This Barack Obama did brilliantly. His rise and the dancing fountains of media adoration accompanying it are a monument to the fraudulence of so much elite “accomplishment.” The smart set were bamboozled because he seemed like one of their own: Columbia, Harvard Law, sort of “editing” a journal yet the only editor in its history never to publish a signed article, giving a lecture or two on constitutional law, handing out leaflets on the South Side of Chicago, voting present, listening to Jeremiah Wright’s conspiracy theories for twenty years, dining with terrorist educator William Ayers…. This is a life? These are achievements?

Well, yes. For the parochial one-worlders among the American elite, that’s a resumé and Sarah Palin’s isn’t. The American Eloi elected one of their own, and, if a year into his reign it was possible to detect signs of embarrassment among some of those gullible enough to fall for such a transparent crock, well, thanks for nuthin’. “I thought he’d do a better job,” whimpered telly genius Jon Stewart.²⁷

“Based on what, his extensive experience?” responded Instapundit Glenn Reynolds. “Rube.”²⁸ The election of Obama was a profoundly unserious act by an unserious nation, and, if you were Putin, the ChiComs, or the ayatollahs, you would have to be awfully virtuous not to take advantage of it.

Within months of his inauguration, I found a lot of Americans saying to me sotto voce that they had no idea the new president would feel so “weird.” But, in fact, he’s not weird. He’s WEIRD in the sense of those students in the behavioral studies: Western Educated Idle Rich Deadbeat. He’s not, even in Democrat terms, a political figure—as Bill Clinton and Joe Biden are. Instead, he’s a creature of the broader culture: there are millions of people like Barack Obama, the eternal students of an unbounded lethargic transnational campus for whom global compassion and the multicultural pose are merely the modish gloss on a cult of radical grandiose narcissism.

Even as he denies American exceptionalism, he gets turned on by his own.

Or as someone once said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

We were waiting for a man who would have been unthinkable as the leader of a serious nation until our civilization had reached such a level of bland bovine prosperity it truly believed that the platitudinous nursery chants it teaches our children as a substitute for education are now a blueprint for governance. Obama is not just a product of his time, but the product of his time.

THE STUDENT PRINCES

In 1940, a majority of the U.S. population had no more than a Grade Eight education.²⁹

By 2008, 40 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in college.³⁰

So we’re on track to a world in which the typical American is almost twice as old by the time he completes his education as he was in 1940, and has spent over twice as long in the classroom—and, in theory, gotten twice as much attention from his schoolma’am: the pupil/teacher ratio is half of what it was a century ago.³¹ Indeed, since 1970 overall public school employment has increased ten times faster than public school enrollment—with no discernible benefit to student performance.³² Here’s reporter Howard Blume in the Los Angeles Times: “Despite thousands of teacher layoffs and shrinking school budgets, Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest school system, posted gains on annual standardized tests. Schools statewide also posted overall gains in results released Monday.”³³

“Despite”?

Today’s “educators” take no chances with their young charges, to the point of keeping as many as they can in “school” until well into what now passes for adulthood. What dragons have been slain by this semester-creep?

In 1940, before this process got rolling, Americans had a literacy rate of over 97 percent.³⁴ Seventy years later, at a student demo to protest budget “cuts” at the University of Washington, the elderly demonstrators waved printed placards bearing the slogan:

And you’re welcome to them. Or, as their placards would no doubt put it, your welcome to ’em. Were they English majors?