Barack Obama has already claimed the mantle of being our worst president ever. Lacking Bill Clinton’s flexibility, he is a rigid ideologue who does not even know how to give a little now, in order to gain a lot more down the road. The wages of being an ideologue is failure. I would bet that there are thousands of Democrats out there who wish that Hillary had won the nomination in 2008 instead of Obama. Hillary has been singularly unimpressive as Secretary of State but the thinking goes at least she would have Bill behind her in a “two for one” deal (as revolting as the idea is ) which they promised in 1992. Obama cannot run on his miserable record of the past three years so he will go like a pit bull on a poodle on the Republican opponent.
by James Taranto
Barack Obama’s recent political difficulties have proved shattering to many of his erstwhile enthusiasts. One of them is Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate.com, who in a column last week declared himself fed up—with America.
The lesson of the debt-ceiling deal, Mr. Weisberg sobbed, is that “there is no point trying to explain complex matters to the American people. The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed.” A pithier expression of this lament was the headline of an online column by liberal Republican Charles Fried: “Obama Is Too Good for Us.”
It takes an authoritarian mindset to look at a failing leader and fault the people for failing to follow him. But Mr. Weisberg has long harbored suspicions about his countrymen’s fitness to be led by the man he described, in an August 2008 column, as “handsome, brilliant and cool.” At the time, Mr. Obama was not doing as well in the polls as Mr. Weisberg thought he should have been, given the all-around awesomeness of the junior senator from Illinois. If Mr. Obama lost to John McCain, Mr. Weisberg concluded, it could mean only one thing: America was irredeemably racist.
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Just ask Drew Westen, who noted in a New York Times op-ed that Mr. Obama “had accomplished very little before he ran for president,” that he “had a singularly unremarkable” academic career, “publishing nothing . . . other than an autobiography,” and that as a state senator he “voted ‘present’ . . . 130 times.” Mr. Westen, a psychology professor who moonlights as a Democratic tactician, was spared the charge of racism only because he waited until this past Sunday to reveal those misgivings. In his essay, he acknowledged that in 2008 he was “bewitched” and “enthralled” by Mr. Obama’s “eloquence” and thus “chose to ignore” the candidate’s deficiencies.
Unlike Mr. Weisberg, Mr. Westen attributes Mr. Obama’s adversity to the president’s shortcomings, not the voters’. But like Mr. Weisberg, he insists the problem is one of communication. As Mr. Westen tells it, “Americans were scared and angry” when Mr. Obama took office. Like traumatized children, they “needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end.” He reproves Mr. Obama for having refrained from identifying “villains,” including “Wall Street gamblers,” “conservative extremists” and George W. Bush.
In reality, Mr. Obama has been no slouch in the vilification department, regularly demonizing, among others, “millionaires and billionaires,” insurance companies, “corporate jet owners” and Republicans, including Mr. Bush. Mr. Westen errs in assuming that normal American adults are as easily enthralled as he is by political fairy tales.
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Actually, Mr. Obama botched the budget negotiation not because he wouldn’t fight but because he didn’t know when to give in to minimize his losses. He stubbornly clung to his demand for a tax increase long after it was clear that was a deal breaker, yielding only when the alternative was to risk imminent catastrophe.
By contrast, Bill Clinton never even made such a demand in the budget battles of 1995-96, from which he emerged victorious. Later he worked with the Republican Congress to enact conservative policies, including welfare reform in 1996 and a cut in the capital gains tax in 1997.
Mr. Clinton was ideologically flexible, whereas Mr. Obama is rigid. Yet the left stuck with Mr. Clinton even through his impeachment. Everyone loves a winner, and progressives are angry and disconsolate with Mr. Obama because they increasingly see him as a loser. But if the president is a loser, it is precisely because he is one of them.
Read the rest – The Left’s summer of discontent
Tags: Bill Clinton, James Taranto
