If it weren't so sad it'd be funny. Liberals have a hard time putting faith in the transcendent but blindly placing one's faith in the immanent? No problem.
Not only is her faith in Barack Obama apparently unfalsifiable, it's contrary to common sense. What makes her think that after five years of economic stagnation, foreign policy blunders, and incontestable mendacity that anything will be different in the next three years? Why think that competency and integrity will suddenly blossom in an administration that has had five years to demonstrate these virtues without having evinced any discernible success?
The sad part of this is that non-liberals had taken the measure of Mr. Obama about thirty minutes after he'd stepped on to the national stage. They knew he was totally unqualified for the job, they knew his ideology would lead to disaster, they knew, in short, that he was an empty suit. They marveled that people like Barbara Walters could be so easily seduced, and they tried to convince the electorate to resist the vacuous sirens' song of Hope and Change, but it was all to no avail.
It tells us something about the liberal mindset that many of them were so eager to place their faith in a charismatic human savior that they plighted their allegiance to a man they scarcely knew, one whose mysterious personal history included spending his formative years surrounded by men and women who despised this country, but who, they nonetheless believed, could and would lead a nation as vast and sprawling as the U.S. into the promised land.
Naiveté is cute in children, tolerable in young adults, but risible in mature adults and especially so at the moment of revelation when the adult realizes how blind she'd been.
Russell Saltzman writes of his own growing disillusionment with the incumbent president at First Things in a fine piece titled The Selfie President.
