Mark Steyn: Obama a better president of the Future

Mark Steyn: Obama a better president of the future | future, belong, obama - Opinion - The Orange County Register

"One of the reasons why Barack Obama is regarded as the greatest orator of our age is that he's always banging on about some other age yet to come – e.g., the Future! A future of whose contours he is remarkably certain and boundlessly confident: The future will belong to nations that invest in education because the children are our future, but the future will not belong to nations that do not invest in green energy projects because solar-powered prompters are our future, and, most of all, the future will belong to people who look back at the Obama era and marvel that there was a courageous far-sighted man willing to take on the tough task of slowing the rise of the oceans because the future will belong to people on viable land masses. This futuristic shtick is a cheap'n'cheesy rhetorical device (I speak as the author of a book called "After America," whose title is less futuristic than you might think) but it seems to play well with the impressionable Obammysoxers of the press corps....

No doubt living in Obama's future will be peachy. But in the meantime we have to live in his present – the one he's nominally in charge of, the only one available. It is tempting to compare him to a great magician, artfully producing flags of many lands from his breast pocket while misdirecting the audience. In fact, Obama's misdirection isn't even that good: In essence, he's promising to perform spectacular tricks at some unspecified point in the future even as he stands on stage with an empty top hat, and the girl in spangled tights he sawed in half is bleeding all over the floor..."