A 12-step cure for Obamaholics
By Wes Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
Craig Karpel is a recovering addict. He says so
himself. His addiction is to Barack Obama, and his
recovery inspires him to write a book. He offers a
12-step program, patterned after the program that
has rescued thousands of town drunks.
He’s a confirmed Obamaholic, but he doesn’t blame
the president. He absolves Mr. Obama of blame for
the addiction to the messiah from the south side of
Chicago that turned so many healthy Americans into
junkies. His book has created a bit of a buzz
already.
“My name is Craig K.,” he says in the opening line
of the “12-Step Guide for the Recovering Obama
Voters,” published by HarperCollins Broadside Books.
“I’m an Obamaholic. Welcome to what Alcoholics
Anonymous would call a ‘meeting in print.’ We’re
here to admit to each other and to ourselves that
the Obama presidency isn’t Obama’s fault - it’s
ours. We should be impeached for having elected
him.”
Though the collective stupor induced by Mr. Obama’s
speechifying four years ago is finally dissolving,
little by little, there’s still a lot of stupor out
there. Gallup only this week said Mitt Romney has
edged ahead of the president in a national poll of
voters, but what is remarkable to the sober observer
is that Mr. Obama is keeping it close, given the
unholy mess he has made of the economy.
The president offers words, pretty enough but not
much consolation to someone desperate for a job. He
correctly figured in 2008 that since few voters in
his left-wing base had ever been to church or heard
good preaching, his own skill with words would be
taken for seductive eloquence. He adopted the pitch
and cadence of the black pulpit, and though there
are hundreds of black (and white) pulpitmasters who
can preach rings around him, the swindle worked.
Addiction, particularly among those who imagine
themselves the elite, blossomed like the deadly
nightshade.
Only a 12-step program, writes Craig Karpel, can
free the naïve and clueless from an imprisoned mind.
Mr. Karpel is no rightwing zealot. His book is
neither rave nor rant. He was once, like the
president, a left-wing community organizer. He once
wrote speeches for Abby Hoffman. He mocks the soft,
gooey language of quackery, of the frauds who have
turned once-sturdy verbs into the soggy language of
academics, therapeutics and charlatans. “We urgently
need to embark on a 12-step program that will enable
us to heal.”
He
argues that the election of Barack Obama was the
triumph of biography over achievement, of empty
promise over performance, the result of aspiring to
elitism. “Outside of technical fields, proverbially
brain surgery and rocket science,” he says,
“academic credentials are an indication not of
achievement, but of promise.” Mr. Obama posed as
Harvard scholar, but since he has resolutely refused
to release any evidence of student prowess we don’t
know whether he was the academic genius he assures
us he was, or a fraud laughing at how easy it was to
fool so many people.
Only by taking 12 measured steps can voters cure
themselves of addiction to the idea that there’s a
solution for every problem, to the temptation to
find someone to blame for frustration and
disappointment, for the addiction to denial, and
finally to recognize the importance of attaining
what he calls voting sobriety.
“Even when we realized this president was
incompetent,” he writes, “we were in denial about
our own incompetence as voters.”
Mr. Carpel, eager though he is to repent and make
amends, may well be embarked on a fool’s errand. The
elites are unlikely to see their practiced error in
judgment; how can anyone with a Ph.D be so wrong
when he’s so sincere? But there may be hope for
enough of the rest of us.
Obamania, in this view, has the classic features of
addiction: the buzz, the rush, the flush, the high,
the euphoric contentment. “And now we’re
experiencing the inevitable comedown: the crash, the
craving when the addiction isn’t satisfying, the
misery of withdrawal.”
Only with recovery can addicts begin to cast sober
ballots. No more dream of being delivered into a
fairytale kingdom of Arthurian legend. “The
president’s job isn’t to pull a sword out of a
stone. It’s to manage the nation’s government and to
inspire Americans to be their best selves.”
Mr. Carpel is correct that we’ve become a culture
addicted to wishes and dreams, where celebrity
reigns and entertainment is all. The circus is fun,
and addiction feels good for a little while. But
there may be hope for change. Who wants to be the
town drunk forever?