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The ever-incisive, often-devastating, and always bold Shelby Steele has a must-read op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.  Here’s a taste. 

After a reference to the story of the emporer’s new clothes, Steele states his thesis:

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.

Steele’s piece is so tightly written that it is really impossible to excerpt fairly.  But here is one of his central and typically well-developed points:  Barack Obama is essentially a content-free president: 

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called “individuating”—that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.

He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.

Mr. Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle. To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as “ideological,” and by promising to deliver us from the “tired” culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be “post-ideological,” “post-racial” and “post-partisan,” which is to say that he defines himself by a series of “nots”—thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

One has to raise such points with great care in order to avoid being painted as a racist – or, in more modern parlance, as a believer in  racialism, which is less odious but just as debilitating to public discourse.  Steele, who himself is African-American, is well-positioned to comment on all this, and probably because of his own racial background (and the resultant need to avoid the tired charge of being a traitor to his own race) is one of the most careful living writers on the subject. 

In other words, his ideas cannot be dismissed.  Give them a read.

I am cross-posting much of this entry with Article VI Blog, where I also hang out.  As I said there, I am offering just a few quick hits:

Mike Huckabee, Convicts, and Religion

Anyone not living in a cave for the last 48 hours knows that Maurice Clemmons, the murderer of four police officers in Seattle, was once in state prison in Arkansas – until Mike Huckabee commuted his sentence. Huck has been running away from that decision and attempting to spread the blame to others involved in processing Clemmons through the legal system. It’s been suggested that Huckabee’s faith played a huge role in his clemency decisions as governor. The man himself has not yet addressed that question, probably because he doesn’t want to touch it.

That’s understandable.

Consider: While Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee issued 1,033 pardons, twice as many as the prior three Arkansas governors combined. Just as a point of comparision, Mitt Romney did not issue a single pardon while Governor of Massachusetts. I have a hunch that Huckabee, as a potential 2012 presidential candidate, is now . . . toast.

David Frum Thinks The Whole GOP Religion Situation Is Terrible

At least that’s what he seems to be saying here. Frum, who’s unhappy with religious conservatives generally, sees the Manhattan Declaration’s failure to include Mormons as yet another example of Evangelical bias against that faith. Well, the Declaration was authored not just by Evangelicals but also Catholics and Orthodox Christians, something Frum doesn’t seem to grasp. Also, as I noted here, the Declaration is a doctrinal trinitarian document. Mormons and other heterodox Christian faiths could not have signed it (to say nothing of Orthodox Jews), so the document’s drafters didn’t even invite them to sign. There are political reasons to quibble with the Declaration’s narrowness, but to this Latter-day Saint it doesn’t look like a slap at Romney or Mormonism.

It seems that in the old legacy media, whether or not political behavior is objectionable depends not on the behavior itself, but on whose behavior it is.

For example, maybe you missed this report from Byron York over the weekend.  In a commentary – a commentary! – about the Obama administration’s attacks on Fox News, Ken Rudin, NPR’s political director, first said this:

“It’s not only aggressive, it’s almost Nixonesque,” Rudin said. “I mean, you think of what Nixon and Agnew did with their enemies list and their attacks on the media; certainly Vice President Agnew’s constant denunciation of the media. Of course, then it was a conservative president denouncing a liberal media, and of course, a lot of good liberals said, ‘Oh, that’s ridiculous. That’s an infringement on the freedom of press.’ And now you see a lot of liberals almost kind of applauding what the White House is doing to Fox News, which I think is distressing.”

Broadcasters and pundits ccould be a bit more kind in their reviews of President Obama’s surprise Nobel Peace Prize.  He IS the first

Making Peace

African American to sit in the White House.  It is odd that, according to CNN, the Nobel Committee closed nominations shortly after Obama was inaugurated.  His “peace” efforts were still wet ink droplets on the page at that time.

In any event, Barack Obama will give the money to charity, all $1.4 million of it, which after taxes will be something over $700,000.  Donating the balance to charity will shelter the remainder of his government salary this year!  Those are the realities.

Past Peace Prize recipients include Al Gore, Henry Kissenger, Jimmy Carter, and of course Martin Luther King.  I thought it might be interesting to remember the names and acts of women  who have been recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize .  Turns out there’s a lot of politics…..in peace.

Thanks to Instapundit, I saw this graph from Don Suber’s site:

Glenn Reynolds‘ comment:  “Not living up to the promises they made, is it? But don’t worry, health care will be totally different.“

What’s that, you say?   Yes, it is an interesting collection of names.   Here’s how they fit together today.

Fox Commentator Glenn Beck

First, I have met Glenn Beck in person, and he exudes kindness, class, and warmth.  You can’t help but like that man.

But the man I see on television is not that Glenn Beck.  That man’s an entertainer, playing to an audience – not always a perceptive political analyst.  I find myself agreeing with Beck on substance most of the time, but wincing at his style.  Can’t we do a better job of talking about important issues — without all that yelling?