by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n Preachers and professors have it hard as presidents. They sermonize too much. Finally the public gets tired of being lectured by those whom they increasingly see as no more upright than themselves. Prophets crumble from feet of clay, and stones shatter glass houses. So it was with Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter, and so it is now with Barack Obama.<\/p>\n The Obama administration is throwing stones at a lot of people \u2014 John Boehner, Republicans, tea-partiers, Fox News, Glenn Beck, doctors, insurers, Wall Street, and business in general.<\/p>\n Such invective invites a response, and here the White House is becoming as fragile as glass. We saw that recently in the presidential petulance at supposedly being talked about \u201clike a dog,\u201d and in a touchy press secretary Robert Gibbs unloading at everyone from Rush Limbaugh to\u00a0Forbes<\/em>magazine.<\/p>\n Last February, Attorney General Eric Holder, self-appointed racial philosopher as well as the nation\u2019s chief law-enforcement officer, lectured his fellow Americans: \u201cIn things racial, we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.\u201d Professor Holder went on to complain that \u201ccertain subjects are off limits and that to explore them risks at best embarrassment and at worst the questioning of one\u2019s character.\u201d<\/p>\n Fair enough: Most Americans would be willing to engage Holder in his desired racial seminar \u2014 if it were two-sided, and did not devolve into something like the imbroglio over Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. Before even hearing the facts of that case, remember, the president of the United States, as arbiter of racial relations on campus as well as commander-in-chief, rushed to condemn the Cambridge police for acting \u201cstupidly\u201d and then accused law-enforcement officers in general of racial stereotyping.<\/p>\n In contrast, did Eric Holder\u2019s proposed conversation include questions of welfare dependency, anti-social cultural messages, or lack of personal responsibility \u2014 in addition to racism \u2014 to explain much higher than average rates of illegitimacy, illiteracy, failure to graduate from high school, and criminal behavior among some minority groups?<\/p>\n So far, Holder himself has never dared to raise such \u201coff-limits\u201d controversial issues. Yet in the case of the Arizona immigration statute, the attorney general was hardly so reluctant. He lambasted the legislation as \u201cunfortunate,\u201d possibly unconstitutional, and leading to racial stereotyping \u2014 all before he had even read the law. Cowardly?<\/p>\n Recently, Michelle Obama advised Americans to eat better foods to combat the national epidemic of obesity. She envisions using government power to teach restaurants how to restructure their menus, and helping targeted communities with federal money to improve their collective diets.<\/p>\n Fair enough once more: As a nation we are probably too fat, and First Ladies often seek to better the American condition. But as in the Holder case, does the First Lady, as first professor and preacher, really wish to lecture the American people on their personal sins and to follow that up with federal programs and expenditures? If the issue is to promote better health by using the bully pulpit of the First Family in symbolic fashion, then Michelle Obama might first more quietly start at home with her errant husband.<\/p>\n The presidential role model is secretively a chain smoker \u2014 a habit that promotes both heart disease and cancer, and kills millions of Americans each year. At almost every photo op, President Obama is enjoying hot dogs, ice cream, and beer. The president deserves a private life, and his smoking and consumption of fatty foods are his business alone \u2014 unless his spouse is suggesting simultaneously that the rest of us must not only avoid such behavior, but seek to fund and institutionalize its antithesis. A voter might well respond to the First Lady\u2019s lectures on diet with something like, \u201cFirst convince the first husband to stop smoking and to eat better, and then I\u2019ll listen to your advice about my own diet.\u201d Otherwise one might conclude that smoking can keep down weight as effectively as restricting one\u2019s diet can. Such are the wages of a White House of \u201cDo as I say, not as I do.\u201d<\/p>\n We saw more of this disconnect between sermons and behavior when the president lectured us that in rough times we all had to cut back: \u201cEverybody\u2019s going to have to give. Everybody\u2019s going to have to have some skin in the game.\u201d Apparently that did not mean giving up one\u2019s vacation at Martha\u2019s Vineyard or the Costa del Sol. Lectures have consequences.<\/p>\n Businesses and banks are increasingly criticized for not hiring and lending while they\u2019re sitting on trillions of dollars in cash. Both charges \u2014 made by the administration and the unions \u2014 are true. But does greed and self-interest alone explain these organizations\u2019 reluctance to spread their wealth to others?<\/p>\n Maybe private companies were stung by the Obama administration\u2019s reordering of the creditors in the Chrysler bankruptcy case. Or maybe their hesitancy derives from the serial anti-business references during the Gulf oil-spill disaster, such as the ones about putting a boot on BP\u2019s neck and forcing it to cough up $20 billion in clean-up costs. Or maybe it has something to do with the stereotyping of insurers and doctors as greedy. Or with the refrain about suspect earners who make over $250,000, and who thus owe the rest of us higher income taxes and healthcare surcharges.<\/p>\n Again, our average voter might respond, \u201cIf you want a two-way conversation on recovery, why not question the unions\u2019 anti-democratic tendencies, haphazard productivity, and inflexibility, or the tax avoidance of allies like Charles Rangel, Chris Dodd, Maxine Waters, and dozens of White House staffers, or the mismanagement of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the wasted stimulus, or the new bureaucratic empires that can only hamper commerce?\u201d<\/p>\n Then we come to radical Islam. The president weighed in repeatedly on the so-called Ground Zero mosque. Here too he wishes to use the symbolic prestige of his office to offer a teachable moment about a local controversy. But to play sermonizer-in-chief requires at least appearing fair-minded.<\/p>\n At various times, the president misrepresented the disagreement as one of legality rather than of taste and common decency. Obama finally implied that his illiberal opponents were lashing out at Islam because of rough economic times \u2014 reminiscent of his earlier psychoanalyzing of rural Pennsylvanians who voted against him in the primaries supposedly out of fear of immigrants and those \u201cnot like them\u201d rather than because of opposition to the policies he was promising to implement.<\/p>\n When Mr. Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, we first heard that he had \u201callegedly\u201d done so \u2014 the same sort of tentativeness we witnessed in the president\u2019s first interview with\u00a0Al Arabiya<\/em>. There he suggested that American problems with Islam were due in part to past American policies and presidents. In the Cairo speech, one would have thought C\u00f3rdoba \u2014 a Western city conquered by invading Muslims \u2014 was a modern-day Amsterdam rather than a typical medieval city in which the dominant religion forced other faiths to pay obeisance.<\/p>\n So an enlightened president likes to lecture less-informed Americans that Muslims are not more likely than other people to promote, or be silent about, radical Islamic terror. Again, fair enough.<\/p>\n But is he as worried about the reality that, of the 31 major foiled terrorist attacks against the United States since 9\/11, all of them involved Muslims? Again, our mythical voter might say something to the effect that \u201cI will be careful to honor the right of Muslims to build a $100 million mosque near Ground Zero if you will at least ask the Muslim community to condemn Western Muslims who keep trying to kill those about them.\u201d<\/p>\n The terrorist impulse simply does not abate. We saw it most recently in Britain, when police broke up a plot by Algerian immigrants to kill Pope Benedict \u2014 who four years ago was a target of Muslim death threats for quoting a Byzantine text. Americans know that even as the president lectures them about being intolerant of Muslims, additional Islamist plots to kill them will be uncovered \u2014 and will probably not earn as much presidential moralizing as the Ground Zero mosque.<\/p>\n When an attorney general, a first lady, and a president offer lectures to the American people about their purported unfounded fears, bad habits, and prejudices, like any sermonizer they invite reciprocal scrutiny, both about their own conduct and about the fairness of their critiques. As a result, a stone-throwing White House is becoming a shattered Glass House.<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Preachers and professors have it hard as presidents. They sermonize too much. Finally the public gets tired of being lectured by those whom they increasingly see as no more upright than themselves. Prophets crumble from feet of clay, and stones shatter glass houses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[515],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-k2","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7069,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-stepping-stones-to-the-ukraine-crisis\/","url_meta":{"origin":1242,"position":0},"title":"The Stepping Stones to the Ukraine Crisis","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 3, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ NRO's The Corner\u00a0 Each step to the present Ukrainian predicament was in and of itself hardly earth-shattering\u00a0and was sort of framed by Obama\u2019s open-mic assurance to Medvedev to tell Vladimir that he would more flexible after the election. 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