Wall Street Journal Sizes Up Obama

by Alan Caruba

I have this theory about Barack Obama. I think he's led a kind of make-believe life in which money was provided and doors were opened because
at some point early on somebody or some group (George Soros anybody?) took a look at this tall, good looking, half-white, half-black, young man with an
exotic African/Muslim name and concluded he could be guided toward a life in politics where his facile speaking skills could even put him in the White
House.

In a very real way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who else do you know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? "Dreams of My Father" was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The "Audacity of Hope" followed in 2006. If, indeed, he did write them himself. There are some who think that his mentor and friend, Bill Ayers, a man who calls himself a "communist with a small 'c'" was the real author.

His political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might be deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois legislature
to the Senator from that state because he had the good fortune of having Mayor Daley's formidable political machine at his disposal.

He was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for the presidency was either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater game
plan that had been determined before he first stepped foot in the Capital. How, many must wonder, was he selected to be a 2004 keynote speaker at the
Democrat convention that nominated John Kerry when virtually no one had ever even heard of him before?

He outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black
population, he oozed "cool" in a place where agriculture was the antithesis of cool. He dazzled the locals. And he had an army of volunteers drawn to a
charisma that hid any real substance.

And then he had the great good fortune of having the Republicans select one of the most inept candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole. And then
John McCain did something crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown female governor from the very distant state of Alaska . It was a ticket that was
reminiscent of 1984's Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and they went down to defeat.

The mainstream political media fell in love with him. It was a schoolgirl crush with febrile commentators like Chris Mathews swooning then and now
over the man. The venom directed against McCain and, in particular, Palin, was extraordinary.

Now, 3 and a half years into his presidency, all of those gilded years leading up to the White House have left him unprepared to be President. Left
to his own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the
briefest of statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters.

Far worse, however, is his capacity to want to "wish away" some terrible realities, not the least of which is the Islamist intention to destroy
America and enslave the West. Any student of history knows how swiftly Islam initially spread. It knocked on the doors of Europe, having gained a
foothold in Spain .

The great crowds that greeted him at home or on his campaign "world tour" were no substitute for having even the slightest grasp of history and the
reality of a world filled with really bad people with really bad intentions.

Oddly and perhaps even inevitably, his political experience, a cakewalk, has positioned him to destroy the Democrat Party's hold on power in Congress
because in the end it was never about the Party. It was always about his communist ideology, learned at an early age from family, mentors, college
professors, and extreme leftist friends and colleagues.

Obama is a man who could deliver a snap judgment about a Boston police officer who arrested an "obstreperous" Harvard professor-friend, but would
warn Americans against "jumping to conclusions" about a mass murderer at Fort Hood who shouted "Allahu Akbar." The absurdity of that was lost on no
one. He has since compounded this by calling the Christmas bomber "an isolated extremist" only to have to admit a day or two later that he was
part of an al Qaeda plot.

He is a man who could strive to close down our detention facility at Guantanamo even though those released were known to have returned to the
battlefield against America . He could even instruct his Attorney General to afford the perpetrator of 9/11 a civil trial when no one else would ever
even consider such an obscenity. And he is a man who could wait three days before having anything to say about the perpetrator of
yet another terrorist attack on Americans and then have to elaborate on his remarks the following day because his first statement was so lame.

The pattern repeats itself. He either blames any problem on the Bush administration or he naively seeks to wish away the truth.

Knock, knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as the sock puppet of his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and
manufactured this pathetic individual's life.

When anyone else would quickly and easily produce a birth certificate, this man spent over a million dollars to deny access to his. Most other
documents, the paper trail we all leave in our wake, have been sequestered from review. He has lived a make-believe life whose true facts remain
hidden. Yet the Liberals want 12 years of Romney's tax returns. Go figure.

We laugh at the ventriloquist's dummy, but what do you do when the dummy is President of the United States .

Stunning: We actually have a commuity organizer who has never drawn a W-2 in the private sector, never managed a budget, never been responsible for
driving the revenue and profit line - and this guy is the President. 3 1/2 years - and no positive results. The facts speak for themselves. This is the
most critical election of our lifetime.