Democratic leaders should be asking themselves just how they have gotten to the point that their strategy is to amend a law that doesn’t exist yet by passing a bill without voting on it.
I think in a few years, once this is all behind us, people will look back in disbelief at the utter inability of a party that controls the White House and large majorities in the Congress to convince the American people or a single member of the opposition party that its primary policy objective is one worth supporting. The attempted legislative chicanery is merely a symptom.
Some time ago, Apollo offered a theory about what was wrong with Obama:
We know this guy. He’s that college professor who never personally said anything outlandish, but when students spoke up in class and said outlandish things, he’d respond with something like “That may be right,” or “there’s some truth in that” instead of the more appropriate “that’s wrong and off topic.” Therefore more people felt free to raise their hands and say outlandish things, and those of us not interested in such nonsense stopped participating in class because it wasn’t worth it. Obama is the “that’s a valid point” professor, so he respects equally my anti-abortion point of view, and his pastor’s government-created-AIDS point of view. They’re all valid.
It seems that I wasn’t alone in finding Obama increasingly un-charming as the event unfolded yesterday. Even Dana Milbank notes that Obama ultimately came across as a bit of a condescending, well, jerk. Here’s Michael Gerson: “President Obama, as usual, was fluent, professorial and occasionally prickly. Some are impressed by the president’s informed, academic manner. Others (myself included) find an annoying condescension in Obama’s never-ending seminar.”
Obama’s habit of deciding what is a serious point and what are mere “talking points,” started out seeming like an attempt at fairness but ultimately revealed itself to be one of the more grating aspects of his personality and his philosophy (It’s worth noting that many points becometalking points because they are such good points!). After awhile, it seemed Obama deemed many talking points to be illegitimate simply because they were inconvenient to his argument.
This is not news to certain people who have greater immunity to his charms. Obama has a very thin skin when it comes to disagreement. He has a Fox News obsession. At campaign-style events, Obama has insisted that he doesn’t want to “hear any talk” from the people who “created this mess” or some such. Remember his call for a “new declaration of independence not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry.” Translation: Ideological objections to what I want to do are akin to bigotry and stupidity.
I think one of the great explanations for the mess the Obama administration is in — the whole cowbell dynamic — is that he, his advisers, and many of his fans in the press cannot fully grasp or appreciate the fact that he is not as charming to everyone else as he is to them (or himself). Hence, they think that the more he talks, the more persuasive he will be. Every president faces a similar problem which is why, until Obama, every White House tried to economize the deployment of the president’s political capital. The Obama White House strategy is almost the rhetorical version of its Keynesianism, the more you spend, the bigger the payoff.
The hidden cost of this strategy is that the more he talks the more pronounced or noticeable this tendency becomes for the average American. Eventually, it could come to define him. Presidents — all presidents — get caricatured eventually because certain traits become more identifiable over time. That’s one reason why parodies of presidents onSaturday Night Liveget more convincing and funnier at the end of their terms — everyone can recognize the traits and habits by then. The more instances where Obama grabs all of the attention while acting like an arrogant college professor — particularly as memories of Bush fade — the more opportunities the White House creates where people can say, “Hey, I finally figured out what bugs me about this guy.” Not long after that, it becomes a journalistic convention, a staple of late-night jokes and basis of SNL parodies.
Do you know how to tell that Barry is not actually serious about passing his health care bill? Because he uses it as a tool to fight for abortion.
Unbelievable. All the Democrats had to do is get the framwork of national control of health care in place – and there are votes in both houses to do it – and then every future Congressional race could be held on their terms. Do we cover X procedure? But instead they simply can’t help themselves. They must have it all at once.
Why any insurance policy would cover abortion is beyond me. Even if you buy into the pro-abortion agenda 100% – you think a fetus is a clump of cells with no more value than a wart, and that a woman should be able to get rid of that clump of cells at any time up to the moment of delivery – we pretty much know who has abortions. Insurance is premised on spreading the risk, making those who don’t have a misfortune pay for the problems of those who do. But an unintended pregnancy is a condition whose causes are known and, with precious few exceptions, preventable at no financial cost.
Even if some insurance policies should cover abortion, though, the notion of having a government-run insurance company pay for abortions should be anathema to most Americans. Majority-rule must pay some heed to the minority. Just as we don’t draft the Amish, we shouldn’t use the government to confiscate money from the 50% or so of Americans who call themselves “pro-life” to pay for the abortions of a small minority.
But the administration is simply too full of itself and its “historic moment” to stop anywhere short of imposing 100% of the liberal agenda on the country, regardless of what the country wants. Obama believes that he must have it all, and he must have it now. No need to bother with formalities or persuasion. I think there’s a word for that; it may need to be redefined come November.
I thought the House Republicans had a rather artful response to the president’s phony baloney health care “summit.” As proof of this artfulness, Roberts Gibbs responded today with, more or less, nothing.
Though in that nothing, there’s a sentence that shows exactly why this president can’t bring himself to work with Republicans or relatively centrist Democrats: “The President is adamant that we seize this historic moment to pass meaningful health insurance reform legislation.”
Can anyone tell me why on earth this moment is historic? I guess it would be historic if the Democrat bill passed, but since it didn’t I can’t think of anything that makes this moment particularly historic.
But, of course, this administration started off behaving as though great achievements were inevitable. The president’s underpants gnome mindset is on display here. He was elected, therefore he is a great and historic president. I think only three presidents, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, achieved genuinely historic feats through their mere election. Every other historic president has had to work at it. And that’s what Obama won’t do.
And how do we know he won’t do it? Back to Gibbs: “The President looks forward to reviewing Republican proposals that meet the goals he laid out at the beginning of this process . . .” Translation: “I look forward to using you to achieve my ends.” I understand this is how a lot of very successful businessmen approach negotiations, but they would never say it so bluntly. Beginning a negotiation in such a manner strikes me as an admission that you’re not really going to be negotiating.
If the president would back down from his grandiose plans and simply look for measures that improve the current system, rather than completely overhaul it, he could find a lot of Republican votes on a lot of issues, and the end result would have a chance of being good for the country. But he won’t consider half-measures, because this is an “historic moment,” because he is an historic president, which means that he will only attempt historically large changes.
Back in high school speech tournaments, I would sometimes write one or two words on my hand. They weren’t extended thoughts, just reminders to focus on particular thoughts that I might otherwise stray from. I’d like to think I was more discrete in reading from my hand than was Sarahpalin, but I didn’t think it was weak for me to write those notes, nor do I think it was weak of Sarahpalin to write hers. To illustrate, let’s jump in the wayback machine.
It’s July 22, last year. The president is still more popular than not, and he’s beginning the push for a health care reform package that will fulfill nearly 80 years of Democrat attempts to make government the primary player in the American health care system. The president goes off teleprompter to give a live, prime-time press conference meant to boost the effort.
At the very end of a fairly competent performance by the president, a journalist asks a question about a complete non-sequitur. There’d been an unusual arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts, involving one of the president’s acquaintances. Not many facts of the case are known publicly, but it’s obvious that the issue has some racial elements.
Scenario 1: The president is so confident in his speaking abilities that he’s gone into the q&a part of the press conference without notes. He’s tired, and he’s got some feelings about the few facts he knows about the affair, and these feelings get the better of him. He spouts some ignorant crap, shows himself to be a guy who’ll form opinions before finding out the facts, and for a crucial week and a half before Congress’s August recess diverts the nation’s attention onto the minutiae of Skip Gates’s travel habits, the specific wording of a 911 call for a non-crime, and the racial sensitivity training of a low-level police officer in a Massachusetts college town. Due in no small part to president’s distracting answer, Congress does nothing before its August recess, during which, at tea parties and town halls across America, all hell breaks lose, spelling the beginning of the end of the president’s health care proposal.
Scenario 2: The president realizes that this press conference needs to be about three things: healthcare, healthcare, and healthcare. So he writes “1. Healthcare. 2. Healthcare. 3. Healthcare” on his hand, or on an index card. When asked a question about a nationally insignificant arrest in Massachusetts, the president wants to spout off some of his uninformed opinions on the matter, but he catches a glimpse of his notes and remembers what the press conference is supposed to be about. “I really don’t know much about that,” he says in response to the question. “Look at this moron, he can’t even remember his own agenda at his own press conference, and he doesn’t know about the events of the day,” some conservative bloggers furiously type.
I’m not saying that Obama would have had his health care program by now if only he’d written more on his hand. I’m merely pointing out that speakers need to be aware of their own weaknesses – such as being drawn off topic by questions – and compensate for them. Yes it’s inglorious to look at crib notes on your hand, but it’s disastrous to forget what a speech is about and make off-topic comments that undermine your aims. If Sarahpalin’s to be ridiculed, it’s the ridicule that the prudent always get for their caution.
Being a sane human being, I didn’t watch the State of the Union. So I was confused when I read headlines about the president “intimidating” the Supreme Court. And I was floored when I watched the video of the president denouncing the justices, sitting directly before him, and the entire Democrat party rising to its feet in support of that denunciation.
“Classless” was the first word that came to my mind. I’ve observed elsewhere that Barry’s got no class, so while this is above and beyond what I would have expected from him, it seems in line with his character.
To truly appreciate the stakes in Citizens United, one must remember the government’s legal position in the case. Implicit in its briefs but laid bare at oral argument, the government maintained that the Constitution allows the government to ban distribution of books over Amazon’s Kindle; to prohibit a union from hiring a writer to author a book titled, “Why Working Americans Should Support the Obama Agenda”; and to prohibit Simon & Schuster from publishing, or Barnes & Noble from selling, a book containing even one line of advocacy for or against a candidate for public office.
So the president’s own lawyers – this oral argument was made by lawyers appointed by Obama – stand before the Supreme Court and argue that a law gives the government the right to ban books because of their political content. The Supreme Court, as one would expect, held that such a law was unconstitutional. And then the president gets on national TV and calls the Supreme Court the enemy of democracy, while the president’s party stands up, surrounding the justices, and applauds this denunciation.
The Democrats’ slow, painful realization that the 2008 election had nothing — nothing! — to do with their ideas and policies has been particularly amusing to watch. As Apollo has noted, President Obama has shown an utter inability to turn people’s affection for him into anything substantive.
John Derbyshire put forward a plausible theory for this phenomenon a few months ago on RadioDerb:
It seems to me that there are certain people to whom, for unfathomable reasons, things happen. We all know, for example, that you can be accident-prone. Barack Obama possesses one of these ineffable attributes. Instead of being accident-prone, he’s award-prone. I mean, he has some indefinable quality that makes people want to reward him. Look at his career: Fulbright Scholarship, President of the Harvard Law Review, Senate seat, convention keynote address, nomination, Presidency — and at each step, if you asked someone why Obama was more deserving than A, B, or C, you’d get a puzzled silence. Obama’s just a guy people want to give things to.Why this is so, is just one of those mysteries about human nature. There are seriously stupid people who get rich; there are beautiful women who can’t get dates; there are people who smoke, drink, and cook every meal in lard, yet who live to be 120; there are gifted writers who are witty, talented, and handsome, full of brilliant insights, who have to eke out a paltry living on obscure conservative websites … It’s all part of the general unfairness built into the world.
Having suffered through the Tea Parties, town halls, two gubernatorial losses, and Scott Brown’s victory,* Congress seems to be on the verge getting this. The big man, however? Not so much:
[Representative Marion Berry, D-LA] recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.
“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.” [snip]
Obama’s the celebrity everyone likes, but won’t buy anything from. Let’s hope he keeps selling.
* Brown’s victory is a pure Rorschach Test: nobody knows anything for sure, but everyone has a theory, which happens to exactly coincide with their own prejudices. (For what it’s worth, I think it was anger at the sleaziness Massachusetts democratic machine, but — again — I’m predisposed toward that). I will say this, though: Brown wasn’t shy about his opposition to Obamacare.
Here’s video evidence that Obama is dead. Coakley could have gotten a more vigorous endorsement from Teddy himself.
George Bush was in his final year or two, dealing with an opposition Congress, before he looked anywhere near this tired. For all the press accolades that Obama has gotten for being in shape and playing lots of basketball, he looks like hell these days. Considering that he’s the only thing separating Joe Biden from real power, I hope he starts taking better care of himself.
Is there a more ironic thing Barry could say than, “The time for talk is over“? Though I suspect that whoever wrote that speech wasn’t laughing when he wrote it.
And when did it become appropriate for the president to speak to an assemblage of foreign leaders while “visibly angry”? Is he going to spank them? The foreigners don’t seem impressed.
The man who said Congress had to pass Porkulus without debate or else our economy would decline and never recover, who says the government has to take over the healthcare system or else we’ll go bankrupt, who says that we need to pass cap and trade or else the ice caps will melt and everyone’s house will flood, is now telling Senate Republicans to “stop trying to frighten the American people.”
Has Barry ever once tried to sell a policy through any method other than, “We’ve got to pass this now or else THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD will happen!!!!”? In the Age of Obama, “Hope” can only be realized by scaring people.
However, 53% of voters believe the president places higher importance on ending the war. Just 28% say Obama thinks winning the war is more important. Another 19% are not sure.
Certainly the speech the president gave last week was not meant to communicate his desire to win. I think most of that 28% is composed of people giving the president a presumption of good faith – that surely he would not escalate a war, sending tens of thousands more Americans into combat, simply to provide political cover for when he cuts and runs. Given the content of his speech, I’m not sure it’s fair to make that presumption. He had an opportunity to lay out the ingenious plan for victory that he’s spent months crafting, but instead he mostly just groused about how much it sucks that we’re having to spend money fighting one of those war thingies.
War is, everywhere and always, a competition of wills. The American people don’t think our commander-in-chief has the will to win this war. Let’s hope our enemies in Afghanistan come to a different conclusion.
When will people stop asking why Obama has suddenly lost his great ability to communicate and finally realize that he never had the ability to begin with? It is still the case that the only thing he has ever convinced anyone of is to vote for him; considering his opponents were Hillary Clinton and John McCain, opinions vary about how large this rhetorical achievement was.
It’s amazing how dogmatically journalists stick to their memes. George W. Bush will always be a partisan idiot who couldn’t string together two sentences. Barack Obama will always be the bipartisan super genius who always knows exactly what to say. Please ignore the fact that by the summer of 2001, with a slim majority in the House and opposition control of the Senate, Bush had passed his two biggest campaign issues (tax cuts – actually a larger tax cut than he campaigned on! – and No Child Left Behind), but here we are almost at the end of 2009, with Obama’s party having a large majority in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and he’s managed to pass . . . um . . . Porkulus and an expansion of hate crimes laws. How high on the list of campaign pledges were those? Wow, I guess Obama must have suddenly lost his Mesmer-like ability to enthrall an audience!
The fact remains that when George Bush spoke, Americans went off to war; when Barack Obama speaks, West Point cadets nod off and the rest of can’t figure out what the hell he’s talking about. Obama has never been a skilled speaker, and he isn’t one today. He has a pretty voice and smiles at opportune times. Everything else is the audience’s projection and wishful thinking.
I hope Krauthammer is wrong, but I can’t think of a single reason why that would be the case:
Despite my personal misgivings about the possibility of lasting success against Taliban insurgencies in both Afghanistan and the borderlands of Pakistan, I have deep confidence that Petraeus and McChrystal would not recommend a strategy that will be costly in lives, without their having a firm belief in the possibility of success.
I would therefore defer to their judgment and support their recommended policy. But the fate of this war depends not just on them. It depends on the president. We cannot prevail without a commander-in-chief committed to success. And this commander-in-chief defended his exit date (versus the straw-man alternative of “open-ended” nation-building) thusly: “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”
Remarkable. Go and fight, he tells his cadets — some of whom may not return alive — but I may have to cut your mission short because my real priorities are domestic.
Has there ever been a call to arms more dispiriting, a trumpet more uncertain?
I confess I feel conflicted about Afghanistan myself: given its history, I’m ambivalent about whether establishing a reasonably competent government with a manageable level of corruption is either possible or worth it. Unfortunately, it’s too late for second guessing on this and — as Krauthammer says elsewhere in the article — if Petraeus and McChrystal believe it’s doable, I’ll for it.
I do have one retrospective question: given the extraordinarily complicated nature of the GWOT — from defining victory to detainee status — would we have been better served in 2001 by acknowledging the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan and then declaring war on them (the declaration could have defined al Qaeda as an irregular co-combatant, or something) ?
It seems to me that this was have solved the tremendous legal and strategic ambiguities that have been so troubling over the past eight years.
Rather than talk for ten minutes in soaring platitudes, we need 20 seconds devoted to the notion that we will win, the Taliban will lose, and Afghanistan will be secured.
Last fall, Americans had an opportunity to choose between a man who would see us through to victory in our wars, and a pseudo-academic who would give us endless lectures about how complicated our problems are and would spend months dithering before making a decision that can be summarized as, “I’m going to up the ante now, but announce that I shall dither again at a predetermined date in the future.”
In the meantime, American soldiers will die, our enemies will circle dates on their calendars, backwards tribesmen will make calculations about who to support based on who they think will still be around in two years, and citizens of this republic will no doubt be subjected to dozens of similar boring lectures. To those Americans who decided they disliked George Bush so much that they’d vote for any ham-and-egger with a D behind his name: Thanks!