Sure, the Maureen Dowd column tried to throw some dirt on George W. Bush, Newt Gingrich and others, but she went on to blast the Big O (and his wife) pretty hard.
Despite what his rivals say, the president and the first lady do believe in American exceptionalism — their own, and they feel assaulted and underappreciated.
We disappointed them.
As Michelle said to Oprah in an interview she did with the president last May: “I always told the voters, the question isn’t whether Barack Obama is ready to be president. The question is whether we’re ready. And that continues to be the question we have to ask ourselves."
They still believed, as their friend Valerie Jarrett once said, that Obama was “just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”...
Kantor writes that the Obamas, feeling misunderstood, burrowed into “self-imposed exile” — a “bubble within the bubble” — with their small circle of Chicago friends, who reinforced the idea that “the American public just did not appreciate their exceptional leader.”
She reports that Marty Nesbitt indignantly told his fellow Obama pal Eric Whitaker that the president “could get 70 or 80 percent of the vote anywhere but the U.S.”
The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage...
Charles C. W. Cooke over at NRO weighs in on the column and presents some good stuff of his own.
But even for those of us who never bought Obama’s shtick, and who do not believe in either the Coming of the Age of Aquarius or that any president could “turn out to be a Messiah,” there has been much about this administration that has surprised.
I did not expect him to be an “introvert,” either. Nor did I expect the man to be such a terrible politician. Instead, I presumed that Obama would be an intelligent technocrat with a well-oiled and competent White House, and that he would be able to use his oratorical ability to his advantage. I fully expected that I would oppose what he would try and achieve — and I do — but I didn’t expect to be embarrassed watching him attempt it. As it happens, the Obama White House is a mess, the president largely shies away from detail — leaving it to the very Congress he blames for his ills — and his speeches tend to hurt any policy he is trying to advance. And he seems incapable of considering his own role in all of this...
