America Has Stopped Listening

The One has become The Boring One and America is tuning out.  From James Taranto:

Michael Goodwin of the New York Post "listened intently" to President Obama's Monday press conference, but only "for 15 minutes or so." That's 15 minutes or so longer than the duration of our own intentness, but we did listen falteringly to the whole thing. By contrast, as the president "droned on," Goodwin reveals that he "did something I never did before during an Obama appearance: I turned off the TV."

"Enough," writes Goodwin. "He is the Man Who Won't Listen to Anybody, so why should anybody listen to him? . . . I will leave that unhappy duty to others. I am tired of Barack Obama. There's nothing new there. His speeches are like 'Groundhog Day.' "

Goodwin is dead wrong about that last point, and he owes Bill Murray an apology. "Groundhog Day" was a terrific movie. Apart from that quibble, though, we feel Goodwin's pain, and we suspect most Americans do. The World's Greatest Orator is almost always uninspiring, condescending, self-aggrandizing, peevish and grim.

He is also, as Goodwin notes, ideologically inflexible: "There is not a single example on domestic issues where he voluntarily staked out a spot in the American middle. . . . Obama's default statist position remains unmolested by facts or last year's landslide that was a rebuke to his first two years. He continues to push bigger and bigger government, higher and higher taxes and more and more welfare programs."

And we are stuck with him for another year and a half. Goodwin and this columnist are professionally obliged to pay a certain amount of attention, but the rest of America can tune him out.

If you read on in the piece you'll find that some of Obama's supporters and not blaming the president for America's lack of attention, but are blaming Reagan and the end of The Fairness Doctrine. After all, once the media was free express a diversity of opinions there no longer was a single media for the president to preach to and that would slavishly report his every word as gospel.

Of course, the media never did that for Reagan but the alphabet networks certainly gave Clinton and Obama their full fealty.

Obama's message long ago grew tiresome and with his insistence on hold to the far left, there's simply no reason for most of America to keep listening.  Being Scolder-in-Chief is not a path to success.