Earlier this week, President Obama strained to fill the seats of a community college auditorium located in one of Cleveland’s largest suburbs, leaving the White House scrambling to fill 75 seats an hour before the president’s scheduled appearance.
That the president was unable to fill seats on a college campus is amazing and is the type of political grist the White House and the Democratic Party hopes will stay inside the political grist mill, so as to protect the president’s constructed image of messianic dimension, when all along, those who have been paying attention understand the president’s image is just that — an image, or as those inside the White House like to call it, “optics.”
Well, image or optics, the descriptors really don’t matter, and of course, they never did. And that is something Obama will have to come to grips with, since his petulant and ideological actions have depleted his only political currency — a currency of campaign scripts and telepromtic delivery that works in campaigns but is sand in the gears of democratic and constitutional governance. Simply put, Americans expect their presidents to act presidential and work within the established system of checks and balances.
The president’s currency was his campaign rhetoric, a valuable currency that he should have cashed in the moment he became president by delivering on his promises of post-partisanship, transparency, and hope and change. President Obama, as we all know, did not cash in his campaign currency. Instead, he remains in campaign mode and has failed to deliver on his campaign promises.
The events of the past 19 months have proven that Obama catapulted himself into office through slick packaging and only slick packaging, for after the packaged election show, America was left with a polemical president whose feigned sophistication, mock leadership and arrogant verbal verbosity have only served to fracture the country.
Yet the American spirit is alive and Americans are organizing and mobilizing around their president. Organizing and mobilizing to 1) vote the president’s party out of office in November and 2) vote the president out of office in 2012.
Matt O’Connor is a freelance writer and founder of Clarion Advisory, LLC, a media production company, and serves as the executive editor of Clarion Advisory.com, a website featuring political commentary and the continuous aggregation of national and international news covering politics and business. Prior to forming Clarion Advisory, Matt worked as a broker and vice president within a Fortune 250 company on the West Coast.