Worth Reading

Frank Rich lets loose: "Obama's Original Sin," in New York Magazine's "News and Features," 3 July 2011.

This article would be great to use in a communications class in which one is discussing the art of rhetoric (ethos, logos, and pathos) and the emotional appeal of language (buried metaphors such as "paw print," alliteration, understatement, hyperbole, aphorisms, etc.)

A few excerpts:

• "As the indefatigable Matt Taibbi has tabulated, law enforcement on Obama’s watch rounded up 393,000 illegal immigrants last year and zero bankers."

• "It's as if the Watergate investigation were halted after the cops nabbed the nudniks who did the break-in."

• "What some call a settlement others may find a cover-up."

• "Those in executive suites at the top of that chain have long since fled the scene with the proceeds, while bleeding shareholders, investors, homeowners, and ­cashiered employees were left with the bills. The weak Dodd-Frank financial-reform law that rose from the ruins remains largely inoperative, since the actual rule-writing was delegated to understaffed agencies now under siege by banking lobbyists and their well-greased congressional overlords." (my emphasis--Just listen to the hard "R's" rolling through the first part of that last sentence, only to be let out like air from a tire, with the emphasis on "S's" at the end of the sentence.)

• And--ouch!: "But the president has no one to blame but himself for the caricature. While he has never lusted after money—he’d rather get his hands on the latest novel by Morrison or Franzen—he is an elitist of a certain sort. For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys."

And the final two paragraphs that one hopes the President (or someone who can influence him) reads and heeds:

“A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There’s nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so—and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it’s essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.

The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation—so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.