Victor Davis Hanson ALWAYS hits his mark....and this one was no exception. Thanks for the post!
It's hard to know which of his sentences and paragraphs one should remember as the highlight, because as a whole, each sentence is a highlight, IMO.....
Wish Obama would just listen to others instead of always tallking. He just might learn something.
A Vineyard too far indeed!
Likewise, Obama (thanks to the two-decade tutelage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright) does not talks like someone from Hawaii — at least not all the time. With some flair, he is able to turn on and off the slightly southern soaring cadences of the inner city (better than Hillary Clinton’s awkward attempts at clingers populism), both to reassure skeptical blacks of his racial solidarity and authenticity, and (as Harry Reid bluntly noted of the adroitly opportunistic diction) to remind his white liberal supporters that their efforts at penance really were genuinely well grounded. Again, in our upside-down world of race, a Clarence Thomas or a Condoleezza Rice, who grew up amid the authentic African-American struggle against Jim Crow, could never quite be as legitimately “black” as was Barack Obama (preppie, half-white/half-Kenyan), simply because liberal identity politics offers instant superficial authentication in a way real life cannot.
But this last in-your-face Martha’s Vineyard vacation was one too many even for our most adroit gymnast of identity and class politics: The public at last really does believe that Barack Obama, whatever his heritage or nomenclature, is an out-of-touch elitist who simply likes hanging out with wealthy people and shares their refined tastes, even as millions are out of work or broke. This summer all the old SEIU talk about “fat cats” and “corporate jets” has been reduced to a parlor game.
In short, this year’s vacation was a vineyard too far.
|
