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Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, published a blockbuster last week. Here’s what a liberal foreign affairs expert thinks of the president’s efforts. We have been saying for years that the narcissist is a rank amateur. Clueless, feckless, worthless are just some of the words we’ve used in this regard. Now we hear from an expert;
Here’s why America’s failure to be represented at the Paris unity march was so profoundly disturbing. It wasn’t just because President Obama’s or Vice President Biden’s absence was a horrendous gaffe. More than this, it demonstrated beyond argument that the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national security policy in the next two years. It’s simply too dangerous to let Mr. Obama continue as is—with his current team and his way of making decisions. America, its allies, and friends could be heading into one of the most dangerous periods since the height of the Cold War. …
… First, Mr. Obama will have to thank his senior National Security Council team and replace them. The must-gos include National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, chief speech writer/adviser Ben Rhodes, and foreign policy guru without portfolio Valerie Jarrett. They can all be replaced right away, and their successors won’t require senatorial confirmation.
Here’s who could succeed them and inspire great confidence immediately at home and abroad: first rate former top officials and proven diplomats Thomas Pickering, Winston Lord, and Frank Wisner; Republicans with sterling records like Robert Zoellick, Rich Armitage, Robert Kimmitt, and Richard Burt; or a rising young Democrat of proven ability and of demonstrated Cabinet-level quality, Michele Flournoy. Any one of them would make a huge difference from Day 1 in a top role. Others among them could be brought on to the NSC as senior advisers without portfolio to take the lead on specific problems. These are not just my personal opinions about these individuals; they are practically universal ones.
The State Department really needs help, too. Anthony Blinken, the new No. 2 there, is quite good and should stay. But Secretary of State John Kerry has been described even by the faithful in this administration as quixotic. …
Steve Hayward of Power Line posts on Gelb’s article.
I remember as a mere callow college student when I made out that Jimmy Carter was finished: when liberals turned on him. For example, Ken Bode, then the revered moderator of “Washington Week in Review” on PBS, wrote in 1979 “It’s Over For Jimmy” in The New Republic: “The past two weeks will be remembered as the period when President Carter packed it in, put the finishing touches on a failed presidency” (There’s lots more in this vein recounted in the first volume of my Age of Reagan books.)
So it shouldn’t surprise us that people are saying Obama’s no-show in Paris last weekend was his “diplomatic Katrina.” More serious is the Daily Beast article out yesterday from Leslie Gelb, who doesn’t come any more Establishmenty than a Harvard-trained Rockefeller. Gelb, notable for chiefly being boring, is the kind of Establishment figure who usually tut-tuts Republican presidents for being too bellicose. But he thinks Obama is circling the drain on foreign policy: …
John Fund’s recent piece on Valerie Jarrett is germane.
It’s high time the news media paid more attention to Valerie Jarrett. An old Chicago friend of both Barack and Michelle Obama’s, she exercises unusual influence in the White House as a “senior adviser.” Many in Washington believe that she is at the heart of the disappointment the Obama administration has become. They are unwilling to say so in public. But the evidence keeps piling up.
One who is isn’t afraid to speak up is Steven Brill, the author of a searing new book analyzing American health care called “America’s Bitter Pill.” Brill is a liberal and still thinks that Obamacare should have been passed. But in his exhaustively researched book (he spoke with 243 people over a 27-month period), he slams “incompetence in the White House” for the catastrophic launch of Obamacare in 2013: “Never [has there] been a group of people who more incompetently launched something.” During an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” last week, he lay much of the blame at Jarrett’s doorstep. “The people in the administration who knew it was going wrong went to the president directly with memos, in person, to his chief of staff,” he told NPR’s Terry Gross. But “the president was protected, mostly by Valerie Jarrett, from doing anything.” Although Obama had no idea of the issues until they ultimately reared their head, he still bears the blame, Brill said. “At the end of the day, he’s responsible. . . . The president, whatever we can say about him on policy and on giving speeches, as a manager, he failed. He didn’t know what was going on in the single most important initiative of his administration.” …
… But Jarrett isn’t any ordinary staffer. There are several things noteworthy about her. 1) Jarrett seems to be the only close Obama aide who entered the administration and is still there; 2) Jarrett has been highly successful in keeping new people with fresh ideas she doesn’t like from the president; and 3) she appears to suffer more than most staffers from a severe case of hero worship of her boss.
Consider what she told David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, in an interview for The Bridge, his 2010 book on Obama:
“He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but someone with extraordinary talents that they had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do. He would never be satisfied with what ordinary people do.”
As columnist George Will noted in astonishment: “Leave aside the question of whether someone so smitten can be in any meaningful sense an adviser. About what can such a paragon as Obama need advice?” …
John Steele Gordon posts on one of the “new ideas” that will come out of the prancing fool’s state of the union address Tuesday night.
… As for taxes, his one idée fixe has been to raise taxes on the rich, an idea that goes back to the 1840s. Consider his proposal regarding inherited property, to be unveiled in the State of the Union speech this Tuesday. It calls for heirs to inherit not only the property but also the original cost basis of the property, subjecting it to far higher capital gains taxes when the heirs sell it. As it stands now, the heirs’ cost basis is the price on the date of death.
But the heirs of large estates would have already paid as much as a whopping 40 percent under the estate tax, which is nothing more nor less than a capital gains taxes triggered by death instead of sale. Obama also wants to raise the capital gains tax to 28 percent, so the total tax take might be as high as 56.8 percent. But many capital assets, such as real estate and shares in a company founded by the decedent, are held for decades and the capital gains and estates taxes are not indexed for inflation.
So much of the value taxed away would be illusory, a tax on phantom gains. An investment worth $1 million in 1970 would have to be worth $6.1 million today for there to be any real gain at all. That won’t stop the president from calling his proposal “fair” and “the right thing to do.” It is, of course, neither, just the same century-old leftist, stick-it-to-the-rich boilerplate.
Fortunately these proposals have zero chance of getting through the new Republican Congress. Still, it’s going to be a long two years until January 20, 2017, a date that will mark what my new favorite bumper sticker calls ‘The End of an Error.”
Randy Barnett, law professor and Volokh contributor has an interesting post on the president’s duty to act in good faith. This is pretty complex and it is difficult to come up with a pithy pull quote. Perhaps it should have waited until just before the weekend. But it is a worthwhile read.
… According to this theory of good faith performance, “scarcity of enforcement resources” is an appropriate motive for exercising prosecutorial discretion, but disagreement with the law being enforced is not. The same holds true with exercising prosecutorial discretion to enforce marijuana laws in states that have made it legal under state law. Prioritizing seriousness of offenses is one thing; disagreeing with the policy of the Controlled Substances Act (as I do) is another.
But how do you tell the difference? Here is where the President’s previous statements about the scope of his powers, about his legislative priorities, and his frustration with Congress’s “inaction” become legally relevant. His prior statements go to the President’s state of mind or motive, which is dispositive of the issue of “good faith.” If the President believed that the law precluded these actions but he was exercising the discretion he was given under the law to accomplish them nonetheless, he was abusing his discretion and acting in bad faith. Whether or not the law gave him discretion is not the answer to the question, it is the problem that a doctrine of good faith performance is devised to address. …
Business Insider says there’s a reason you won’t waste your time watching the state of the union.
Sure, the pageantry and theatrics of the annual presidential address will all be there. The stem-winder of a speech from President Barack Obama. The standing ovations from his supporters, and strategic smirks and scowls from his opponents. The wall-to-wall media coverage and cable news countdown clocks.
But viewership is falling, with 20 million fewer people watching last year’s State of the Union compared to Bill Clinton’s address at the same point in his presidency.
Congress rarely follows through on the policy proposals the president unveils. And this year, the battle lines between Obama and the new Republican-led Congress will have already been set before the president arrives on Capitol Hill for the annual address to a joint session of Congress and a television audience of millions.
The dwindling impact of the big speech has sent the White House searching for new ways to break through. It’s now thinking of the State of the Union as an “organizing principle” rather than a single, communal event. …
But, we do have lots of SOTU cartoons with attitude.