Outlook

We are all indebted to President Obama for reinforcing an important lesson: If one wants to influence others or persuade them towards one’s point of view then speaking to them condescendingly is rarely a winning strategy. The one bump in the road of the Obama juggernaut 2008 campaign came when he confirmed for a group of wealthy San Francisco donors his view of small-town Americans: “[T]hey get bitter they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

Unchastened by the fallout from that gaffe he recently offered a group of Massachusetts donors a similar explanation of why “facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time.” It turns out that human beings are “hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared.” (At the very least the president should bone up on his evolutionary theory: Acting stupidly is hardly the kind of advantage that gets “hard-wired” into our brains even according to the evolutionists.)

In charitable moments the president allowed that perhaps he could have done a better job of explaining the benefits of ObamaCare or the $787 billion stimulus in terms simple enough for even the common man to grasp.

While people do not like to be spoken down to they generally do respect the outstanding qualities of others as long as they are permitted to discover those qualities for themselves. President Obama however has never mastered the trick of hiding his light under a bushel basket. He famously hailed his own nomination as the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow. Speaking on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall the president noted that no one could have dreamed then that a black man would be the president of the United States thirty years later as if every event in human history was significant only in how it prepared the way for the advent of Barack Obama.