The Transformation of Barack Obama

Chris Christie to Barack Obama: "What the hell are we paying you for?"

Thank you, Governor. For some time the TMR has been pondering a new Obama moniker. "His Obamaness" is getting shop worn. Worse, it is much too regal for a president  whose fight-or-flight instincts tilt so heavily to the latter. How can we attribute regality to a man whose response to national bankruptcy is a jet trip to Asia and Oceania where his most notable act was ordering a company of U.S. Marines to Australia?

So the stunningly apt Christie question inspires "His Ineptness."

Just over three years ago, Barack Obama capitalized on an amazing run of luck. A lackluster lawyer turned welfare bureaucrat, he possessed a certain personal charm and, more important, a great gift of oratory in the Benny Hinn sense of the term. Local political imperatives in Cook County, Illinois, made him a young state legislator and a very young United States senator. Why? Because Daley's Chicago machine found him useful in group-identity politics.

As a senator his potential for damage was limited, but in 2008 a majority of Americans stared gape-mouthed at one another and asked "What the Hell happened."

The only thing they agreed on was that things had blown up like a Vanguard missile on the launch pad. The bills had come due for optional wars, more optional nation-building across the seas, an avalanche of domestic vote-buying,  and government-assisted fraud by our great financial institutions.

Families couldn't pay their bills. Banks and giant insurance companies couldn't pay their bills. Neither could many states, and for damned sure Washington couldn't either.

Enter Hope and Change, Barack Obama as messiah -- or as Robin Hood wielding his long bow in Nottingham Castle and marshaling the peasantry for war on the Evil Prince.

In the event, his quiver was empty, his bow string soaked and stretched. The man was intellectually impotent in any setting more rigorous than a rally of the slack-jawed who once heard and continued to believe that, by right, they were entitled to other people's stuff.

His Ineptness couldn't deliver on his leftist fantasies, even with squads of Little Johns commanding a majority of his Merry Men in the legislative bodies. As the end of A.D. 2011 approached, the president discovered that he was no longer taken seriously.

Of course, Obama's failure to maintain is not a bad thing. We are spared his corps of paramilitarized civilians in "service" to the statist ideal. We escaped some -- too little --  of his desired national health bureaucracy.  We have been temporarily spared the final currency collapse as his exchequer officials revved the printing presses to something more than supersonic to meet the cost of his pixie dust dreams.

But we have not evaded a generalized popular dread, that ambition destroying malaise of millions of American souls. They look at the debt. They note His Ineptness and his courtiers, empty suits purporting to guide our destiny.

They begin to suspect that in November of 2008, they fell for a practical joke of cosmic proportion.

And they look at the available -- meaning politically viable --alternatives to His Ineptness, one of whom they may choose in just over 11 months.

And they continue to despair.