Conservative writer fails to see the irony

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last updated 8 January 2015

Kevin D. Williamson at National Review was predictably unimpressed with President Obama's D-Day commemoration, but he may have inadvertently drawn a rather favorable comparison between the socialist-in-chief and one of America's favorite presidents.

It is impossible to watch Barack Obama speaking at Normandy without comparing him to the giants of that period, namely Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. Considered in absolute terms, President Obama has been a mild catastrophe; in relative terms, alongside Roosevelt and Eisenhower, he looks like a toddler playing dress-up.

Of course it is difficult to stand alongside those two, for any modern public figure. But President Obama’s particular vices — his vanity, his self-dramatizing, his love of practically Roman levels of pomp — are cast into sharp relief when he is considered alongside President Eisenhower, who was caricatured as a golf-addicted caretaker during his presidency but whose reputation, considerable as it was during his life, has if anything risen in recent years. National Review, which was founded in part to oppose conciliatory Eisenhower-style Republicanism, has reconsidered him. [National Review]