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Mr. Big Stuff! Who do you think you are?

Da hammer.

Who Does Obama Think He Is? Charles Krauthammer

A political messiah, who unlike Reagan and Kennedy needn’t bother to do anything.

Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign-policy credentials.

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final “tear down this wall” liquidation. When President Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush 41 who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap called “a Europe whole and free”?

Batman trilogy

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Americans are beginning to notice Obama’s elevated opinion of himself. There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work I a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history “generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment” when, among other wonders, “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, “Moses made the waters recede, but he had help.” Obama apparently works alone.

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After all, in the words of his own slogan, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” which, translating the royal “we,” means: “I am the one we’ve been waiting for.” Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his podium, until general ridicule it was pointed out that he was not yet president induced him to take it down.He lectures us that instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, “you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish” a language Obama does not speak. He further admonishes us on how “embarrassing” it is that Europeans are multilingual but “we go over to Europe, and all we can say is, merci beaucoup.’ ” Obama speaks no French.

He hammers it home. Read it all.

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