The Second Coronation
By Bruce Walker (07/29/08)
Think back about a year. A Democrat running for president was actually going through little more than a coronation. Hillary, as a member of an official victim class, was extended groveling courtesy by the Leftist media. “Why do you think it is that you care more about children than any other candidate?” was about as close to a hardball question as she got. Hillary had never run anything, ever, but her executive experience for the most important executive position on earth was simply assumed – because Mrs. Bill Clinton assured fawning television readers that she was qualified. What work experience Hillary had was in the practice of law and in work with the Legal Services Corporation, where she helped poor people sue other poor people.
But something funny happened on the way to the coronation. The late Tim Russert, in perhaps his greatest journalistic triumphant, asked Hillary a serious question. She was, of course, utterly flumoxed. It was not so much that Hillary had clay feet as that she had clay everything, including the part of her above the neck. She did not “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” but rather floated like a hausfrau and stung like popgun. Take away her privileged position as a wronged First Lady, her immunity from serious questioning, and her certificate of victimhood and Hillary was dull, slow and weak. Republicans may have bemoaned the absence of a Reagan from their nomination, but Romney, Giuliani, Thompson and the rest were giants compared to the Hillary Who Would Be Queen.
One coronation derailed and another coronation in full swing. Barack has no qualifications to be anything, including the Junior Senator from Illinois. If eloquence alone were a reason to be in the Senate, then his Republican opponent in his senate race, Alan Keyes, was a vastly superior orator – as well as also being black. Practicing law and working for dubious nonprofit organizations is no qualification for much of anything. No one with weaker qualifications has been nominated for president in the lifetime of most Americans. And this is in the middle of a war for our survival.
But the coronation is likely going to unravel soon. Obama, essentially, is in a holding pattern. He is playing for the clock to run out. But McCain, who did fight his way to the top of the Republican race and who did endure torture in North Vietnam with dignity and who has survived through tenacity problems like the Keating Five, is not going to permit Obama to be crowned King.
The media, for its part, cannot afford yet another coronation. Their credibility and neutrality has never been more seriously questioned by Americans. What makes this particularly appalling, aside from it being the second coronation in less than a year, is that the same flacks who lionized McCain are now compelled – if the coronation is to go on without a hitch – to either ignore or to disparage McCain. The attention span of the Average American is not that short, particularly when there are so many other media vehicles around to remind us what we thought six months ago.
Obama is helping to unravel his own coronation by acting as if it is a coronation. He acts like the Crown Prince of America making plans to assume the throne. The more he does this, the more it will grate on the nerves of the seventy-five percent of us who cling to our religion, believe that there are only fifty states, and have other similar delusional thoughts.
Hillary I, Queen of America, is now back to an aging politician trying to pay off her campaign debts and to parlay her office into perks and power. The coronation, so skillfully orchestrated, did not stand up well in a democratic republic which has been actually electing presidents since 1789. Obama I, Crown Prince of America, raised like so many other royals isolated from the realities of life and told of his great wisdom and pure noble blood so long, is wondering how the crown will feel on his head. His eyes are focused on the jeweled scepter and the ornate headgear of a monarch. Politicians like that do not walk down the aisle long before stepping on a banana peel and stumbling into the pews.
We fought a revolution precisely to avoid having to endure the coronation of our governors. What was true in 1776 is true today: Americans, ultimately, will demand that our president earn the office, which is something McCain is willing to do and something that Obama would not know how to do even if he felt that he had to earn the office instead of being crowned our King.
Bruce Walker
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