Obama and the Burden of Exceptionalism

The Wall Street Journal ^ | 1 September 2011 | SHELBY STEELE

[Jimmy Valentine's brother]

Post-'60s liberals, with the president as their standard bearer, seek to make a virtue of decline.
If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.

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As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.

Like me, he is black, and it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people. So the concept of the exceptionalism—the genius for freedom—of the American people may still be a stretch for him. But in fact he was elected to make that stretch. It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.

[Jimmy Valentine's brother]

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (Harper/Collins, 2007).

I heard Mr. Steele say that after 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act no additional Federal Laws were required to enable him to persue happiness.

[Kenton]

Barack Obama - Lowering American Expectations Since 2008