Originally posted at American Thinker.
In 2011 in Time Magazine, while President Obama’s job approval was dropping like a rock, Ronald Reagan’s daughter and faithful Obama supporter Patti Davis wrote an article entitled “Perception and Reality: What Obama Really Needs Right Now.”
Davis addressed Barack Obama’s poor public image and did so by pointing out that Mike Deaver, White House Chief of Staff under President Reagan, helped shape America’spositive impression of her father by crafting patriotic theatre that enhanced the public’s perception of the former president.
Romesh Ratnesar, author of the book Tear Down This Wall, agreed with the premise that Mike Deaver’s “true talent was stagecraft,” and that he was the “most powerful force in the molding of President Reagan’s public image.”
In her “perception and reality” article it was easy for Davis to stir up memories of the “windy promontory called Pointe du Hoc and the soft light over the English Channel as [her] father honored the 40th anniversary of D-Day,” and resurrect images of Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate challenging, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Two decades later, the current president’s idea of a Brandenburg Gate moment is to have a group of mind-numbed acolytes clap uncontrollably when he announces that he’ll be punishing the rich for being successful.
Despite the potential for a public relations disaster, Barack Obama even golfed during an oil disaster and vacationed with the “family at exactly the same time that Japan was suffering through a nuclear disaster, Libya had been bombed, and there was a threat of a government shutdown.” Also seared into America’s mind’s eye are images of Barack Obama body surfing in Hawaii as the nation teetered dangerously close to the edge of the fiscal cliff. Then, after very public, very heated negotiations concerning the ominous economic future of the country, Obama brazenly spent $7 million just flying back and forth to Hawaii for vacation.
Over the last four years Barack Obama has shown that indeed he is a theatrical phenom, proving Patti Davis’s impression to be far afield. After all, what other president consistently dispatched a message of defiance to his detractors, smiled while giving the middle finger to his critics, and did it all while further enamoring his sycophants? That’s a level of proficiency even Reagan lacked.
The difference between Reagan and Obama is that instead of doing what the Gipper did, which was to impart a measure of his own patriotic optimism to the country, Obama openly exposes his resentment by dragging around the disgruntled and downtrodden as props to help convey a message that divides rather than unifies the nation.
Case in point — recently, White House pool boy/press secretary Jay Carney announced that Obama would be unveiling a “concrete package” sure to give the U.S. Constitution the Jimmy Hoffa treatment.
The $500 million gun violence ‘package’ included 23 executive actions addressing “gun control proposals including assault weapons bans, high capacity ammunition magazine bans, and closing loopholes on background checks.” In other words, the same guy who claims he can’t find millions of illegal aliens has miraculously found a way to track down and register 300 million guns.
In pseudo-Reaganesque mode, the president’s anti-Second Amendment effort was made public while armed Secret Service agents stood in the wings ensuring his personal safety. In place of a huge American flag billowing in the breeze, a stalwart Vice President Joe Biden, overseer of Obama’s commission on gun violence, was also in attendance to provide moron — oops — moral support.
To set the tone, the absolutely shameless Barack Obama misused small “children from around the country” who, after the Newtown shootings, supposedly wrote to him expressing concerns about “gun violence and school safety.” Accompanying the kids were their clueless parents, all of whom most assuredly supported Obama in 2012.
The only thing missing from the anti-gun violence show were a few of the kids openly weeping in the background as Obama stressed the nation’s moral duty to spare the little ones from fear and harm.
Weeping or not, President Obama lost all credibility when he decided to use children as props. Again, despite the melodrama, this man does not care one iota about child safety. Barack Obama believes in partial birth abortion and gladly provides unlimited government funding to terminate as many unborn children as Planned Parenthood can possibly snuff out.
Yet, while unveiling his executive actions the president said, “This is our first task as a society, keeping our children safe. This is how we will be judged.” If NARAL darling Barack Obama were to be judged honestly on his child safety record, then living, breathing youngsters would not have graced the White House ceremony.
That is why, when it comes to utilizing the power of acting, clearly, Ronald Reagan’s daughter Patti Davis misjudged Time Magazine’s Person of the Year’s ability to compete with her father. Hence, Obama’s well thought-out attempt to fortify his gun control argument by having young children flock around a man who would have unblinkingly aborted them is just another attempt to woo America into viewing him as something he is not.
Even so, Obama seems unfazed by the paradox he projects. After all, why should he be? Despite his horrendous first term, lethal tendencies, and blatant Constitutional breaches, he managed to manipulate the public into granting him another four years. Therefore, transparent theatrics being used as a substitute for conviction and character is an apropos reward for an electorate who’ve willingly forfeited truth for Obama-orchestrated displays of propaganda.
And so, surrounded by giggling children, as Barack Obama censured Congress and with a pen as his weapon of choice aborted the Second Amendment, the image he successfully conveyed was that nothing and no one can prevent him from “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” into a vision Ronald Reagan would have demanded he tear down.
