NY Post
Obama hasn’t come up with one original idea yet
By _John Podhoretz_ (http://nypost.com/author/john-podhoretz/)
*
October 4, 2014 | 8:35pm
_Modal Trigger_
(http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/451516684-11.jpg)
(http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/syria-crisis_obama.jpg) Just
before Labor Day, controversy erupted over President Obama’s garb at a
presidential press conference — should he or should he not have worn a light
tan summer suit when talking about ISIS? That was beside the point.
The issue isn’t the weight or color of his suit. The issue is that the suit
is empty.
With almost six years of the Obama administration under our collective
belts, the time has come to acknowledge a painful truth: This is an
astoundingly idea-free presidency.
At that press conference, Obama stunned the world by saying, out loud and
openly, that “we don’t have a strategy yet” on how to deal with ISIS. No
president before him had ever said such a thing out loud, and for good
reason: Having a strategy is the president’s job.
In the parlance of the universities where Obama spent so much of his time
before 2004, when it came to a terror army running rampant through Iraq and
beheading Americans, Obama was admitting he hadn’t done the reading, needed
an extension on the paper, had to take an “incomplete.”
(http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/mideast_syria_iraq-11.jpg)
Well, there was no one there to grant him his incomplete — which is why, two
weeks later, he found it necessary to give a nationally televised address
to inform the American people and the world that, hey, guess what, he’d
come up with a strategy at last. It involved sending arms to the very same
Syrian rebels, which just happened to be a policy he had derided only a month
earlier as “a fantasy.”
(https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/secret_service-1.jpg) This
maddening directionlessness was also on display in the American response
to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza in July — which would involve statements
of support for Israel, followed by statements of anger about Israel’s
conduct, which would be followed by more statements of support for Israel, and
then word that the administration had delayed a standard-issue arms
replenishment for Israel as punishment for its bad behavior.
(http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/ebola-3.jpg) This kind of
policy and public-relations whiplash also characterizes the White House’s
behavior when it comes to the failures of the Secret Service, with Obama
press secretary one day saying the USSS’s director had the president’s full
confidence and the next day announcing her resignation as though it had been
what the president wished for all along.
And, of course, there’s the handling of the Ebola patient in Dallas, with
the administration so desirous of not causing a panic that it spent several
days misinforming Americans about whom the patient had come in contact
with, how many people there had been, how many plane flights he’d been on, and
so forth.
This inconstancy is the result of the administration’s elevation of cool
and calm above all other qualities — leadership qualities like urgency,
firmness, focus and determination.
The hard truth is that the Harvard Law Review editor and University of
Chicago professor with two bestselling books to his name can’t formulate a
policy to save his life, can’t oversee the implementation of the policies his
administration has put in place and can’t adapt or rejigger them in a
convincing way to take account of changing conditions.
(http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/524756510.jpg)
This has become startlingly evident even to his friends in recent days,
but it actually dates back to the beginning of his tenure.
Consider his two signature legislative accomplishments (one 5 ½ years old,
the other 4 ½ years old): The post-meltdown stimulus and ObamaCare.
These, arguably the two most expensive domestic programs ever put on the
books, weren’t carefully formulated and rigorously conceived.
They were jerry-rigged assemblages of ideas, policies pulled down off the
shelves of congressional subcommittees.
Because the stimulus was so poorly designed, the stimulus was used in large
measure by states to pay down their own debts rather than on “shovel-ready”
projects intended to employ the unemployed. And ObamaCare’s manifold
sloppinesses and disasters both in the drafting and in the execution have gone
off like time bombs every few months ever since the law was passed.
(http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/obama_vacation_hawaii.jpg)
Or consider one of the issues nearest and dearest to his heart and to his
party’s base — immigration reform. In the most dramatic case of the law of
unintended consequences in our time, the president’s decision to grant
permanent-resident status to the children of illegal aliens led to the border
crisis of 2013-14, with tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors flooding
across the border under incredibly dangerous conditions.
Beyond our shores, we were told back in 2011 that this administration was
redirecting American policy to take the full measure of the challenges of
the 21st century.
The new approach was called “the pivot to Asia,” and would require a
thorough revision of our military and foreign policies to deal with the rise
of
China and the destabilizing behavior of North Korea.
Well, guess what? By March of this year, assistant secretary of defense
Katrina McFarland let slip that “right now, the pivot is being looked at again
because, candidly, it can’t happen.” Why? It was just too expensive.
So much for the biggest foreign-policy idea of the Obama era. Poof.
We can all name the ideas of presidencies, from the New Deal to Reaganomics
to the Bush Doctrine. Obama’s self-described strategy for world affairs is
“don’t do stupid s – – -.”
His economic strategy is “print money.” These aren’t ideas. They aren’t
even ideology. They’re voting “present.”
What matters most to this administration is surface. It’s why Obama made
such a spectacular subject for a “HOPE” poster and why his choice of suit
provoked so much discussion. As a two-dimensional object, he’s endlessly
fascinating. Add the third dimension and he’s lost.
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