BR comments follow article : -------------------------------------- Real Clear Politics June 9, 2010 Is Obama at a Tipping Point? By _David Paul Kuhn_ (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/authors/?author=David+Paul+Kuhn&id=14532)
Hurricane Katrina. Hostage crisis. Tet Offensive. Is Barack Obama's presidency at a similar tipping point? The relevance of the question exemplifies the gravity of Obama's crisis. Obama is learning the lesson of presidents before him. ''Poor Ike," Harry Truman said of the incoming president, "it won't be a bit like the Army. He'll sit here and he'll say, 'Do this, do that,' and nothing will happen.'' Presidents are hostage to events, goes the old political axiom. But that's a half-truth. Presidencies rise and fall far more by their response to great events than to the event itself. "Presidents are ultimately judged by how they handle the unexpected," presidential historian Richard Norton Smith wrote in an email exchange. "JFK may have blown the Bay of Pigs but more than recovered a year later in _Cuba_ (http://realclearworld.com/topic/around_the_world/cuba/?utm_source=rcw&utm_me dium=link&utm_campaign=rcwautolink) . ... Just as he moved away from his cautious approach to civil rights as newspaper pictures and TV reports from Birmingham -- the equivalent of today's unstopped pipe at the bottom of the Gulf -- made him realize that the presidency is, indeed, ultimately a place of moral leadership." This issue comes down to presidential leadership. The British Petroleum crisis clearly _placed Obama's presidency in crisis a couple weeks back_ (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/05/28/obamas_oil_stain_gulf_briti sh_petroleum_105771.html) . Yet the status quo endured. The media pile on ensued. Impressions solidified. This is what happens when the president does not meet the moment. History tells us how it happens. Perceptions contrast with promises. The measure of the president appears smaller than the problems before him. Presidencies, subtly and at similar junctures, turn south for a long winter. "The good presidents are able to basically survive these kinds of events, rarely are they able control of them. They find strong political and strategic responses," said Princeton political historian Julian Zelizer. "The bad presidents make the crisis seem greater than the presidency." This turning point is often gradual. Not made by one event. And like all crossroads, clearest in the rear view mirror. But when the perception goes from good to bad on great events, the entire presidency goes bad. Obama's leadership problem did not begin with BP. There was the coolness to Wall Street malfeasance. The sure victory of financial reform sidelined. The new New Deal that never was. The healthcare bill that came instead and in time, took hold of his presidency. The president seemingly aligned with all the big boogiemen of the day -- big business and big government. The change agent personified the establishment. The post-partisan went to the mat for a hyper-partisan issue. The candidate who _won his majority with the recession_ (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/01/democrats_year_less_change_tha.html) , focused his mandate elsewhere. The man who promised new politics partook in the ugly old politics, from healthcare's Cornhusker kickback to the Joe Sestak incident. And now, the competent candidate haunted by perceptions of incompetent presidential leadership. Somewhere, along the way, was Obama's Bert Lance affair. Jimmy Carter's budget director was legally exonerated from a financial scandal. But the issue was ethics. Critical weeks passed. Amid Watergate's shadow, the candidate who ran on good ethics was now a president tainted by bad ethics. The hostage crisis cemented what began with Lance. But it's also how the hostage crisis bled on. Like George H.W. Bush's recession. And like too many of Obama's crises. Healthcare bleeds for a year. The jobs crisis still bleeds. Now this oil crisis, bleeding past day 50. And like the Lance affair, critical weeks have indeed passed. Political triage might be too late. The time with the victims too little. The president's emotive distance from the tragedy too great. The aloofness too constant. The expressions of anger and empathy too contrived. The crisis too far along. FDR most famously took command of like times. His response to the crisis won the public -- and historic gains in the midterm elections -- despite the Great Depression languishing on. It was not the solution but the response. In Roosevelt, as Zelizer put it, "Americans saw someone from the White House doing as much as anyone could see possible. That's in contrast to the current administration on the oil spill and, many would say, on jobs." Obama's effort to highlight his command has only underlined his failures. This week he told NBC that he talks to his experts "so I know whose ass to kick." It was like hearing Spock swear. It was also reminiscent of Bill Clinton in 1995. "The president is still relevant here," Clinton said. But these things are true, of course, when they need not be said. Obama is flailing. The feckless image haunts him. Meanwhile, from the Korean peninsula to _Iran_ (http://realclearworld.com/topic/around_the_world/iran/?utm_source=rcw&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=rcwautolink) to fragile world markets, myriad potential crises loom. Obama famously rode an historic wave to the White House. That wave turned on him long ago. But he never seemingly got off. Never succeeded against the tide. Never came close to turning the tide. This is when discipline appears timid, when stability appears stolid and cool appears cold. Nothing is written. But it's not getting better. No end to the BP crisis is in sight. And as Zelizer warned, "The public watches a president like they watch a TV-show character. Those perceptions set in and they are incredibly hard to change. That's why the oil spill is significant and the longer it goes on, the more feelings harden." At some point, the bad show also goes on too long. Negative perceptions of the character are formed. That's the tipping point. And it's possible, but not necessarily probable, that Obama's point has already come to pass. David Paul Kuhn is the Chief Political Correspondent for RealClearPolitics and the author of _The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma_ (http://www.amazon.com/Neglected-Voter-White-Democratic-Dilemma/dp/023060806X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242670981&sr=8-1) . ==================================================== Lessons of History Sometimes history is very useful. Actually, history could be useful most of the time, but that is asking too much. Sometimes is about the best we can hope for. What the 2008 election most brings to mind is 1912, the victory of progressive Woodrow Wilson, a university intellectual who, in the end, turned out to be ineffectual and unpopular. Which is not a disparagement of intellectuals. Teddy Roosevelt was an intellectual himself. But a very different kind of intellectual, someone with real world experience, indeed, who had once been a cowboy in Dakota, a rancher and outdoorsman, not to mention a hero of the Spanish -American War. Wilson was strictly an ivory tower type, a pure idealist. And he bungled the job of president badly, Wilson was also an anti-war president, re-elected in 1916 on the strength of the slogan, "he kept us out of war." Of course,one year later a million US troops was on its way to Europe Hopefully you can start to see the similarities to Barack Hussein Obama. The parallels are anything but exact, of course, especially since Wilson was racially bigoted and did much to end civil rights gains of African-Americans, and institutionalize Jim Crow for the next generation and more. Yet there is a pattern here, especially the upsurge in enthusiasm for Wilson that brought him into the White House. He was seen by his acolytes as someone incapable of wrong, above the fray, a politically pure soul who would surely usher in a millennium. And Europeans and others also regarded Wilson as an American messiah. Such expectations are folly. They were then, they were in 2008. Which some people saw as the likely outcome while the 2008 campaign was unfolding, even though it did no good to be prescient. The start of the serious recession ended any hope for a McCain victory, not to mention the Arizonan's poorly run campaign, his unwillingness to be critical of Obama's Muslim connections, etc, and lack of a knowledge base in any areas except insider DC politics. At any rate, the parable of Cassandra is worth remembering, the prophetess who accurately foresaw the future. Just one problem, the gods had decreed that no-one should believe her. So it was in 2008 concerning everyone who looked at BHO and could see the real danger of malfeasance in office if he was elected. After all, no president in US history has been so poorly prepared. All comparisons to JFK were bogus since Kennedy had two full terms in the House, and 8 years service in the Senate prior to his run for the White House. Obama was an utter novice, and worse, was schooled in what is often referred to as Chicago "machine politics." Then, in the US Senate, he was present to act like a senator only about half the 2 years he was in office, otherwise he was already campaigning for the presidency. Objectively this was ridiculous. But the contagion was what it was, a fever spreading over the land like the approach of a weather system which cannot be stopped. Now we have to live with the aftermath of the equivalent of major storm damage, tornados, and rivers flooding all over the map. This was a storm system that the electorate voted for. And so it came to pass that Obama stood the imperatives of practical politics on its head and spent a full year and more seeking to pass a health care reform bill that, far from being bipartisan, was strictly a matter of Left-wing priorities even if there was some compromise with the Right, most notably in abandonment of a single-payer option. But the point is that , objectively, the Number One Priority had to be the economy. Here it is, mid 2010 and the economy still isn't fixed, with the possibility of a double dip recession very real. For all his stupidity and cupidity, at least Clinton understood the importance of getting the economy right before all else. This basic, Politics 101 lesson, simply did not penetrate into Obama's consciousness. From every indication, it still has not done so. There is another point. Why was health care so crucial for Obama ? The answer seems clear. His professional background included years as a social worker. Understandably, he wanted the poor and the unfortunate to have access to hospitals and medical treatment. Which is a noble sentiment. But any practical political leader would reflexively put righting the economy first as an absolute necessity. People need an income, it is vital to everything else in their lives. With an income, basic medical needs can be paid for even before any health care system might be in place, plus , an income is what sustains families and such things as paying for clothing, school fees for kids, gasoline for the car, and much else. But, no, Obama had etched in his inner mind the plight of the poor as even more important. So, now we have more poor than ever before, but they have ( at least the promise of ) health care insurance starting as soon as 2014 or thereabouts. Speaking personally, it is hard to imagine anything so stupid. And yet, this is what actually happened this past year and a half. Maybe there still is time for an Obama epiphany, a "Damascus road" experience that turns everything around, including an end to his love affair with Islam , and his sickening true belief in homosexual causes of every imaginable variety, but this seems to be as unlikely as anything gets. Obama's mismanagement of the White House is clear to just about everyone now. Yet little or nothing changes as we get still more law professor lectures, day in and day out, at the same time as no-one gets news conferences at which the president is asked questions he needs to answer from smart people who are well able to ask good questions. This man is a disappointment across the board. Needless to say, Obama's approval ratings are down among just about ALL demographics, even Jews who voted at a 78% rate for him in 2008 now rating him at a 57% level, a loss of 21%. Obama's support among Hispanics has also slid, even if not as far, but declined nonetheless. Yet there is one group of voters among whom there has not been as much as a 1% decline. From January of 2009 to June of 2010 Obama's approval rating among African-Americans has remained at exactly 91 % This reminds me of nothing so much as African-American attitudes toward OJ Simpson, obviously a murderer, which was the Civil Court viewpoint, and at the least a sonovabitch who has since gone on to commit felony aggravated robbery. Yet, through it all, black sentiment remains supportive. What the hell is this ? More to the point, in thinking about the Obama administration, "what the hell is this ?" also. My opinion as of June 2010 Billy
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