Why Obama Is Blowing Off Gettysburg Address

Obama has displayed his contempt for our country and its heritage yet again, this time by blowing off today’s 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. No doubt he has important fund-raising to do. Or maybe he understands how pathetic he looks in comparison to a real president, as Bret Stephens suggests.

Obama used to love comparing himself to Lincoln so much that he explicitly denied doing it.

“I never compare myself to Lincoln,” the president told NBC’s David Gregory last year. Except that he announced his presidential candidacy from the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Ill. And that he traveled by train to Washington from Philadelphia for his first inauguration along the same route Lincoln took in the spring of 1861. And that he twice swore his oaths of office on the Lincoln Bible. “Lincoln–they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me,” he said in Iowa in 2011.

But that was before he ran out of hype, and the Hope & Change Express predictably went off the rails. Any comparisons with Lincoln now would only underscore how far we have let ourselves fall.

The Gettysburg Address was the work of a great mind nourished on great books…

Maybe Mr. Obama has similar literary tastes. It doesn’t show. “An economy built to last,” the refrain from his 2012 State of the Union, borrows from an ad slogan once used to sell the Ford Edsel. “Nation-building at home,” another favorite presidential trope, was born in a Tom Friedman column. “We are the ones we have been waiting for” is the title of a volume of essays by Alice Walker. “The audacity of hope” is adapted from a Jeremiah Wright sermon. “Yes We Can!” is the anthem from “Bob the Builder,” a TV cartoon aimed at 3-year-olds.

There is a common view that good policy and good rhetoric have little intrinsic connection. Not so. President Obama’s stupendously shallow rhetoric betrays a remarkably superficial mind. Superficial minds designed ObamaCare. Superficial minds are now astounded by its elementary failures, and will continue to be astounded by the failures to come.

No failure is as astounding as America’s inability to see through the fog of media promotion to what Obama is and has always been. But people are starting to catch on at last. Obama is well-advised to avoid standing in the shadows of his betters.

lincoln-overshadowing-obama
Cheapness overshadowed.

On a tip from Varla. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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