Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature currently requires accessing the site using the built-in Safari browser.
He is no more a failed president today than he was Abraham Lincoln two years ago.
November 16, 2010
Pretty in Pink? Obamas Dark Night of the Soul
Walter Russell Mead
Life keeps getting worse for President Obama. It is not just that the conservative press, which never liked him, has a new note of confidence and even joy as it pursues a quarry whose blood reporters think they can smell. It is not just that he lost control of Congress in the midterms. No: the mainstream, liberal press and the American left are deserting him now. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and even Michael Moore have turned on the Messiah. Take off your pink tutu! Moore commanded the President on Bill Maher. Jeremiah Wright must feel vindicated down under the bus; now the rest of the left increasingly sees Obama as weak, opportunistic, and unprincipled.
We and the President were always likely to come to this point. The adulation lavished on a one-term senator of little life experience was not a good thing for anyone. For Obama, it fed an already enlarged self-esteem that had become grotesque by the inauguration. A cruelly accurate piece by Jonathan Last in The Weekly Standard highlights the ghastly series of intentional evocations of Lincoln that a delusionally imprudent White House team put forward in the flush of victory.
Important note to all future denizens of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first compare to Abraham Lincoln. Comparisons to Washington, Lincoln, or to either Roosevelt, if any, should come from other people, never from you or from anyone on your payroll and preferably should come late in a presidential term, not when the incumbent still has that shiny new president smell.
...
In January 2009, newly inaugurated President Obama believed that the road to success as president lay in pleasing the kind of intellectuals and the high priests of the liberal religion whose esteem he had long sought and pretty much always obtained. He seems to have thought that groups like the editorial board of the New York Times actually represented some serious force in American life. He also seems to have believed that with a few tweaks here and there what passes for political orthodoxy among the intelligentsia of the civil service unions provides a coherent and practical governing philosophy for the United States and that the aspirations of the most legalistically minded of the human rights community describe a feasible path toward world peace. He believed that if we were nicer to the leaders of other countries they would be nicer to us with one important exception. He believed that if the President of the United States shook his little finger, the Prime Minister of Israel had no choice but to tremble and obey.
Of course none of these things are true; President Obama has been putting his ideas into practice and now he is coming to terms with the results. Worse, from his point of view, he is feeling for the first time in his life one of the nastiest, most venomous and least attractive features in American life: the rage and loathing of a frustrated left. (Fairness alert: Im not saying the angry right is better; theres enough evil in human nature for everyone to have a full share.)
...
The question for all of us is what does the President do now? Does he waffle and wander, dazed and confused in fogs of self pity and self justification until a merciful calendar brings his failed term to a close? Does he double down, convinced that the American people will rally round him if he will only let his true inner liberal break free? Does he skillfully triangulate, dancing and dazzling as he wrong foots his enemies until 2012 brings a new opportunity for a renewed mandate?
Although I am sure there are mornings when hes tempted, I dont think hell pick box number one: I dont expect him to tuck his tail between his legs and slink away. The President is too driven and, yes, too smart and too talented to give up so quickly...
...
I hope he will neither double down nor triangulate. I hope he will find some time over the holiday season to reflect on his presidency to date and ask himself what if anything the world has been trying to teach him these last two years. Here are some of the questions he should ask himself:
Why has all the get tough with Israel advice from Middle East realists led him to one disaster after another? Why has split the difference strategy in Afghanistan worked so poorly? Why is it that every time he listens to environmentalists something politically bad happens? What are the three to five fixes he could make that would take the edge of the health care debate? Why is it that public service unions so consistently give advice that is bad for both his political health and the future of the country? Why does he have so much trouble persuading the white working class that he is on their side? Why dont conciliatory gestures to foreign leaders and political currents lead to concrete negotiating concessions? Why does his staff keep sending him to high profile, high stakes international negotiating events (Copenhagen I on the Olympics, Copenhagen II on climate, Seoul on Free Trade) without a winning script? Why does all the advice from the legalistic Goody Two-Shoes community turn out to be unworkable (as on Guantanamo) or destructively unpopular (as on the question of trying KSM in Manhattan)?
The answers to these questions, rigorously pursued, would lead him to some ideas and positions that could reinvigorate his presidency at home and abroad. It would also lead him to make some personnel changes that would see him better served. Failing to ask them will give him another two years much like the last.
The test of every leader, and of every person, comes when life brings you face-to-face with tough questions. Whatever their political beliefs, Americans should hope and pray as I do that President Obama in these dark hours will find the strength and the courage to learn, to grow and to lead.
What we will have to see is if he is half the Politician Bill Clinton is.
Clintion took on the loss of congress in 1994 by basically taking the Republican Agenda, toning it down, and in the end claiming part of it as his own. I wonder if Obama has the political acumen to pull off the same thing.
What we will have to see is if he is half the Politician Bill Clinton is.
Clintion took on the loss of congress in 1994 by basically taking the Republican Agenda, toning it down, and in the end claiming part of it as his own. I wonder if Obama has the political acumen to pull off the same thing.
That's a myth.
Clinton took his loss and stayed his "center left" course. He vigorously fought republicans who wanted to evicerate Medicare and in turn they shut down government and impeached him.
Obama should grow a spine, stop this bi-partisan bullshit, take a lesson from President George W. Bush and start swinging that "executive order" sword.
Bush lost BOTH houses..and that didn't stop him in the slightest.
What we will have to see is if he is half the Politician Bill Clinton is.
Clintion took on the loss of congress in 1994 by basically taking the Republican Agenda, toning it down, and in the end claiming part of it as his own. I wonder if Obama has the political acumen to pull off the same thing.
That's a myth.
Clinton took his loss and stayed his "center left" course. He vigorously fought republicans who wanted to evicerate Medicare and in turn they shut down government and impeached him.
Obama should grow a spine, stop this bi-partisan bullshit, take a lesson from President George W. Bush and start swinging that "executive order" sword.
Bush lost BOTH houses..and that didn't stop him in the slightest.
Yeah...
That was one event. He refomed welfare which was a republican idea, as well as others.
Presidency of Bill Clinton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Check the major legislation section. Yeesh, I try to give Clinton a compliment and just because you are a partisan hack you instantly assume its a criticism.
That's a myth.
Clinton took his loss and stayed his "center left" course. He vigorously fought republicans who wanted to evicerate Medicare and in turn they shut down government and impeached him.
Obama should grow a spine, stop this bi-partisan bullshit, take a lesson from President George W. Bush and start swinging that "executive order" sword.
Bush lost BOTH houses..and that didn't stop him in the slightest.
Yeah...
That was one event. He refomed welfare which was a republican idea, as well as others.
Presidency of Bill Clinton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Check the major legislation section. Yeesh, I try to give Clinton a compliment and just because you are a partisan hack you instantly assume its a criticism.
Welfare reform was something he was talking about for a very long time. And early on in his administration he put up NAFTA...Poppa Bush's "idea".
Liberals aren't that lockstep that they don't use ideas from the right, left, center..or mars, if they are good ideas.
Hack.
