The smartest man in the room

By DAVID ROSS

‘If you’re so smart, why aren’t you president?” George H.W. Bush used to employ this line when egghead types would try to convince him that they knew more than he did. I don’t know if he ever said it to his son. Or if his son ever said it to him.
Anyway, we have a president now who always thinks that he is the smartest man in the room—even when the room is very, very big.
I don’t see it. He’s smart, there’s no doubt about that. Which puts him above most politicians certainly. But I have yet to hear an original thought come out of his mouth that I haven’t heard, in one form of or another, from various other liberal icons over the years, including Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Al Gore and Ted Kennedy. His difference is that he is a very liberal politician who sounds moderate because of his reasonable, measured tone that never slips into the harridan mother-in-law from hell screeching of, say, Hillary Clinton.
But if he’s so smart, why can’t he unite the country? He has certainly said he would.
Be very skeptical of politicians who tell you that they are going to bring the country together and unify the great divides. During his victory speech in 1968 Richard Nixon alluded to see a young girl carrying a sign that read, “Bring us together,” which all things taken together, was on the order of Roman Polanski being told to date within his age group—with the same predictive power. “W” hilariously claimed, “I'm a uniter, not a divider.”
So when Obama told us last year that he was going to transcend partisanship and bring us all together behind common goals, I knew we were in trouble.
Take, for instance, this quote from one of his speeches last year: “What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics… that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize.”
Tell that to Fox News, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and health insurance companies who have dared oppose the president and who have been attacked by name in a most unprecedented way. Well, that’s the Chicago way. As Sean Connery told Kevin Costner in The Untouchables: “They put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue.” So, when they oppose your legislative program, you set out to destroy them.
When confronted on this, one of the president’s aides laughingly declared that Obama was “speaking truth to power.” Remind me again who is supposedly more powerful than the President of the United States? When he speaks truth to power does he look in the mirror?