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.
... 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. 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, 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
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.
====================================================
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
