PAtownhall.com
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
PAtownhall.com
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
by Ralph R. Reiland,
Professor of Free Enterprise
The bloom is coming off the Obama rose.
It started with people fainting at his mega-rallies and peaked with the plate that he used to eat waffles in a Scranton diner being put up for sale on eBay.
"Winner gets his used diner plate with his used silverware and uneaten portion of waffle and sausage," according to the ad. "Guaranteed authentic. His DNA is on the silverware. This plate was wrapped by the waitress who served him. It was wrapped with Saran Wrap immediately after his departure and is now in the freezer awaiting the lucky winner's bid!! This is 100 percent authentic as you can see he was at the diner by the picture and it was on all local news stations."
Obama's old sausage and waffle pieces were followed on eBay by an oil painting that celebrated the special leftovers.
"The recent eBay auction of Barack Obama's waffle may be no more, but it lives on here as a miniature oil painting," according to the item description. "Created from the actual recent photo of Mr. Obama's half-eaten breakfast, this one-of-a-kind art is not a reproduction but an artistic interpretation of the original. I call it 'Memories of Barack Obama's Breakfast.'"
Those days are gone.
Bob Herbert, a pro-Obama columnist at The New York Times, began his column last week on the presumptive Democrat nominee as follows: "In one of the numbers from 'Fiddler on the Roof,' Tevye sings, with a mixture of emotions: 'We haven't got the man we had when we began.'"
What's different is that Obama is flipping like a newly landed flounder on the dock. He now backs the government wiretaps that he once opposed, he applauds the Supreme Court decision that overturned the District of Columbia ban on handguns, he's now OK with the death penalty for child rapists and he wants to shovel even more faith-based money than Bush to religious groups.
Even the white grandma who used to make him "cringe" is back on top again.
The white grandmother, as Obama revealed in his Philadelphia speech on race in March (the speech about how he couldn't disown his now-disowned minister), was "a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
At the time, Herbert wrote that the Philadelphia speech "should be required reading in classrooms across the country " and in as many other venues as possible."
Today, Herbert writes that "many of Obama's strongest supporters are uneasy, upset, dismayed and even angry at the candidate now emerging in the bright light of summer."
It isn't the same Obama they saw in January, says Herbert, when he "pulled off his stunning win in the Iowa caucuses and people were lining up in the cold and snow for hours just to get a glimpse of him," i.e., back when "there was a wide and growing belief that something new in American politics had arrived."
Gertrude Stein once said that "there is no there there," referring to Oakland, Calif., where she had spent her childhood.
It's the same with Obama, a politician with basically no record, where "there is no there there," except for the ability to wax eloquently about "hope" and "change." With no specifics, followers could have faith that "change" meant the end of handguns, the end of bad wiretaps, the end of shipping taxpayers' millions to hucksters like Jeremiah Wright.
As Obama said early on, "I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."
Not just "new enough," but unaccomplished enough.
On Obama's years as a "community organizer," a front-page article in The New York Times on July 7 succinctly summarized the net impact: "It is clear that the benefit of those years to Mr. Obama dwarfs what he accomplished."
The Times quotes Gerald Kellman, the community organizer in Chicago who interviewed Obama to work on the city's South Side. His evaluation of Obama's work? "We made very little progress, nothing that would change poverty on the South Side of Chicago."
Similarly, "there is no there there" regarding Obama's achievements in the Illinois Senate or the United States Senate.
"We haven't got the man we had"? He was never there.
Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.
Ralph R. Reiland
Phone: 412-884-4541
E-mail: rrreiland@aol.com
"Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon Professor of Free Enterprise at Robert Morris University, the owner Amel's Restaurant, and a columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review."
