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Mort Zuckerman writes on the anti-president.
… In his first year in power, Obama decided to focus on health care reform. And careful reform was necessary to help millions of uninsured. But many thought a more urgent demand was the economy — jobs, jobs, jobs. The public ranked lack of work as its most important concern. Obama chose health care reform because he thought this would give him a place in American history. He misjudged his ability to “bend the cost curve” of health care. Alas, his political relationships with Congress were so limited and so susceptible to partisanship that they ultimately overwhelmed whatever he might have been able to do to advance his health care program. Indeed, Obama’s signature legislation ultimately became a political burden, dramatically undermining his public support and diminishing his political capital.
It is almost mysterious how little he connects with people. In his six years in office, his relationships have been impersonal, and his lack of rapport with Congress has become a serious issue. …
… Obama’s personality over time has been hard to read and hard to trust, particularly when he has seemed to be seeking to transform America into a European-style nanny state, marked by a bloated public sector, burdensome regulations, high taxes, unsustainable entitlements and, accompanied as these factors usually are, by weak economic growth. This was not the vision of Americans, who are increasingly unhappy that we seem to have a leftist-leaning ideologue in the presidency. As The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd put it, this was a man who doesn’t seem to like the bully pulpit, just the professor’s lectern. Even the millennial generation, one of his core voting groups, has begun to drift away. The result is that America today is even more deeply divided than when Obama started his first term. …
… Looking at other dimensions of Obama’s performance, Kimberley Strassel contributed a devastating portrait in a recent Wall Street Journal article. He is, she asserted, “a lousy boss.” Although every administration has dysfunction and churn, “rarely, if ever, has there been one that has driven more competent people from its orbit — and chewed up more professional reputations.” She goes on to say that “The president bragged in 2008 that he would assemble in his cabinet a ‘Team of Rivals.’ What he failed to explain to any of the poor saps is that they’d be window dressing for a Team of Select Brilliant Political Types Who Already Had All the Answers: namely, himself and the Valerie Jarretts and David Axelrods of the White House.” She described Obama as a boss who doesn’t listen, views everything politically and always thinks he’s right.
And then there’s this: Obama has had over 195 golf outings, over 400 fundraisers, and over 130 vacation days. It seems like he spends as little time as humanly possible doing his job as president. Governing seems to be secondary to being a celebrity. When he came back from his summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, he immediately left Washington to attend several fundraisers and then claimed we don’t have a strategy for ISIS terrorists.
All this at a time when pessimism about the economy is widespread. The U.S. has lost 3 million full-time jobs and now has over 3 million more part-time positions than at the start of the economic meltdown in 2007. Roughly 45 percent of American families today have a median income that is lower than at the end of the recession, with an average drop of roughly $4,500 in spending power annually. No wonder too many families still work too many hours for too little to show for it. If income inequality is the defining issue of our time, Obama has failed here more than any president in the modern era.
Obama is seen as the anti-president. He sometimes acts in manners at odds with the framers of the Constitution. For example, as University of California-Berkeley law professor John Yoo points out in the National Review, rather than negotiate with Congress, Obama granted executive exemptions from immigration law to a large class of illegal immigrants. Rather than seek legislative repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, “the president ordered his Justice Department to stop defending the law in court,” says Yoo. He changed the work requirements of welfare reform by executive order, even though the measure had passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.
Keep in mind that Obama told us again and again that this time would be different. But he is responsible for the long painful slide from hope and change to partisan gridlock. He turns out to be the odd case of a pragmatist who can’t learn from his mistakes. He has failed to fill the leadership void. He doesn’t lead, and he doesn’t understand why we don’t feel led.
Andrew Ferguson has fun with a presidential speech writers’ tick.
Perhaps you too have been wondering why it is that President Obama is always, always telling us who we are as Americans and who we are not. Obviously, why he does this is a complicated question. And I guess “always” is an exaggeration. Frequently, though—he does it very frequently.
To pull one little item from the Google hopper: He was asked earlier this year about football players and the concussions they always (frequently) seem to be getting. There are few subjects the president won’t comment on.
“We have to change a culture that says you suck it up,” the president said. At the same time, he went on, football will continue to be, even after we stop sucking it up, “fundamental to who we are as Americans.” Boola boola.
The little clump of words about who we are as Americans pops out of the president’s mouth so often it’s easy to miss it, even when he says it twice on the same occasion, a few sentences apart, as he sometimes does. It’s not necessarily annoying. Often when he tells us who we are the phrase has a nice, friendly lilt to it, as though the president were giving us a pat on the back. You hear him at the 9/11 museum saying, “Nothing can ever break us. Nothing can change who we are as Americans,” and you think, Thanks, Obama!
Unfortunately, Americans might also get confused about who we are, assuming we’re paying attention to our president. It’s easy to lose track.
“That’s who the American people are—determined, and not to be messed with,” the president said again last summer. So, number one, we’re bad ass. This is probably related to our being football fundamentalists. But make no mistake: We have a gentler side. All the Christmas parties, Seders, and Muslim religious ceremonies the president hosts at the White House “are an affirmation of who we are as Americans.” So, number two, we’re religious, without overdoing it. …
Instapundit had a couple of posts on the president. The first was about the prez’ unhappiness with the press and closed with a great description.
But what a thin-skinned, narcissistic little putz. No President has gotten such adulatory coverage, and he’s still unhappy?
The next post was on a survey showing race relations have gotten worse.
… He ran as a post-racial uniter, but he’s been a race-baiting divider in office.
Here’s that survey from the Examiner.
… In the Dec. 3-5 poll of 1,001 adults, 53 percent said race relations had gotten worse since Obama, the nation’s first black president, took office in 2009. That figure included 56 percent of white respondents and 45 percent of black respondents.
Only 9 percent of respondents said race relations had gotten better under Obama, including just 3 percent who said they had gotten a lot better. Thirty-six percent said relations had stayed about the same. …
The new Exodus movie led to a WSJ article explaining how Moses might have crossed the Red Sea.
… There is a much better natural explanation for how a temporary path across the Red Sea could have been revealed. It involves the tide, a natural phenomenon that would have fit nicely into a well-thought-out plan by Moses, because Moses would have been able to predict when it would happen.
In certain places in the world, the tide can leave the sea bottom dry for hours and then come roaring back. In fact, in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte and a small group of soldiers on horseback were crossing the Gulf of Suez, the northern end of the Red Sea, roughly where Moses and the Israelites are said to have crossed. On a mile-long expanse of dry sea bottom exposed at low water, the tide suddenly rushed in, almost drowning them.
In the biblical account, the children of Israel were camped on the western shore of the Gulf of Suez when the dust clouds raised by Pharaoh’s chariots were seen in the distance. The Israelites were now trapped between Pharaoh’s army and the Red Sea. The dust clouds, however, were probably an important sign for Moses; they would have let him calculate how soon Pharaoh’s army would arrive at the coast.
Moses had lived in the nearby wilderness in his early years, and he knew where caravans crossed the Red Sea at low tide. He knew the night sky and the ancient methods of predicting the tide, based on where the moon was overhead and how full it was. Pharaoh and his advisers, by contrast, lived along the Nile River, which is connected to the almost tideless Mediterranean Sea. They probably had little knowledge of the tides of the Red Sea and how dangerous they could be.
Knowing when low tide would occur, how long the sea bottom would remain dry and when the waters would rush back in, Moses could plan the Israelites’ escape. Choosing a full moon for their flight would have given them a larger tidal range—that is, the low tide would have been much lower and the sea bottom would have stayed dry longer, giving the Israelites more time to cross. The high tide also would have been higher and thus better for submerging Pharaoh’s pursuing army. …