* _DECLARATIONS_
(http://online.wsj.com/public/search?article-doc-type={Declarations}&HEADER_TEXT=declarations)
* SEPTEMBER 24, 2011
Amateur Hour at the White House
But at the U.N., Obama rises to the occasion, while Perry makes himself
small.
* By PEGGY NOONAN
*
A small secret. In writing about the White House or Congress, I always
feel completely free to attempt to see things clearly, to consider the
evidence, to sift it through experience and knowledge, and then to make a
judgment. It may be highly critical, or caustic, even damning. But deep down I
always hope I'm wrong—that it isn't as bad as I say it is, that there is
information unknown to me that would explain such and such an act, that there
were factors I didn't know of that make bad decisions suddenly explicable. Or
even justifiable.
I note this to make clear the particular importance, for me, of Ron
Suskind's book on the creation of President Obama's economic policy,
"Confidence
Men." If Mr. Suskind is right, I have been wrong in my critiques of the
president's economic policy. None of it was as bad as I said. It was much
worse.
The most famous part of the book is the Larry Summers quote that he saw it
as a "Home Alone" administration, with no grown-ups in charge. But there's
more than that. Most of us remember the president as in a difficult
position from day one: two wars and an economic crash, good luck with that.
But
Mr. Suskind recasts the picture.
Like FDR, Mr. Obama had big advantages: "overwhelming popular support,
Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, and the latitude afforded by
crisis." But things were weird from the beginning. Some of his aides became
convinced that his "lack of . . . managerial experience" would do him in.
He ran meetings as if they were afternoon talk shows. An unnamed adviser
says the 2009 stimulus legislation was the result of "poor conceptualizing."
Another: "We should have spent more time thinking about where the money was
being spent, rather than simply that there was this hole of a certain size
in the economy that needed to be filled, so fill it." Well, yes.
The decision to focus on health care was the president's own. It could have
been even worse. Some staffers advised him—this was just after the
American economy lost almost 600,000 jobs in one month—that he should focus on
global warming.
Mr. Suskind's book is controversial, and some of his sources have accused
him of misquoting them. The White House says Mr. Suskind talked to too many
disgruntled former staffers. But he seems to have talked to a lot of
gruntled ones, too. The overarching portrait of chaos, lack of intellectual
depth
and absence of political wisdom, from a Pulitzer Prize-winning former
reporter at this paper, rings true.
***
Let me say here clearly what I've been more or less saying in this column
for a while. It is that Mr. Obama cannot win in 2012, but the Republicans
can lose. They can hand the incumbent a victory the majority of American
voters show themselves not at all disposed to give him. (No column is complete
without his latest polling disasters. A Quinnipiac poll this week shows
Florida voters disapprove of the job the president is doing by 57% to 39%.)
Republicans only six months ago thought the president was unbeatable. Now
they see the election as a bright red apple waiting to fall into their
hands. It's not. They'll have to earn it.
Mr. Obama isn't as resilient as a Bill Clinton, with his broad spectrum of
political gifts and a Rasputin-like ability to emerge undead in spite of
the best efforts of his foes. His spectrum of political gifts is more
limited. That's a nice way to put it, isn't it?
But consider what happened this week in New York.
Mr. Obama's speech Wednesday at the United Nations was good. It was strong
because it was clear, and it was clear because he didn't rely on the
thumping clichés and vapidities he's lately embraced. When the camera turned
to
the professionally impassive diplomats in the audience, they seemed to be
actually listening.
"It has been a remarkable year," he said: Moammar Gadhafi on the run, Hosni
Mubarak and Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali deposed, Osama bin Laden
dead. "Something is happening in our world. The way things have been is not
the way they will be." Technology is putting power in the hands of the
people, history is tending toward the overthrow of entrenched powers. But
"peace
is hard. Progress can be reversed. Prosperity comes slowly. Societies can
split apart."
On the Mideast conflict: "The people of Palestine deserve a state of their
own." But the proposed U.N. statehood resolution is a "shortcut" that won't
work: "If it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now."
Peace can be realized only when both parties acknowledge each other's
legitimate needs: "Israelis must know that any agreement provides assurances
for
their security. Palestinians deserve to know the territorial basis of their
state." Friends of the Palestinians "do them no favors by ignoring this
truth, just as friends of Israel must recognize the need to pursue a two-state
solution with a secure Israel next to an independent Palestine."
"I know that many are frustrated by the lack of progress," the president
said. "So am I." All in all, it was a measured statement at a tense moment.
It was meant to defuse tensions, to cool things down.
Contrast it with the words of Rick Perry, who zoomed into New York to make
his own Mideast statement the day before the president's speech. The Obama
administration's policy, the Texas governor said, amounts to
"appeasement." It has encouraged "an ominous act of bad faith." We are "at the
precipice
of such a dangerous move" because the Obama administration is "arrogant,
misguided and dangerous." "Moral equivalency" is "a dangerous insult."
This was meant not to defuse but to inflame. It does not seem to have
occurred to Mr. Perry that when you are running for president you have to be
big, you have to act as if you're a broad fellow who understands that when the
American president is in a tight spot in the U.N., America is in a tight
spot in the U.N. You don't exploit it for political gain.
Perry competitor Rick Santorum responded: "I've forgotten more about Israel
than Rick Perry knows about Israel," he told Politico. Mr. Perry "has
never taken a position on any of this stuff before, and [the media is] taking
this guy seriously."
The Israeli newspaper Ha'artez likened Mr. Perry's remarks to "a pep rally
for one of Israel's right-wing politicians, and a hard-liner at that,"
adding that the governor "adopted the rhetoric of Israel's radical right lock,
stock and barrel."
I'd add only that in his first foreign-policy foray, the GOP front-runner
looked like a cheap, base-playing buffoon.
As I said, Mr. Obama can't win this election, but the Republicans can lose
it by being small, by being extreme, by being—are we going to have to start
using this word again?—unnuanced.
--
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