Columnist: Obama having trouble because rest of America ‘not as gifted’

By: Mark Hemingway
Commentary Staff Writer
08/19/10 11:05 AM EDT

Here’s Bloomberg’s Margret Carlson this morning on the mosque controversy:

How can President Barack Obama be so right about the mosque and yet get it so wrong?
Here’s how: He is so supremely confident in his intellect that he forgets, on his way to the correct decision, to slow down and pick up not-so-gifted stragglers.
The controversy over locating a mosque close to Ground Zero in New York City created the perfect storm, putting Obama’s strengths and weaknesses into play.
He’s an intellectual comfortable with abstractions, a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, a constitutional scholar, a community organizer. When convinced he’s right — which is often — he turns his head at the podium to the right and left, gazing above his audience into the near distance, chin elevated, and makes his pronouncement about what is just and reasonable. We are expected to nod.
With the mosque, he didn’t bother with feelings when he saw that the U.S. Constitution and facts were on his side.

Everytime I think commentators can’t possibly hit new levels of arrogance and condescension on this mosque issue, I’m surprised yet again. Reciting Obama’s resume for the millionth time prove exactly nothing, and if you’re going to flatly declare that the “facts” and Constitution are firmly on one-side of the debate right away, why even bother writing the column? Further, if the idea is that Americans can’t handle abstractions, Carlson’s dead wrong about that. Here’s the Siena poll of New Yorkers on the mosque issue from yesterday:

Opposition remains strong against building the mosque, 63-27 percent, however, by a margin of 64-28 percent voters say that the developers of the Cordoba House have a Constitutional right to build it.

Clear majorities in New York both don’t want it built, and recognize it’s generally not the government’s place to tell people whether they can build a church on private property. Those positions are not inconsistent. Holding fast those beliefs does, however, put one at odds a liberal elite desperate to prove they’re so much more tolerant than the little people.