The NYT's Roger Cohen isn't a conservative; but to his credit, the insightful commentator separated himself from the media's groveling liberal cheerleaders when he called Barack Obama a failed president.

However, before getting to Cohen's thoughts, it's necessary to say a few words about a 2008 You Tube video in which an audience of starry eyed parents smiles approvingly as a private school teacher conducts her youthful class in a choral composition whose only word, "Obama," fills the room with syllables rhythmically rising and falling in a manner associated with the holiest of hymns.

Yes, for some Americans in 2008, hope and change included the moral and intellectual abomination of carefully teaching their elementary school children to exalt not just the name of a merely human being but a politician.

Moreover, the current President of the United States consciously fed the fires of this mindless, dangerous sycophancy, for instance, when he announced his candidacy in Springfield, pluming himself as the Second Coming of Abraham Lincoln, and when he accepted his party's nomination in Denver, posturing among preposterous Greek columns.

At the time, those behaviors impelled many a thoughtful citizen to think, "Nothing good can come from this."

And nothing good has...not for the middle class or the poor. . .the unemployed or underemployed. . .the experienced who have lost their jobs or eager, job-seeking young people who look upon degrees, diplomas, and certifications they have earned only to be reminded of crushed hopes and trampled dreams.

Now back to Cohen, who assesses the past four years and concludes that "Obama ...has not provided a 'different future' worthy of the hope invested in him."

Turning to the cause of that failure, he first observes that while candidate Obama promised to surround himself with a bi-partisan, ferociously independent group of advisors, the people he actually chose were destined to become "a team, or rather a coterie, of idolizers."

Then, he concludes with this additional blast of truth:

"There is only one star in the galaxy at this White House and his name is Barack Obama. Everyone in the Sun King's court has drunk the Kool-Aid."

With respect to the president's failures, Cohen is right to assert that "Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall."

But despite the insightful nature of his observation, he doesn't get to the overarching reason for Barack Obama's stunningly dismal record.

In contrast, Paul Tough, also writing in the NYT, does, albeit ironically because while he extensively discusses Obama's failure to advance smart, innovative programs to help the nation's inner city poor, he conspicuously tiptoes away from saying anything about the reason.

Fortunately, when Tough writes about the disconnect between the words candidate Obama spoke in Washington's devastated neighborhood of Anacostia and the actions President Obama has taken, the president's fundamental flaw becomes evident:

"As president Obama has followed a very different path from the one he described in Anacostia. [In fact] the path Obama has pursued looks more like a traditional Great Society Democratic approach."

Faith in the disastrously ineffective Great Society template for solving every problem imaginable or, to put it in other words, a dogmatic belief in the goodness of big centralized government, the historical scourge that inevitably destroys a people's life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness...

That is the fundamental flaw of a president who talks a good show about change and denounces his opponents as better fit for the nineteenth century while he is intractably devoted to the hoariest, most catastrophic political dogma of the past.

It explains why instead of taking sound, common sense steps to invigorate the economy he has done nothing but condemn business, his Great Society vision affecting him so deeply that he has mocked not just small business owners but all who have achieved success for believing they "built that."

It explains why his only real economic strategy has the Federal Reserve enriching big banks with a saver and seniors punishing Zero Interest Rate Policy that is as remarkable for its hypocrisy as it is for representing one of the most disgusting instances imaginable of "trickle-down economics."

It explains why instead of fighting for the serious reforms the nation's healthcare system desperately needs, he shoved down the throats of the American people a bureaucracy bloating Great Society style abomination that without a word of explanation cuts $700 billion from Medicare while asking the Democratic Party darling called the Trial Lawyer Industry to pony up not a single cent.

It explains why this year the Democratic National Convention opened with a video that pronounces, "Government is the only thing we all belong to," thereby mocking Jefferson and every other American who has fought for the idea that because only "We the People" create legitimate government, it "belongs" to us.

Finally, it explains why any criticism of Obama's policies will be met with the spewing of "racist" by the nation's top Democrats as well as the likes of the arrogant hate mongers at MSNBC.

After all, because they have "owned" Great Society programs for the past fifty years, Democrats will, for example, go to any length to prevent the hard facts about the social and economic realities afflicting the inner city poor from coming out.

The truth is, however, that an ever bigger, more powerful, more costly, more indebted centralized government will do to the entire nation what it has done to millions in our inner cities.

As a consequence of that truth, voters ought to think about the world of meaning evident in the fact that the number of food stamp recipients rose to a record 45.7 million in June (15% of the U.S. population) and expand their thinking about Obama to include the notion of why he has failed.


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