With an image of President Barack Obama as the mythical Icarus flying to close to the media spotlight, Fouad Ajami accurately argues that the spell Obama has cast upon our country and the world has been broken. The President is not the demigod or, in Ajami’s words, the “Awaited One.”
Americans don’t deify their leaders or hang on their utterances [actually, they do both Mr. Ajami], but Mr. Obama succumbed to what the devotees said of him: He was the Awaited One. A measure of reticence could have served him. But the flight had been heady, and in the manner of Icarus, Mr. Obama flew too close to the sun.
Only one paragraph earlier, Ajami nails the real reason why people are beginning to see through this President’s slippery and shallow veneer of personality and policy: exaggerated pride or self-confidence. Ajami writes:
… then there was the hubris of the man at the helm: He was everywhere, and pronounced on matters large and small. This was political death by the teleprompter.
Neverthless, Obama continues to govern by his cult of personality and by flinging questionable policies at the economy like children throwing snowballs at passing cars.
The read Mr. Ajami’s op-ed piece.
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