What keeps this failed president above water?

Surprise is the beginning of wisdom, and
President Obama and his campaign so far are deeply surprising. His
presidency is a basket case, a failure with a capital F, and yet he is
neck-and-neck with Romney. The only comparable failure since World War
II was Jimmy Carter’s—and Carter, it’s true, gave Reagan a tough race in
1980. But Carter at least attracted a stiff primary challenge from
Edward Kennedy. And voters were scared of Carter’s opponent (the
terrifying extremist Ronald Reagan); they might not be inspired by
Romney, but they are comfortable with him. Obama’s showing this year is a
surprise from many angles.

The utter failure of this president is rank.
History’s most expensive plan ever for buying your way out of recession
barely propelled the economy uphill, and now, in a squeal and stench of
smoking tires, the Obama Special (sweating, straining, roaring, leaking
dollars) is slipping back down again. The president’s signature approach
to governing is to ram through some wildly-unpopular measure and then
take a bow as the audience hoots. He did it with his famous unreform of
healthcare, and again with the blocked Keystone pipeline. His attorney
general would be a joke if he weren’t so dangerous, but Obama likes him.
The president did give up such unpopular ideas as closing Guantanamo,
card-check, a criminal trial for KSM in Manhattan à la P.T. Barnum,
cap-and-trade–but only because there was no way to push these things
through. (Although when Obama can govern by decree instead of by
legislation, he is only too happy. Legislation has always struck him as a
monumental bore.)

Obama perfectly fits the personal profile of the Culture Machine that runs so much of the American elite nowadays.

The Machine is run by
PORGIs, who are just like Obama: post-religious, globalist,
intellectuals or at least intellectualizers (who talk and act like
intellectuals even if they don’t quite qualify themselves). And his
being black, with an African father, an African name (icing on the cake)
and a childhood spent in a Muslim nation (the cherry on top!) makes him
beyond perfect–makes him nearly divine. We’re unlikely to hear anyone
say so during this campaign as frankly as Evan Thomas of Newsweek did in
2009: reviewing the president’s recent speech in Cairo, Thomas
explained to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, “I mean in a way Obama’s standing
above the country, above—above the world, he’s sort of God.” But we all
get the idea.

If conservatives were serious, they would think much harder about the
Culture Machine (aka the Establishment) and the ways in which Obama is
typical instead of exceptional—typical of a new type of Establishment
leader, the new Machine Man. We’re used to old-fashioned political
(usually Democratic) machines. But those political machines compare to
the modern Culture Machine like a stick of dynamite to an H-bomb. While
conservatives worry about debt and taxes and huge problems abroad, the
left is busy pulling the whole country out from under them. While
conservatives fiddle around on the roof, robbers are rifling the house
and stealing the children. Conservatives might consider climbing down
and having a look. Obama is only the first of a new breed.