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TOPIC: Obama and Wilson (American Thinker 3/30/10)

Jen the Michigander

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Posts: 1788

Date: Mar 31, 2010

Obama and Wilson (American Thinker 3/30/10)	Permalink

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/03/obama_and_wilson.html Barack Obama has been compared to Lincoln, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, and JFK, among others. But few have noted his interesting parallels with Woodrow Wilson. Historical comparisons have their limits. But Wilson-Obama similarities abound, starting with both men's use of the label "progressive." Both more than flirt with racists. Wilson cherishes the South's Lost Cause and segregates federal offices. He praises D. W. Griffith's controversial Birth of a Nation as being "like writing history with lightning." Obama allies himself with black liberation theology advocate Jeremiah Wright. Only political necessity induces him to break with Wright. Nothing keeps him from embracing the execrable Al Sharpton. It is here that the similarities of style come to the fore. Both Wilson and Obama receive tumultuous receptions in Europe: Obama in his tumultuous pre-coronation visit to Berlin and Wilson in his unprecedented 1919 European tour. Tumultuous crowds greeted Wilson throughout Europe. The adulation, Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote, "might have turned the head of a man far less responsive than the President was to public applause, and have given him an exalted opinion of his own power of accomplishment and [own] responsibility to mankind." Yet, there remained in Wilson -- and resides in Obama -- a strange academic coldness that stiff-arms natural foreign allies. "I could not bear him," a frustrated George V complained. "An entirely cold academic professor-an odious man." In 1916 Woodrow Wilson campaigned as the "peace candidate. Supporters praised him for keeping "us out of war." By April 1917, however, Wilson demanded that Congress declare war on Berlin. In 2008 Obama derided George Bush's Iraqi surge and vowed a quick exit from that nation. He not only remains in Iraq, reluctantly, he has implanted his own surge in Afghanistan. And while Obama piously vowed to bring an unprecedented "transparency," to Washington, Wilson pledged himself to "open covenants, openly arrived at." Both promises soon entered the dustbin of history. Rather than compromise, Wilson -- and Obama, his fellow Noble Peace Prize laureate -- attempted rather to orate their dreams into reality. To force a recalcitrant Congress into acquiesce by the force of their oratory -- and their diminishing personal charm. All the while, both chase their dreams while ignoring rapidly deteriorating economies. Wilson deciding to circumvent opposing senators, embarked on a grand whistle-stop tour designed to directly sway tens of thousands of their constituents, commencing a grueling twenty-two-day, 9,981-mile speaking tour designed to save his League. Obama hit to road to college campuses and hastily convened town meetings -- and inexplicably even fantasized that he could charm Fox News viewers. The result for Woodrow Wilson was broken health, broken dreams, no League of Nations-and twelve years of Republican ascendancy. Enjoying partisan majorities that Wilson did not, Barack Obama finally shoved his League of Notions through Congress but the result may be a broken health care system, a bankrupt federal government, and a legacy quickly overturned by an overwhelmingly outraged and energized opposition. For in the end, Barack Obama, despite a Sunday afternoon's bought and bullied triumph, may end up not only making the world safe for Democracy-but also, once again, for Republicans. __________________ Nobody puts THIS baby in the corner!

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