September 16, 2013
The Impostor President Gets Caught
By Jack Cashill

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the New York Times ran an article on what psychologists call the "impostor phenomenon." To measure it, they ask test subjects questions like, "At times, I feel my success has been due to some kind of luck" or "I can give the impression that I'm more competent than I really am."

Although the article had nothing to do with Barack Obama, he would surely have scored off the charts had he answered those questions honestly. He was a reasonably bright guy but not the "brilliant" author and savant white liberals thought him to be. His "luck" derived from the fact that he grew up almost exactly as those liberals had but in the body of a black man. Hearing him they heard themselves. Seeing him say what he said surprised them, validated them, delighted them with its very whiteness. Although they would be the last to admit it, they suffered conspicuously from what George Bush has called "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

In speaking of Obama in early 2007, Joe Biden framed those expectations with dunderheaded clarity. "I mean you got the first mainstream African-American presidential candidate who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Not to be out-patronized, Senate majority Leader Harry Reid found comfort in Obama's having "no Negro dialect." The always-observant Shelby Steele summed up the phenomenon, "Blacks like Obama, who show merit where mediocrity is expected, enjoy a kind of reverse stigma, a slightly inflated reputation for 'freshness' and excellence because they defy expectations."

Throughout his ascendancy, Obama has had to fake something else besides competence, namely a belief in America. This trumpery was on full display during Tuesday night's Syria speech. "When, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act," said Obama at the conclusion of his disjointed speech on September 10. "That's what makes America different. That's what makes us exceptional."

Exceptional? As Russia's Vladimir Putin promptly made clear in a taunting New York Times op-ed, Obama did not believe in American exceptionalism any more than he did. Indeed, Putin's old KGB pals had been working to undermine that belief since the agency's creation.

Obama's rise was, in no small part, a testament to the KGB's success. From his childhood on, Obama had been learning that just about the only thing exceptional about America was Barack Hussein Obama. In Hawaii, his communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, reinforced his mother's casual anti-Americanism. "You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained," Davis reportedly told Obama. "They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit."

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http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/t...l#ixzz2f6qE2nJe