“I think part of the reason Obama wasn’t careful is because he sort of lives in words.  That’s been his whole professional life — books, speeches.  Say something, and it magically exists as something said, and if it’s been said and publicized, it must be real.”

—Peggy Noonan

A child’s earliest speech is a magic charm.  It is directed toward forcing the external world, parents, and fate to do those things that have been conjured up in sounds and words.  Charm may have its origin in the smile response that occurs normally at three or four months of human development.  A child’s charming smile also  helps caretakers to bond in delight with the infant.  Some infants more than others have the gift of more glowing smiles.  In the Darwinian sense, the smile reduces potential propensity by a stranger to destroy or harm the innocent infant.

Barack Obama’s smile says volumes before he ever says a word.  Obama’s boyish charm helped him survive a difficult childhood.  It also helped create and now sustain his dazzling political power and influence.  Even as a chubby toddler, Barack Obama possessed a winning smile and a command of words.  David Maraniss, in his book about Obama, describes Barack’s comment about what people fear the most.

Obama said, “WORDS...words are the power to be feared most...whether directed personally or internationally, words can be weapons of destruction.”

As a child moves past his childhood world, the elemental power and potency of skillful words is moderated definitively by reality.  It is a serious question as to whether Barack Obama has ever fully had such a reality check.

From his soaring Cairo speech early in his presidency, Obama started by reaching out with powerful words of peace to Muslim people around the world.  He stressed freedom of religion, freedom from violent extremism, assertion of human rights and social justice via freedom of speech in his powerful words.  He did not wait to see if Muslim peoples could reach out in their ways and modes of peaceful handshakes.

Instead, after his word-weapons of peace in Cairo, Obama soon turned on Americans.  Obama seemed to assume that we Americans have a massive amount of work to do ferreting out, identifying, and atoning for our conscious and unconscious racist sins before we are ready to extend olive branches to one another or the world.  Obama chose to identity with Trayvon Martin as a victim and with his wingman Eric Holder helped foment the defund and devalue the police movement “for our own good”...of penitence and extension of financial reparations for some collective source of unconscious guilt over our past history of slavery.  Americans, he seemed to be saying, must undergo massive large group and individual psychoanalytic soul-searching and repentance.

Obama can be described as one of the prime movers of the woke, of DIE, of the barrage of charged words against “systemic racism,” “homophobia,” ‘xenophobia,” “Islamophobia,” and “white privilege.”  Even young black men get chided by Obama for their sexism against Kamala Harris, whom he would have them vote for and adore.

As one observes Obama’s slick, calculated, manipulative verbal skills in action, it is impressive how he entwines a winsome smile and a calculated charm with his powerful, deceptive, manipulative words.  His verbal charisma is significantly connected to the timing of his rising and falling baritone intonations rather than containing genuinely convincing logic.  Obama’s magic words seem studied and resemble other influential speakers like Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Billy Graham, et al.  Bill Clinton, the master of political maneuvering, luxuriated in his political magic while enjoying the sound of his own voice.

Barack Obama, however, seems spellbound by the omnipotent fantasy of the imagined pure power of his words — “as if” the programs he or others he supports would establish and their successful results were already of permanent record.  Obama seems to think he and his words have “fundamentally changed America,” and what he and more recently Biden-Harris call “ the dignity of our American democratic values” are, by definition, all Americans’ values.

The legacy media use a barrage of descriptive words like “far left,” “left-of-center,” “center,” “right-of-center,” “right,” “far right,” and “MAGA Republicans” — all to pidgin-hole Americans and keep political fear alive.  Fortunately, Donald Trump is a man of action first, and then words arrive.  His creativity takes the form of careful street-smart intuition-based listening, followed by effective actions.

Image: Ari Levinson via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped).