What kind of sick society names Obama, Clinton its most admired?

By David McElroy · January 2, 2012

When I was a child, I admired Richard Nixon and supported him during the dark days of Watergate. Why not? He was my president. He was the great man who had been selected to “run the country.” My civic indoctrination taught me this. I eventually grew up and learned better, but it seems that many people never outgrown this childish desire to put politicians onto pedestals.

USA Today released its annual poll last week of who Americans admire most. I shouldn’t be disgusted — because I know human nature — but I am disgusted. Topping the list of men is Barack Obama. Topping the list of women is Hillary Clinton.

I’m not making a partisan statement in saying this. My issue isn’t that they’re both Democrats. I’d have felt the same way when it was George W. Bush during his administration. My issue with it its that we deify politicians in this culture — instead of honoring the people who actually achieve things worth doing.

Take a look at the list and see all the politicians. I’ve colored all the political figures in red. (And, yes, I count Michelle Obama and Laura Bush as politicians. You’d have never heard of them if they weren’t associated with politics.) On the women’s side, 80 percent are politicians and the two remaining choices are entertainers. Why do we admire these people?

Interestingly, three of the men are religious figures, but I suspect that has more to do with who people assume they’re supposed to admire than anything else. Billy Graham made it onto the list because he’s who most Protestants thought of first. The pope is the one most Catholics thought of first. Thomas Monson is the one most Mormons thought of first.

The remaining three names are businessmen — Warren Buffet, Donald Trump and Bill Gates. I’m not really much of a fan of Buffet or Gates, but they’re defensible choices. Any list that includes Trump, though, is a list for idiots.

So who do I admire? Sadly, I have trouble naming anyone who I admire who you would have ever heard of. There are a few — not many — but they’re people who I’ve experienced making a difference in the world or who I’ve gotten to know closely enough to admire their hearts and minds. (At least one of those people might be reading this. You know who you are.)

The people we really admire aren’t celebrities, are they? Isn’t it more a matter of a few hundred people in every little place seeing the difference that some man or woman makes? It could be a teacher, a pastor, a co-worker, a friend or scores of different roles. But if we all mention John Smith or Mary Jones — the people we know that we admire — there aren’t enough people who even know those people for them to make the list.

So is there something wrong with Americans to produce such a shallow list? Or are we asking the wrong questions in a media-saturated world? I suspect it’s a little of both. I think most of us have real people in real life who we admire deeply, but those real-life heroes can never make a poll such as this.

But there are some people who truly do admire the Clintons and Bush and Newt Gingrich. (Heaven help us.) I wonder if these are the people who are most engrossed in the media culture. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect those groups would correlate tightly.

I don’t admire the people on these lists. I actively distrust most of them. I’m indifferent about most of the rest. Even someone such as Graham — whose faith is similar to my own — is a mere footnote of the past in my mind.

I admire a few people, but they aren’t people you know. The public obsession with making heroes out of politicians and entertainers — and the media’s complicity in it — is a dangerous thing. As long as we believe these people are the ones to admire, we’re going to keep giving our honor to people who don’t deserve it — rather than the truly admirable people who labor without recognition all around us.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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