Obama To Honor Commitment to Visiting Chicago Periodically By Blowing Off Commitment to Speak at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day

How did we lose to this guy?

With the long Memorial Day weekend on the horizon, President Obama is finally addressing one of the great broken promises of his administration: his early pledge to return home to Chicago every six weeks or so.

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On Monday, Obama will make remarks at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery, south of Chicago - missing the usual tradition of presidents speaking at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day.

There's a certain commendable honesty to Obama. Past Democratic presidents -- Clinton, say -- were plainly card-carrying members of the would-be ruling class of the Harvard-to-DC corridor. But they feared the people, at least, and practiced gestural politics to symbolically, but deceptively, suggest they "shared the values" of non-ruling-class Americans.

Obama's kind of giving up on that ruse. His attempts to establish populist credentials were half-hearted from the outset, and now he can't even be bothered to phone it in.

Of course this might not be a sort of honesty at all but simple detachment from reality; as liberals are fond of saying of Sarah Palin, it could be that Obama is so oblivious that he doesn't know what he doesn't know.

posted by Ace at 12:31 PM

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