 H/T Powerline
There is a new president and a new NEA. The president first. This is the first president that actually lets Bill Ayers ghostwrite his books writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to have found a really talented ghostwriter write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.
Candidate Obama was the first in my memory to establish an arts advisory committee and the first to propose an arts policy. President Obama followed that up by making a surprising, leftist out-of-left field choice to head the NEA, a signal I certainly took to mean he wasn’t interested in business-as-usual for the arts. Not long ago he even referenced the NEA when talking about the budget deficit issue. He said, in a speech at Georgetown University: “Let’s not kid ourselves and suggest that we can solve this problem by…cutting the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts.”
MMM MMM MMM Barack Caesar Obama! |