Conrad Black: Incompetent Obama teeters on the edge
Posted: January 22, 2010, 11:00 AM by NP Editor
Conrad Black, U.S. Politics
The burning question after the Massachusetts Senate election is whether the administration responds by making a course correction to survive politically by jettisoning its policy core and cleaning up its methods, or 'doubles down,' as President Obama has implied, and escalates the ideological and guerrilla war for direction of public policy. This was a referendum on the Obama administration, including health care, not just on health care. Even less was it just the rejection of an astonishingly unappealing candidate, predestined to glory as a trivia question. John F. Kennedy took that seat with lashings of his father's money in an anti-Brahmin revolt against Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952, and was reelected by 864,000 votes in 1958. In the intervening years of Teddy Kennedy, the Democrats could have won with a candidate not confined to two legs and one head. This was less a wake-up call than a Te Deum for a dying and sweaty dream.
The president has three principal problems. He is well to the left of the public and of what he promised the voters in 2008, and it is an old, passe leftism, that is authoritarian, deviously presented and was discredited in this country decades ago; the sort of nostrums that caused Bill Clinton and others to become 'New Democrats.' He is increasingly perceived as having credibility problems and of being cold, cocksure, narcissistic and intoxicated by what he modestly called 'the gift' of his own articulation. And as president, he has been quite, and quite surprisingly, incompetent.
The second of these problems seems to prevent the president from appreciating the last. The only serious domestic initiative to show for the last year is an obscene stimulus bill that has had to be defended by the spurious supposition of 'jobs saved' since, contrary to promises, unemployment has risen by over five million after it was enacted. That target could have been attained without squandering 787 billion borrowed dollars.
Current economic projections call for massive debt increases of $1 trillion a year for a decade, with huge money supply increases that will make history not only by their size but, according to forecasts, by their non-inflationary nature, accompanied by tax increases that will, also miraculously, not retard recovery from the recession. No audible sane person believes this arithmetical fairy tale, including, one dares to hope, the president himself. It is a recipe for guaranteed stagflation and currency devaluation.
The administration bought wholly into the unproved claim that carbon emissions are causing global warming, but global warming has not, for the last ten years, been happening. The president padded around the Copenhagen global warming conference trying to generate enthusiasm for $100 billion annual transfers to the Mugabes and Chavezes, as well as the Chinese (the world's largest carbon emitters), as conscience-alleviating payments for the carbon emissions of the economically advanced countries. America's fellow culprits found less tangibly burdensome expiations. So will America.
Mr. Obama must have noticed that the science and the politics were wrong, and that the arithmetic was too. The whole concept, like his promotion of renewable energy, his cap-and-trade bill, his redesignation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and his pursuit of complete nuclear disarmament, is mad. It was a worthy encore to the president's previous cameo appearance in the Danish capital, where his and his wife's prodigies managed to bring Chicago in fourth in contention for the 2016 Olympics, (out of four competing cities).
In foreign policy, engagement with Iran and North Korea, appeasement of Russia, over Georgia and missile defense, attempting to bully Israel and to deny that there was an agreement between the Sharon and Bush (Jr.) regimes over settlements, and siding with Chavez and the Castros in the Honduran crisis against constitutional democracy and America's legitimate interests, have all failed, practically and morally, at least without knowledge of indiscernible and unlikely, contrary intelligence.
There have been no initiatives to reform NATO, the UN, the IMF, all in need of modernization, and there has been a regrettable delay in launching the long-promised and necessary measures to turn the Afghan operation into a success, while the U.S. and its allies have been milling about, losing ground and taking increasing casualties.
The fumbling over Guantanamo has been another fiasco, as attorney general Holder has acknowledged that it is an exemplary prison. But Obama has been entrapped by Teddy Kennedy's unfounded identification of Gitmo with Abu Ghraib. The president's reaction to the near disaster of the panties-terrorist in the skies over Detroit began with waffling from a Hawaiian luau, and gained altitude agonizingly slowly.
No one is audibly lamenting the retirement of George W. or throwing shoes at his successor's head because he speaks in sentences, but this president is bestriding the world as a flake, cow-towing to the Mikado, apologizing for President Truman's use of the atomic bomb, criticizing Roosevelt and Churchill's uninclusive approach to winning World War II, and Churchill and Eisenhower for disposing of the pajama-clad hysteric Mohammed Mossadegh as head of Iran.
And instead of sending the Congress completed bills and drumming up public support for them, as legislatively successful past presidents like FDR, LBJ, and Reagan did, he just rolls a Christmas tree into the Capitol Rotunda and invites Reid and Pelosi and their vacuum-cleaner committee chairmen to festoon it with their favorite pork baubles. Stealing the Alaska Senate election with the fraudulent prosecution of Senator Stevens, (since retracted), the Minnesota Senate election with the fraudulent recounts against Senator Coleman, and the unchallenging seduction of Senator Specter as he was circling the Republican primary drain in Pennsylvania, to get 60 Democratic senators, enabled the public purchase of party loyalty, the dismissal of sincere moderates like Senator Olympia Snow, (whose furrowed brow is a mortal challenge to Botox), for a bad health care bill that is not a reform. This was not what was thought to be meant by the slogan 'Yes we can!,' is not leadership, and the people, even in Massachusetts, don't like it.
It has been a year of fecklessness, amateurism, and posturing. Less that is useful has been accomplished by this president in his first year than by any president since Herbert Hoover, and he was ambushed by the Great Depression after seven months.
President Obama rose with astonishing speed from a more improbable sociological provenance than any of his 42 predecessors, an alumnus both of the genteel finishing school of Harvard Law and of the Chicago boiler room for hardball politicians. Neither his radical nor sleazy connections stuck to him. He deftly made an unspoken arrangement to liberate white liberal America from its guilt complex over historic treatment of African-Americans, and to banish the down-market Al Sharptons, Jesse Jacksons and Charlie Rangels as black spokesmen, in exchange for a one-way ticket to the White House. With this implicit, non-refundable offer in his back pocket, he almost effortlessly seemed to take the Democratic Party away from the Clintons and rode the trends, the economy, and the sclerosis of his opponent's campaign straight into the White House, with professional skill and elegance.
Withal, this president seems overwhelmingly confident, strangely detached, and, as Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's leading speech-writer, and now one of the leaders of the Obama Buyers' Remorse Movement, wrote, 'cold and faux eloquent.' He is fluent and sonorous, but rather vapid. And now, Maureen Dowd, foxy doyenne of New York Times columnists and pin-up girl of the D.C. Democratic establishment, niece of FDR's top fixer, former co-leader, with Michelle, Caroline Kennedy and Oprah Winfrey, of the Obama massed, synchronized cheerleaders, has apostacized and reviled the president as a nasty egotist. When A Democratic president has lost Ms. Dowd and the Kennedys' Senate seat, it is time to return to the drawing boards.
If the president has a Damascene rendezvous with the real wishes of the American people and turns the White House bowling alley into a cram-course charm school, he can be a popular and successful president yet. An excellent bi-partisan health care bill that really is a reform can still be had and would be hugely admired, especially after this debacle. If he wants to double down on what we have seen in the last year, he will leave the White House in a submersible in three years.
For all the claims that the Republicans are too influenced by religious zealots and country club knuckle-draggers, the administration may be in the hands of 'redistributive,' pacifistic Kool Aid drinkers. If it is, the Republicans will have to elevate their 2012 presidential candidate this year. The office may, 213 years after the retirement of George Washington, actually seek the (wo)man, but not from what is conspicuously on offer now, from either party.
National Post
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/01/22/...
Francesco Biasia
Fly London
Versace
This is a well written and cogent article. The telling line is, "When A Democratic president has lost Ms. Dowd and the Kennedys' Senate seat, it is time to return to the drawing boards." Indeed this is true, but can Obama see that this is necessary? I sincerely doubt it.
1The difficulty, as I see it, indeed interpreting Obama''s comments (and countenance) in light of the post Mass. debacle, is that he appeared to have had no idea anything was wrong. Could it possibly be that Obama really didn't understand that there were that many people who had turned against him? If so, this is the epitome of hubris. Further, if he recognizes how the people feel NOW, and intends to change nothing, that's just monstrous and stupid. The same experiment with the same failed results is a bad omen for the country and indeed his presidency.
The second issue is that Obama seemed to have lost his spirit in these post debacle comments. While they were supposedly a kind of explanation, they appeared more to be a defense. His encouragements to rally and fight back were indeed hollow. While one may argue that he can recover this lost spirit, the greater question is why he was so surprised to have lost it in the first place.
What has happened is all Obama's life he has been able to get by with platitudes and vague grand strategy. He seems incapable of going into the details as to how this might be done. He felt throw just throwing his grand plan to Pelosi and Reid, letting them deal with the details was all that was necessary. Those two proved to be ideological hacks, and really up to finding real solutions, other then throw money, and set up committees. it is one thing to have a grand theoretical plan, but another thing to put in place with enough detail to assure its success.
I truly believe now that the Lame Stream Media, and the inside the beltway politicians, and I include most or at least way too many Republicans here as well, actually believed what was being said on the likes of MSNBC, and the three major talking head channels, and the printed press represented by the NY Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe group. For cripes sake they do not even monitor Fox News Channel, so they are clueless when some tainted individual is forced to resign, or the fact that ACORN is a corrupt and probably;ly criminal organization. They actually believed that the Tea party group was a small group of very local yahoos, with the rest of the American public on their side. That in my opinion is why the Blue Dogs in the Senate marched in lock step with Reid. The actual reaction to their vote at home caught them by surprise. They never expected the intensity or numbers of constituents where ideologically in sync with the Tea party movement.
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