More and more people are becoming not just opposed to, but genuinely perplexed by, President Barack Obama. He spoke of so many good things during his campaign — the start of bipartisanship in Washington, the end to pork-barrel politics, the beginning of real peace in the Middle East, the end of racism, and poverty, and on, and on, and on.

So little of what he has promised has come to pass, even with overwhelming party majorities in the House and Senate. The president’s actions have betrayed his promises, his filibuster-proof majority in the Senate is gone, and his startling plunge in the polls is the result.

But here is the perplexing part: Even though far fewer people believe in him now, still he clings (at least at this writing) to the wreckage of his big government proposals — the unwieldy health care reform bill, the global warming fix, and yet another “jobs bill.”

This is what people really cannot figure out, this business of staying the course, when the course is so un-workable, and so incomprehensively expensive. When people stop me to ask what I make of it all, I tell them that the best commentary on Barack Obama was written about a hundred years ago.

In his little book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton wrote that many times virtues can become more dangerous than vices when those virtues are unhinged from moral truth. All that President Obama talked about during his campaign was virtuous; all of it was good. But he didn’t talk much about what was true.

He didn’t speak about the truth that some political leaders are evil — they really would rather kill us than reason with us. He didn’t seem to comprehend that people are selfish, and when they are left to themselves to design a stimulus bill that is supposed to better the nation, they will design it to better their own odds of being re-elected.

And if a dashing young leader such as our president continues to speak only what is good, rather than what is true, something worse might befall him — a crippling adulation that only hardens his course. For instance, he could win the Nobel Peace Prize, a prize often given for words rather than deeds. It has happened before.

Columnist Bret Stephens, writing in The Wall Street Journal, reminds us that in 1910 the president of Colum-bia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, tried to convince the country that it was unthinkable to suppose that the enlightened nations of Europe could ever go to war. Four years later, World War I broke out.

Undaunted, Butler campaigned for passage of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which proposed a simple solution — outlawing war. The treaty passed in 1928, and, in Stephens’ words, “was immediately ratified by dozens of countries, including Japan, which invaded Manchuria in 1931, and Italy, which invaded Abyssinia in 1935, and Germany, which invaded Poland in 1939.”

Butler received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Stephens writes that the prize has seldom gone to leaders who understood the moral truth of evil, and stood against it. It was awarded to none of the leaders of World War II, not to Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower or Winston Churchill.

I think that if Chesterton were here today, his counsel to the president would be clear and strong. He would say that the soaring rhetoric of hope and change for the good things will always crash against the stubborn re-ality of the true things, and a leader who doesn’t allow for that fact of life as he plans his course, will inevitably run aground.

Tom Minnery is the senior vice president of government and public policy for Focus on the Family Action and the editor of Citizen.

Print