Does Obama Deserve a Better People?

Bret Stephens in The President of Contempt views the American people from the perspective of President Obama. The word often used to describe candidate Obama was “cool.”

The Obama cool made for a reassuring contrast with his campaign's warm-and-fuzzy appeals to hope, change and being the ones we've been waiting for. But as the American writer Minna Antrim observed long ago, "between flattery and admiration there often flows a river of contempt." When it comes to Mr. Obama, boy does it ever.

We caught flashes of the contempt during the campaign. There were those small-town Midwesterners who, as he put it at a San Francisco fund-raiser, "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who are not like them." There were those racist Republicans who, as he put it at a Jacksonville fund-raiser, would campaign against him by asking, "Did I mention he's black?" There was the "you're likable enough, Hillary," line during a New Hampshire debate. But these were unscripted digressions and could be written off as such.

There are other signs of the contempt exhibited in the short time he has been President.

The gratuitous return of the Churchill bust to Britain. The slam of the Boston police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates. The high-profile rebuke of the members of the Supreme Court at his 2010 State of the Union speech. The diplomatic snubs, petty as well as serious, of Gordon Brown, Benjamin Netanyahu and Nicolas Sarkozy. The verbal assaults on Wall Street "fat cats" who "caused the problem" of "10% unemployment." The never-ending baiting of millionaires and billionaires and jet owners and everyone else who, as Black Entertainment Television's Robert Johnson memorably put it on Sunday, "tried rich and tried poor and like rich better."

Now we come to the last few days, in which Mr. Obama first admonished the Congressional Black Caucus to "stop complainin', stop grumblin', stop cryin'," and later told a Florida TV station that America was losing its competitive edge because it "had gotten a little soft." The first comment earned a rebuke from none other than Rep. Maxine Waters, while the second elicited instant comparisons to Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech. They tell us something about the president's political IQ. They tell us more about his world view.

Obama is not a big fan of Americans. And the more that feeling is reciprocated, the more he wishes that he could replace the American people in the next election.

When a good history of anti-Americanism is someday written, it will note that it's mainly a story of disenchantment—of the obdurate and sometimes vulgar reality of the country falling short of the lover's ideal. Listening to Mr. Obama, especially now as the country turns against him, one senses in him a similar disenchantment: America is lovable exactly in proportion to the love it gives him in return.

Hence his increasingly ill-concealed expressions of contempt. Hence the increasingly widespread counter-contempt.