighted with generalities—they are not prepared to buy. They are not prepared to believe that our first most important concern now is health-care reform or all will go under.

The president has a problem. For, despite a great election victory, Mr. Obama, it becomes ever clearer, knows little about Americans. He knows the crowds—he is at home with those. He is a stranger to the country's heart and character.

He seems unable to grasp what runs counter to its nature. That Americans don't take well, for instance, to bullying, especially of the moralizing kind, implicit in those speeches on health care for everybody. Neither do they wish to be taken where they don't know they want to go and being told it's good for them.
Who would have believed that this politician celebrated, above all, for his eloquence and capacity to connect with voters would end up as president proving so profoundly tone deaf? A great many people is the answer—the same who listened to those speeches of his during the campaign, searching for their meaning.

It took this battle over health care to reveal the bloom coming off this rose, but that was coming. It began with the spectacle of the president, impelled to go abroad to apologize for his nation—repeatedly. It is not, in the end, the demonstrators in those town-hall meetings or the agitations of his political enemies that Mr. Obama should fear. It is the judgment of those Americans who have been sitting quietly in their homes, listening to him.

It's easy to understand how Obama could so easily mis-read much of America. He has surrounded himself through his formative years with left-wing loons and people who generally have a hatred for all things America. They believe the country is racist, a bully to other nations, and has taken a place in the world it doesn't deserve. Hence the constant apologies and the efforts to put this country back in its "rightful place" as just another nation among nations. The concept of American exceptionalism is tantamount to a curse word to those folks.

The Obama America is also a nation full of people unable to care for themselves or live their daily lives without help from the government. They're they people you'll find in this story who think Obama is giving them "free" money.

Real America, the one Obama knows so little about, is the one that's turning up at Democrat town hall meetings and letting them have an earful about socialized medicine. That America has about had it with the massive expansion of government by both parties and they're ready to take some scalps.

The wave is building and I hope it holds together long enough to break in November of 2010 and wash some of this scum out of D.C.