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Rex Murphy in Canada’s National Post cuts our president to the quick.
When you are in vogue, the editor of Vogue pleads for your attention.
When you’re not in vogue, you plead with the editor of Vogue.
Consider Barrack Obama. Just a week ago, in an effort to mingle with the despised 1% and walk away with bucketloads of money none of them should apparently have in the first place, the president of the United States — once a figure of dignity and prestige — went to a dinner with the Ice Queen of the Fashionistas, the editor of Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour. This was a remarkable turnaround.
About four short years ago, while Obama was still on the campaign trail, he had ascended, as no other political figure in recent years has done, to an altitude of public esteem and celebrity that almost draped him in divine status. (One Newsweek reporter, if those terms don’t nullify one another, even said he was “our god.”) In those high days, Obama didn’t just visit somebody or some group; he bestowed his presence or attention on them. He was the “cynosure of all eyes,” “the glass of fashion and the mould of form … th’ observed or all observers.”
Obama was the supercelebrity of our time. He didn’t need to solicit attention, and certainly never needed to do anything so undignified as ask for money — after every primary, win or lose, his online army mailed in the loot and the big bankrolls of Wall Street and Hollywood couldn’t wait to shower the cool candidate with their cash and cheques. He shone so brightly there were moments in the last presidential campaign when you could reasonably wonder if there was another candidate in play.
And now look at the man, and candidate, this year. He has had to resort to summoning the woman Meryl Streep played so chillingly and with such hauteur in the Devil Wears Prada, Anna Wintour, to do an online pitch for him. It is available on YouTube, and for unintentional comedy it has few peers. … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAlnKHctMYs
It is an important week. Andrew Malcolm wonders if everyone is on station in DC.
In case you wondered if Democrat President Obama would keep his eye on the ball in the final months of this term, his schedule this week tells the tale: …
… Obama ended last week with a Florida campaign event, where, oops, he fell down (Video here). That was widely seen as a metaphor for the president’s awful month of June.
With the economy and employment situations finally in tip-top shape, Obama got in another round of golf Sunday and launches this “work” week by flying Air Force One up to New England for not one, not two, not three, but four more fundraisers today.
Then, after overnighting in Boston to rest his vocal chords, Obama flies back down South for more fundraising. It’s probably coincidence that Obama also was out-of-town – fundraising, of course – on June 1 when the awful May job numbers came out. …
Peter Wehner reviews three new books that seek to defend the indefensible.
Few things are more difficult in politics than confronting failure and learning from it. It is especially difficult when a leader you have championed, and in whom you have placed your highest hopes, turns out to be less than he seemed.
Such is the dilemma facing liberals in the age of Obama. Barack Obama entered the presidency with his sights and standards very high, and many liberals believed he could be the transformative figure they had been awaiting for generations. But by now it is clear that, by any reasonable measure (including those set out by Obama himself at the beginning of his term), his presidency has been a failure.
Consider the economy. President Obama has overseen the weakest recovery on record. He is on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era. The standard of living for Americans has fallen more dramatically during his presidency than during any since the government began recording it five decades ago. As of this writing, unemployment has been above 8 percent for 38 consecutive months, the longest such stretch since the Great Depression. Home values are nearly 35 percent lower than they were five years ago. A record 46 million Americans are now living in poverty.
The economist Michael Boskin has listed some of the post–World War II records set during the Obama years: among them, federal spending as a percentage of GDP at 25 percent, the federal debt as a percentage of GDP at 67 percent, and the budget deficit as a percentage of GDP at 10 percent. The United States has amassed more than $5 trillion in debt since January 2009, with the president having submitted four budgets with trillion-dollar-plus deficits. (Prior to Obama, no president had submitted even a single budget with deficits in excess of a trillion dollars.) In addition, government dependency, defined as the percentage of persons receiving one or more federal benefit payments, is the highest in American history.
Add to this the fact that the president’s signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is among the most unpopular major domestic policies passed in the last century; and that the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, widely known as Obama’s stimulus package, is so unpopular that his aides have virtually expelled the word stimulus from their lexicon.
The president’s critics are eager to offer their explanations of his shortcomings, but what can his supporters say?
Three new books, each by authors favorably disposed to Obama, attempt to explain the declining arc of his presidency. Noam Scheiber’s The Escape Artists (Simon & Schuster, 368 pages) and David Corn’s Showdown (William Morrow, 432 pages) offer a behind-the-scenes look at the Obama White House. Scheiber focuses exclusively on the president’s economic team, and Corn covers everything from debt-ceiling negotiations to the killing of Osama bin Laden. In the third book, Overreach (Princeton University Press, 248 pages), presidential scholar George C. Edwards III provides a more academic and detached analysis of Obama’s failures and tries to put them in perspective.
Taken together, these books offer a sense of what the president’s champions and defenders think has gone wrong, with Scheiber and Corn in particular beginning to suggest how liberals will rationalize Obama’s first term should his failures prove fatal to his securing a second.
First, these supporters of the president accuse him of the same sin they themselves committed: expecting too much from Barack Obama. Scheiber writes that there was a “strain of messianism” in Obama, a “determination to change the course of history.” When soon-to-be Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told president-elect Obama that his signature accomplishment would be preventing a Great Depression, Obama said, “That’s not enough for me.”
“If you don’t do that,” Geithner responded, “nothing else is possible.” Obama repeated, “Yeah, but that’s not enough.” …
… Obama has routinely used rhetoric that is, by presidential standards, hyper-partisan and splenetic. He has accused Republicans of being members of the Flat Earth Society, of being “social Darwinists,” and of putting “party ahead of country.” He has portrayed them as cruelly indifferent to the suffering of autistic and Down syndrome children and the elderly. And as the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel has pointed out, the administration has gone so far as to engage in implicit intimidation and threats against private citizens in order to frighten them away from giving money to Mitt Romney. To believe that Obama is at heart an irenic, unifying political figure requires an almost clinical level of self-delusion.
As for laying the blame for Obama’s failures on a communications problem, that is the usual refuge for all White Houses that find themselves buffeted by events. “If only we made our case louder, more often, and to more audiences,” the thinking goes, “the scales would fall from the eyes of the public.” But this, too, is a species of self-delusion. Holding this view is more a source of Obama’s failures than an excuse for them. …
… For the first two years of his presidency, Obama had his way with the stimulus package, the Affordable Care Act, the GM-Chrysler bailouts, “cash for clunkers,” financial regulations, release of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, credit-card price controls, the endless extension of jobless benefits, and more. As the Wall Street Journal put it, “Mr. Obama has been the least obstructed president since LBJ in 1965 or FDR in 1933.”
The results have been parlous for the country and created cognitive dissonance for progressives. The election of Obama was supposed to be a liberal apotheosis. Democratic strategist James Carville proclaimed his belief that the changes wrought by that election would “guarantee the Democrats remain in power for the next 40 years.” Capturing the spirit of the left, the theorist Michael Lind said: “The election of Barack Obama to the presidency may signal more than the end of an era of Republican presidential dominance and conservative ideology. It may mark the beginning of a Fourth Republic of the United States.”
No Fourth Republic has emerged. Carville’s prediction of a 40-year majority fell 38 years short. And liberalism has not supplanted conservatism. According to Gallup, 40 percent of Americans described their views as conservative last year, 35 percent as moderate, and only 21 percent as liberal. This marked the third straight year that conservatives outnumbered moderates—and after more than a decade in which moderates mostly tied or outnumbered conservatives.
In the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans picked up more House seats than in any election since 1938 and controlled more seats than they had since 1946. In addition, Republicans picked up more than 720 seats in state legislatures, the most in the modern era. The GOP has not enjoyed this much power in state capitals since the 1920s. To be a Democrat in the age of Obama is a dangerous thing.
If Obama goes on to lose his bid for reelection, it would be yet another crushing blow to liberalism. And in reading these books, it is hard to avoid the impression that the effort to explain a 2012 defeat is already under way. …
WaPo gives the Obama campaign “Four Pinocchios” for the latest ad slamming Romney’s work at Bain.
… The Obama campaign apparently loves to ding former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney with the charge of “outsourcing.” On several occasions, we have faulted the campaign for its claims, apparently to little avail.
Now, all of the claims have been combined in one 30-second ad, with the added incendiary charge that Romney was a “corporate raider.” Let’s look anew at this material. …