Category Archives: Barack Obama

The Peter Principle in the White House

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As was the case more than once during the campaign, SNL’s doing a better job of dealing with the news (in its own inimitable way) than the people whose job it is to cover it; this sketch captures the deer-in-the-headlights cluelessness of the Treasury Secretary so well, it’s almost painful to watch.  For all his résumé, it’s clear that Timothy Geithner is out of his depth in doing the job he’s been given; he has risen to the level of his incompetence.Unfortunately, it isn’t just Secretary Geithner.  We were repeatedly told during the campaign that Barack Obama was going to improve America’s reputation around the world—but that doesn’t appear to include our allies, since we’re not even two months in to his administration and he’s already managed to infuriate the Brits.  Though delivered in the “stiff upper lip” tone that Americans associate with our closest ally, the outrage in the British media at the way President Obama responded to their prime minister’s visit is clear.  I’m sure they particularly appreciated this curt dismissal of their concerns from an official in the State Department: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”True enough, I suppose, except of course for the fact that unlike those other 190 countries, the UK has been a staunch and consistent ally of our government . . . Now, as the whole David Brooks episode clearly demonstrated, this White House is remarkably thin-skinned when it comes to criticism and complaint, and so when the firestorm erupted, they defended the President—if you want to call this a defense (emphasis mine):

Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been “overwhelmed” by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest.British officials, meanwhile, admit that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister.But Washington figures with access to Mr Obama’s inner circle explained the slight by saying that those high up in the administration have had little time to deal with international matters, let alone the diplomatic niceties of the special relationship.Allies of Mr Obama say his weary appearance in the Oval Office with Mr Brown illustrates the strain he is now under, and the president’s surprise at the sheer volume of business that crosses his desk. . . .The American source said: “Obama is overwhelmed. There is a zero-sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.”

In other words, as Power Line’s John Hinderaker summed it up, “Don’t blame us, we’re incompetent!”  Except that there’s one other factor referenced in the Telegraph article:

A well-connected Washington figure, who is close to members of Mr Obama’s inner circle, expressed concern that Mr Obama had failed so far to “even fake an interest in foreign policy”.

It seems clear that indifference—to foreign policy in general and Great Britain in particular—also played a part in this:  Barack Obama and his administration simply didn’t care enough about Gordon Brown’s visit or our alliance with his country to try to be competent about it, or even to try to hide their lackadaisical attitude about it.That said, the portrait painted here of an overwhelmed president who’s unable to keep up with the demands of his job in any sort of effective fashion is deeply worrying, and particularly when combined with his own expressed opinion that he’s “very good” at the job.  This is a member of the Self-Esteem Generation, all right.  It’s no wonder he inflated his résumé (follow the links from that post), took credit as a Senator for work he didn’t do, and gilded the lily in his autobiography to make his first job look much better, and his decision to leave it much more meaningful and meritorious, than it really was; he’s the product of an educational system that’s been more concerned in recent decades with making sure students feel good about themselves than about giving them the education they need to live lives that merit a healthy self-respect.  It’s all of a piece with him taking a job at a law firm, slacking on billable hours, and spending much of his time working on his autobiography (which he didn’t even manage to finish, at least while he was there).Up until last November, none of this has been much of a problem for Barack Obama; he’s had the brains, the grace, and the charm to keep wangling his way along and retelling his story to suit himself without anybody minding enough to cause him any problems.  After all, nothing was really riding on him.  The law firm wasn’t depending on him; the Illinois State Senate got its bills passed whether he did any work or just voted “present” (though the man who ran the shop was happy enough to boost him by putting his name on bills anyway); the US Senate kept running along whether the junior Senator from the state of Illinois was in his seat or not.  Being President of the United States, however, is different; and now, this is a problem.  This is the first actual job he’s had since his days as a community organizer (which were, by his own admission, unsuccessful) in which his job performance actually matters—and it’s one of the biggest jobs in the world, and his performance is all-important.  Now, it matters immensely whether he gets things done, and whether they’re the right things; and unfortunately (for us), he has never cultivated the habit of digging deep and digging in to get things done, he has never cultivated the endurance necessary to true accomplishment—in Nietzche’s words, he’s never practiced “a long obedience in the same direction”—and so he doesn’t have the habits and skills and life patterns necessary to do that job effectively.This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, since it was all there in his résumé, for anyone who cared to look; but too many people didn’t.  The McCain campaign tried to make the point, but they couldn’t get beyond talking about “experience,” as if it was simply a matter of time served, when it was really a matter of character.  This allowed the Obama campaign to counter it emotionally, by making “experience” mean “old, tired, and four more years of Bush”; it allowed them to counter it mathematically by adding Sen. Biden to the ticket, when in fact Sen. Biden’s career in the Senate basically consisted of nothing much more than Sen. Obama’s time in the Senate, spread out over many more years; and perhaps most fatally, it allowed them to portray Sarah Palin, when she was named as John McCain’s running mate, as equally “inexperienced.”  Thus what should have been a powerful comparison for the McCain campaign—that Gov. Palin had accomplished far more of substance at a similar age than Sen. Obama—ended up being used against them.  People looked at the numbers and missed the real point:

Two things would leap out from Sarah Palin’s résumé—a pattern of overachievement and a pattern of actually getting things done. Two things would also leap out from Barack Obama’s résumé—an undeniable wealth of talent and an equally undeniable dearth of accomplishments. . . .In truth, Sarah Palin is the kind of employee virtually every enterprise seeks—the kind who gets things done. And Barack Obama is the kind of employee a company hires only when it’s in the mood for taking a risk and willing to wager that the candidate’s past performance isn’t predictive of his future efforts.

So far, that risk isn’t looking too good.

Barack Obama is no John Kruk

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If you’re not a baseball fan, you’ve probably never heard the story, and even if you are, you might not remember it.  Today, John Kruk is a scruffy, rotund talking head, but back in the day, he was a scruffy, rotund hitter for the Padres and Phillies.  He was a good one, too; for all that he walked up to the plate looking like an unmade bed a lot of the time, he could pretty much roll out of bed and collect a hit, so it worked for him.  He was a lifetime .300 hitter with an on-base percentage just south of .4oo, and he had enough power to keep pitchers honest; he made the All-Star Game three times in a ten-year career and could fairly have gone once or twice more.Anyway, I no longer remember the precise situation, but on one occasion, Kruk was confronted by a female fan with a disparaging comment—I think to the effect that he looked too fat to be an athlete (as noted, he was far from svelte).  Slow of foot but quick of wit, Kruk immediately responded, “Lady, I’m not an athlete, I’m a ballplayer.”It was the absolute truth, and dead on point.  Bo Jackson was an athlete.  John Kruk was a ballplayer.  Bo looked a lot better in uniform, but Kruk did more to help his teams win.  Why?  Because being an athlete is about having talent; being a ballplayer is about having skill.  Talent is innate; skill is learned, developed, honed.  Talent limits what you can do with skill, but skill is ultimately what wins ballgames.I got to thinking about this when I read Michael Gerson’s Washington Post column “GOP at the Abyss.”  Ultimately, I agree with Jennifer Rubin’s assertion that Gerson gets the matter backwards; but I also think he gets there in the wrong way.  Gerson writes (emphasis mine),

[American conservatism] has been voted to the edge of political irrelevance, assaulted by a European-style budget and overshadowed by a new president of colossal skills and unexpected ambition.

The vote I’ll grant, but that’s happened before.  The budget I’ll grant, but the mere fact of the budget doesn’t spell curtains for conservatism; if the budget fails, the results are likely to be quite the contrary.  That President Obama’s leftist ambition was “unexpected” I most emphatically do not grant; many people saw that one coming, including Sarah Palin, Stanley Kurtz, and (for whatever it’s worth) me.Most significantly, though, I cannot agree with Gerson’s statement that Barack Obama is a president of “colossal skills.”  He’s a president of colossal talent, of rare political gifts, and few actual skills.  The recent commentary on his dependence on the teleprompter, while unimportant in itself, illustrates this.  He has great ability, but very few political and governance skills because he’s done little to hone them; he’s spent more of his career campaigning for jobs than actually doing them, and it shows—when he needs to accomplish something, he reverts to campaign mode because that’s the only way he knows how to get anything done.  That’s the only area in which he’s done any significant work to develop skills to utilize his talents.  When it comes to actually governing, he’s the Bo Jackson of politicians—he can hit the ball a country mile when he makes contact, but he has absolutely no clue what the pitcher’s going to throw him next.Of course, this is by no means a permanent situation; skills can always be developed, and the president now has a powerful incentive to develop them.  He’s bound to get better, and as he does, the task of opposition will grow more difficult for the GOP.  But that doesn’t mean the GOP ought to buy in to Gerson’s gloomy analysis, because the fact is, Barack Obama isn’t the colossus at the plate that Gerson takes him for.  He might be pretty good with the roundball in his hand, but in this game, he’s no ballplayer at all; he’s just an athlete.  He’ll hit the meatball and the hanging curve, but a good pitch at the right time will get him out.  The GOP just needs to have confidence in their stuff, focus on their control, and go after him.

Obama threw down the gauntlet; Rush picks it up

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Obviously, an old-fashioned duel is out of the question, so Limbaugh has challenged the president to its modern-day political equivalent:  a debate.

If these guys are so impressed with themselves, and if they are so sure of their correctness, why doesn’t President Obama come on my show? We will do a one-on-one debate of ideas and policies. Now, his people in this Politico story, it’s on the record. They’re claiming they wanted me all along. They wanted me to be the focus of attention. So let’s have the debate! I am offering President Obama to come on this program—without staffers, without a teleprompter, without note cards—to debate me on the issues. Let’s talk about free markets versus government control. Let’s talk about nationalizing health care and raising taxes on small business.Let’s talk about the New Deal versus Reaganomics. Let’s talk about closing Guantanamo Bay, and let’s talk about sending $900 million to Hamas. Let’s talk about illegal immigration and the lawlessness on the borders. Let’s talk about massive deficits and the destroying of opportunities of future generations. Let’s talk about ACORN, community agitators, and the unions that represent the government employees which pour millions of dollars into your campaign, President Obama. Let’s talk about your elimination of school choice for minority students in the District of Columbia. Let’s talk about your efforts to further reduce domestic drilling and refining of oil. Let’s talk about your stock market.

I’m quite sure Barack Obama is neither gutsy enough nor foolhardy enough to take that challenge, and in some ways, I wouldn’t be happy to see him reduce the dignity of the office enough to do so . . . but that would be a fun three hours.Update:  Of course, if he doesn’t, Jeffrey Lord is right:  his own team’s language is going to make him look pretty bad.  After all, David Plouffe called the GOP “paralyzed with fear of crossing their leader” because they haven’t taken on Limbaugh; given Limbaugh’s challenge to the president,

the Obama crowd has now set up a breathtakingly stupid proposition: either Obama debates Rush one-on-one or he is, in the words of his own staff, paralyzed with fear.

Not good.  None of Obama’s guys are chess players, I can tell—so far, there doesn’t seem to be one member of this administration who thinks beyond the next move.

The anti-bipartisan chicanery continues

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Barack Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, suggested yesterday that the administration would consider using the budget reconciliation to pass its healthcare agenda and energy agenda (particularly their proposed cap-and-trade bill) by inserting that legislation into the final version of the budget.  It’s not that those bills are actually a proper part of the budget process—rather, it’s that the budget reconciliation (the final version of the budget agreed upon between the House and Senate after each passes its separate version) can’t be filibustered.  Orszag’s suggested tactic would allow the White House to pass major legislation without debate—and without a single Republican vote.At least, it would in theory.  In actual fact, as About.com’s Kathy Gill points out,

If Democratic leadership pursues this ill-advised plan, moderates do have an out. The out is a constraint on reconciliation that is called the “Byrd rule.” Named after Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), the constraint means that if a Senator believes that a provision of the reconciliation bill is “extraneous” it may be subject to a point of order. After the Byrd Rule is invoked, at least 60 Senators must vote to waive the Byrd rule.

There are two things to be said about this.  The first is that the Byrd Rule is there to prevent exactly the sort of shenanigans that the Obama administration is contemplating, and that’s a very good thing; misusing the budget process in that way would just be wrong.

The budget process should be used to manage federal expenditures for programs that have been enacted by Congress. It’s bad enough that enabling legislation runs hundreds of pages and that there is no requirement of nexus (relevance). The budget is not the place to shoehorn policy changes that should be the subject of their own enabling legislation.

The second is that Gill’s point shouldn’t be news to Barack Obama.  Don Surber comments,

Perhaps if Barack Obama had spent a few days in the Senate instead of campaigning, he would know this.

You would think that a former member of the Senate would have more awareness of and respect for the proper procedures of the Senate than President Obama has so far shown.(Cross-posted to RedState)

The problem for Barack Obama

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This from Mark McKinnon:

Obama can never live up to his stratospheric expectations. He set the bar himself. But now he is realizing how hard it is to clear. He’s extraordinarily gifted. As gifted, perhaps, as anyone who has ever held the office. But in today’s world, gifted only gets you in the zoo. Then you have to tame the animals.

Isn’t the election over?

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And didn’t Barack Obama win?  And if so, shouldn’t somebody clue him in so he can stop campaigning and start governing?If you’re wondering that, too, after President Obama’s appearance in our neck of the woods to campaign for the so-called “stimulus” bill, take heart, because we’re not alone in our reaction.  Granted, he’s a very effective campaigner, and his campaign appearance might do the trick—this time.  Over the long haul, though, you can’t govern a country by giving stump speeches.  Making your case to the American people is an important part of the process, true (Ronald Reagan was a past master at this), but while that may help you get the rudder over to keep the nation on the course you want, it’s not going to do much to propel the ship.  The president needs to have more in his arsenal than going out and holding campaign rallies if he wants to have a successful term in office.The question is, why is President Obama still operating in campaign mode rather than in governing mode?  I’m tempted to say that it’s because campaigning privileges style over substance, and that plays to his strengths.  He knows how to campaign effectively, but when it comes down to getting things done, put me down as one of the increasing numbers who don’t believe he really knows what he wants to get done, let alone how.  How else do you explain the fact that he articulated an ambitious plan for the stimulus package, then not only didn’t have anyone in his administration draft legislation to enact his plan, but rather let the House Democrats write a vastly different bill that doesn’t meet any of the standards and qualifications he laid out—and is now laying all his political capital on the line to defend that very different bill?  This is bad governance; but it’s right in line with the way he ran his campaign.  Unfortunately, now it’s time and past time for him to stop campaigning and start governing.

This makes sense

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One of the things that’s been hard for me to understand about our president is how all his talk of bipartisanship—and his apparent firm belief in his ability to work in a bipartisan fashion—squared with his extremely partisan voting record.  In her column today, Carol Platt Liebau makes a point that I think explains this:

From his days on The Harvard Law Review forward, Barack Obama gained a reputation for “bipartisanship.” The problem? His much vaunted bridge-building was always a matter more of style than of substance. He would treat those who disagreed with him with great politeness and civility, listen their views, and then ignore them.In environments like a law school campus, or Chicago city politics, or Illinois state politics—where liberals overwhelmingly outnumber conservatives—bipartisan words, without action, are enough. Where conservatives are otherwise completely disregarded and routinely treated with contempt, respectful words can secure their support and even a certain degree of affection. Throughout his life, Barack Obama has blossomed primarily in liberal hothouses; perhaps it’s no surprise that he concluded that a little lip service would fulfill the demands of bipartisanship. . . .Perhaps that’s why the President believed that simply talking to Republicans would be enough to secure their support for the stimulus package, even though the final product reflected none of their input.

Of course, as she goes on to note, real bipartisanship requires more than that—and more than that the Obama-Pelosi administration wasn’t willing to give.  You can always find a few marginal members of the GOP to pick off, but that’s all they could manage; the result isn’t real bipartisanship, it’s what we might call “RINO bipartisanship” (kudos to Glenn Foden):

The gang that couldn’t govern straight

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Never put yourself in a position where your party wins only if your country fails.
—Thomas Friedman
It hasn’t been a good start for the new administration.  In the first couple weeks, we’ve seen them announce standards and then not keep them; we’ve seen two of Barack Obama’s nominees withdraw for legal and ethical reasons (following another nominee who had previously done so, and yet another who should have); we’ve seen the House Democrats running the show on his first big piece of legislation, which consequently has turned into a legislative albatross; we’ve seen him back down on some aspects of that legislation after some complaints from our allies; we’ve seen the response to the big ice storm botched; we’ve seen the appointment of a new ambassador to Iraq botched (which is not to say that Gen. Anthony Zinni would have been a better choice than Christopher Hill—I have no reason to think he would have been—but rather that offering a guy a job, thanking him for accepting it, telling him to get ready to go to work, and then actually hiring someone else behind his back without letting him know you’ve done it is no way to run a railroad); we’ve seen Iran rattling sabers, apparently emboldened by the President’s comments; and unfortunately, we’ve seen all this addressed by a McClellan-esque disaster of a press secretary who isn’t helping his administration at all.  Only two weeks in, and some people are already deeply worried, while others are asking, “Who is Barack Obama?” and others yet are beginning to think that the administration is “on the verge of combining the competency of Carter and the ethics of Nixon.”For my part, I don’t think the most pessimistic talk is warranted—yet.  Granted, no recent administration has gotten off to this bumpy a start, but false starts and missteps aren’t uncommon for new administrations; after all, you can’t really rehearse this.  (Compare this article on the beginning of the Bush 43 administration, which managed the transition much better than the Obama administration has so far—courtesy of Dick Cheney, who had already seen it all and done most of it—but had some similar legislative splats.)  These are bright people, and it’s perfectly reasonable to hope and expect that they’ll figure out what they need to figure out, and do a better job of managing the job as time goes on.  On the other hand, we’ve seen a few troubling trends from the campaign repeating themselves in the early days of the administration, most notably President Obama’s tendency to duck unpleasant conversations—not telling Tom Daschle to withdraw his nomination, not telling Gen. Zinni he wasn’t getting the job after all, not going to Kentucky, not answering questions on William Lynn, and so on.  As such, there’s reason for concern that some of these problems may persist, and that the comparisons to President Carter may ultimately prove out.  That would be a bad thing for the country; and so, as a believer in Thomas Friedman’s dictum, I will be (along with many others I know) praying it doesn’t happen.