Now They Tell Us

Mark Steyn brings his razor sharp wit to bear in a column for Investors Business Daily in which he skewers the media and academic elites for how they gushed over Barack Obama in 2008 and are now realizing how naive and gullible they were. Their expressions of remorse and regret at having been blinded by the "crease in his pants" and seduced by the "thrill up their legs" are little comfort to those who accepted their judgment and voted for a man with no real record and about whom they knew almost nothing:

"The way I think about it," Barack Obama told a TV station in Orlando, "is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft."

He has a point. This is a great, great country that got so soft that 53% of electors voted for a ludicrously unqualified chief executive who would be regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation.

One should not begrudge a man who seizes his opportunity. But one should certainly hold in contempt those who allow him to seize it on the basis of such flaccid generalities as "hope" and "change": That's more than "a little" soft.

"He's probably the smartest guy ever to become president," declared presidential historian Michael Beschloss the day after the 2008 election. But you don't have to be that smart to put one over on all the smart guys.

"I'm a sap, a specific kind of sap. I'm an Obama Sap," admits David Brooks, the softest touch at the New York Times. Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek, now says of the president: "He wasn't ready, it turns out, really."

If you're a tenured columnist at the Times, you can just about afford the consequences of your sappiness. But among the hundreds of thousands of your readers who didn't know you were a sap until you told them three years later, soft choices have hard consequences.

Steyn goes on in this vein for the rest of the column. He's relentless in taking the celebrity media to task for assuring us in 2008 that we could put a community organizer in charge of a multitrillion dollar economy and have it turn out well. It was like being assured that giving the keys for a Ferrari to a ten year old is what any wise, sophisticated Ferrari owner should do.

During the campaign it was a common occurrence for someone in the audience of Mr. Obama's speeches to faint from ecstasy at the sound of his voice and the splendor of his words. Now, as we teeter on the brink of economic collapse, as millions of college grads leave school up to their eyeballs in debt with no job prospects suitable for their level of education, as unemployment in the black community hits historic highs, no one swoons anymore when he speaks.