Obama: "demogoguery with a graduate degree"

At Commentary Andrew Ferguson made it a point to listen tomost of Obama’s exit interviews the last several months.

Here was the essence of Obama’s rhetorical style as chief executive: a feint toward common ground while pushing his opponents still further away. It was dramatic, delivered in an exasperated, put-up-or-shut-up tone. It was utterly insincere. It gave an impression of boldness where there was none. It limned a meaningless proposal to make him appear flexible and bipartisan while scoring a partisan point. And it displayed his sly understanding of how public policy should work. A “public option” in a national health-insurance program would bring us closer to the socialized medicine that Obamacare supposedly made unnecessary. And the way to make national health insurance “cheaper,” in the president’s view, is to make it cost more, by giving more people more subsidies.

…By now Obama has refined his demagoguery so that it perfectly suits the modern partisan of the left—that is, a partisan who refuses to see himself as partisan. This isn’t the traditional populist demagoguery of William Jennings Bryan or even Lyndon Johnson, aimed at the unschooled, the unlucky, the desperate. This is demagoguery aimed at the well-to-do audience of Trevor Noah and Samantha Bee: the overschooled and undereducated, the self-certain and self-satisfied, who see ideological deviation as a moral lapse rather than a difference of opinion. It’s demagoguery with a graduate degree. It’s boob bait for pseuds.

…He talked with Axelrod about his upbringing by a loving mother. “For all the ups and downs of our lives,” he said, “there wasn’t a moment that I didn’t feel as if I was special—that I was just this special gift to the world.”

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