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For a conservative like me, Obama seems responsible for almost everything that’s wrong with America.
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But as the president heads into his sixth year in office, every kindly American must grieve that Barack Obama is descending into his dark night of the soul. Lord knows what trials he will face in 2014, from Obamacare to that reliable graveyard of presidential hopes, the second mid-term election. But he will need to dig down deep to find the strength to carry on through the tough year ahead.
Liberals used to make fun of George W. Bush, that he had been born on third base and thought he had hit a triple. But in fact, President Bush went through his own dark night of the soul in early middle age when his drinking nearly ruined his life and his marriage. And we know from contemporary accounts that during the darkest days of his administration, when everyone but the president had given up on Iraq, it was Bush that worked to lift the spirits of his staffers and not the other way around. As a young man, Bush served in the military – famously or infamously – in the Air Force reserves. Say what you will about Bush’s military service, military training prepares you, at least in part, to deal with tough times.
But Barack Obama, we conservatives are told, has been wafted aloft all his adult life, from college to Harvard Law School to a quick stint as a community organizer and then foundation jobs, state senator, U.S. senator, and president. No doubt it’s all been very challenging, and no doubt the president was up to the challenge. But there has been no dark night of the soul, no difficult time when the president was tried to the uttermost.
In his Hero with the Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell wrote of the hero’s journey:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
The whole point of the hero’s journey was that he had to undertake the underworld journey, complete with symbolic death and rebirth, before he took up earthly responsibilities and powers. The frightening thing about President Obama is that he has so patently not done this.
I blame liberals and their infernal affirmative action for this. No white guy – and no conservative black – would ever have been wafted aloft by liberals impatient to prove that America was “ready for its first black president.”
Well, it serves liberals right that Obama is turning out to be the Worst. President. Ever. That’ll teach ’em a lesson.
But I grieve for Barack Obama the man. I just hope and pray that his wife and his top staffers can keep him together through the valley of the shadow of death that awaits him in 2014 and after.
The president puts on a good show and seems determined to push the liberal agenda as far as it can go from now until January 2017.
But inside, I suspect that Barack Obama is utterly at sea, utterly unprepared to deal with the adversity of the coming months.
Still, I pray that he will find the strength, somehow, to carry on, for his sake, and for the sake of the American people.
