The Great I Am

   Near the end of Pres. Obama's first year in office, columnist Jeff Jacoby noted the president's decision not to attend the celebration in German marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The president, wrote Mr. Jacoby, was "too busy to attend the celebrations," opting instead to send a video of himself.

 

In the video, Mr. Jacoby writes, the president was careful not to offend any current or former enemy, blandly calling the wall   '' 'a painful barrier between family and friends' that symbolized 'a system that denied people the freedoms that should be the right of every human being.' He referred to 'tyranny,' but never identified the tyrants - he never uttered the words 'Soviet Union' or 'communism,' for example. He said nothing about the men and women who died trying to cross the wall. Nor did he mention Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan - or even Mikhail Gorbachev."

 

Pres. Obama, however, was not too busy to talk about...well...Pres. Obama.

 In "Obama's Swelling Ego" Mr. Jacoby notices that "[a]s presidential rhetoric goes, [the video] was hardly a match for “Ich bin ein Berliner,’’ still less another “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’’ But as a specimen of presidential narcissism, it is hard to beat."

Recently, the president spoke at a fundraiser for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA). According to The Weekly Standard, Mr. Obama gracelessly decried what he saw as the mess his predecessor had left him when he assumed office on Jan. 20, 2009. He then recited the litany of Democratic initiatives he was responsible for in his 14 months in office: the second stimulus bill, the healthcare bill, etc.

The president's self-congratulatory conclusion: "This has been the toughest year-and-a-half since the 1930s."

Oh, really?

Granted, the U.S. president has shown himself in that last year and a half to be shockingly ignorant of American history (for most leftists, American history started in the streets of Chicago in 1968). but has this president had a tougher go than:

• FDR in 1933-34 confronting not only an economic depression but the near collapse of a monetary system, as well as a natural disaster that left much of the nation's breadbasket a parched wasteland? 
• Harry Truman coming to grips with a devastated and vanquished Nazi Europe, a stubborn enemy in the Pacific that refused to yield, and the soul-wrenching decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan? 
• Jack Kennedy navigating by Braille through the Bay of Pigs in 1961, only to be taken to the nuclear woodshed the following year by the more experienced Soviet leaders? 
• Lyndon Johnson trying to bind the nation's wounds after JFK's assassination while trying to get his arms around that thing called Vietnam? 
• George W. Bush confronting a stateless, invisible enemy that  perpetrated the most significant attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor? 

Mr. Obama is much taken with his own accomplishments in the face of what he sees as adversity. But quite frankly, a lot of that adversity was of his own making. And while he views his legislative conquests as a lasting accomplishment, it may instead be a phyrric victory. Because if the president leaves any lasting accomplishments it appears that they will be the destruction of American initiative, the death of American exceptionalism, the end of America as a counterweight to the forces of tyranny in the world, and the permanent re-classification of the U.S. as a debtor nation.

You want to talk about a tough year and a half? That will be the first 18 months of whoever replaces him in the White House and has to untangle this mess.

Just thought you might like to know.