Dorothy Rabbinowitz is a great investigative reporter and currently works as an editorial page editor for the Wall Street Journal. I’ve been a fan since I read her coverage in the Journal of the child-abuse witch hunts that swept the land during the 1980s and 1990s.
Her recent column is entitled, “Obama’s Tone-Deaf Health Campaign” in which she chronicles the administration’s maladroit political instincts in handling the debate. But the key graf for me is this:
The president has a problem. For, despite a great election victory, Mr. Obama, it becomes ever clearer, knows little about Americans. He knows the crowds—he is at home with those. He is a stranger to the country’s heart and character.
He seems unable to grasp what runs counter to its nature. That Americans don’t take well, for instance, to bullying, especially of the moralizing kind, implicit in those speeches on health care for everybody. Neither do they wish to be taken where they don’t know they want to go and being told it’s good for them.
I’ve had a sense that Obama doesn’t know the America I know, or, if he does, he’s uncomfortable with it. The America I know is redolent with the ‘mystic chords of memory’ that Lincoln recognized in his first inaugural address.
There are various themes to which all true Americans instinctively respond. American exceptionalism is one of them. We have always believed that we’re special. That we have a mission in the world. That through some strange divine alignment, America was born of people and ideas that condensed and congealed at history’s fulcrum. This belief is part of our DNA. We’ve been down but never out precisely because we knew that tomorrow was just as important as today.
And that’s why the left has labored so mightily over the past generation to suppress this instinctive knowledge of ourselves.
I leave you with a few words from Bruce Catton. Catton was the undisputed dean of Civil War historians during the postwar years and wrote movingly of the war and life in the America of his youth and adulthood. He was no stylist, but instead wrote evocative prose that expressed what it meant to be an American.
In Waiting for the Morning Train, he affectionately described his father, who founded a school in Benzonia, Michigan, at a time when the area was still a wilderness.
Father had his full share of that profound conviction which lies so close to the headwaters of the American spirit: the conviction that if in the end the world is saved from disaster the saving will be done in America and by Americans. As a people whose ideas about the cosmos have at least in part an Old Testament base, we have a deep suspicion that we are the chosen people. We may not actually be the ones specifically mentioned in Scripture, but we feel that we are fairly close; maybe Providence made a supplementary choice somewhere along the way. (After all, no less a man than Abraham Lincoln, trying to nerve his countrymen for the shock of civil war, spoke of them as the almost chosen people. This feeling is in fact one of the most powerful forces in American life, and now and then it leads to interesting happenings. . . .
But whether we act wisely or foolishly, we always feel that what we do is important to the whole wide world and not just to ourselves, and that the responsibility runs all the way down to the conscience of the individual. We are mindful of the text which, telling the chosen ones that they were the salt of the earth, asked what the world would do if the salt ceased to be salty. A man who feels so will make no small decisions.
The Americans whom Catton describes are never tempted to grovel or whimper before a government that fancies itself as being ‘of the people.’
And these are precisely the Americans whom Barack Obama does not know.
