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Craig Pirrong reacts to the news that the president doesn’t think he has campaigned enough.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a looonnggg piece on Obama Agonistes, the struggler facing a tough reelection campaign. Oh! The injustice!
In it, his confidants identify his problem: He hasn’t campaigned enough:
“Over his first term, Mr. Obama, 51 years old, has fundamentally shifted his view of modern presidential power, say those who know him well. He is now convinced the most essential part of his job, given politically divided Washington, is rallying public opinion to his side.
As a result, if he wins a second term, Mr. Obama plans to remain in campaign mode.”
Note: that was not from The Onion. Follow the link, and you’ll find the above in the WSJ.
Umm, when has he ever been out of campaign mode?
This explanation for his failures is a variant on a theme that he personally and his minions have flogged for the past several years: his biggest mistake has been that he hasn’t taken the time to explain the brilliant wonderfulness of The One and his deeds to the boobs in the boonies and the burbs. So he will dedicate himself to righting that mistake and instructing us slow learners. …
Roger Kimball has the Obamanation of the Day. Pickerhead asks again, how sick is this guy?
I admit it, when it comes to Barack Obama, I think pretty low. But not, apparently, quite low enough. This exchange, from an interview with Cathleen Falsani of the Chicago Sun-Times, took even my jaded breath away:
Falsani: Do you believe in sin?
Obama: Yes.
Falsani: What is sin?
Obama: Being out of alignment with my values.
Have you ever found a pithier summary of the narcissistic core of today’s “progressive” Left-liberal ideology? I’m not sure I have.
Tim Dalrymple has another OMG example.
The liberal elites who are denigrating Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican National Convention last night are only hurting themselves. Swing-state independents and undecideds like Clint Eastwood a lot more than they like liberal elites. They will only harden in their support for Clint’s folksy commonsense the more it’s contrasted with the cheap and scornful hyper-partisanship of the Daily Kos and HuffPo crowd.
I thought the premise was brilliant. Clint seemed a little nervous, a little out of his element, but that only made him more relatable, more like the kind of guy you’d have a beer with. (Seriously, who wouldn’t want to have a beer with Clint Eastwood?) But the premise was perfect.
To everyone who has not consumed the Kool Aid, Barack Obama seems strikingly insubstantial. ”Senator Present” from Illinois became a U. S. Senator who was more interested in campaigning than legislating. Then he became an empty promise in the 2008 campaign, a micron-thin veneer of glitz and glamor over a hollow core, an empty screen onto which everyone projected their wishes. Six weeks after the inauguration, when he was thoroughly in the honeymoon phase and largely still campaigning against President Bush and on behalf of a stimulus, he uttered one of the most vapid and immature things I have ever heard from a President, when he told a bunch of television anchors at the White House: “I like being President, and it turns out I’m very good at it.”
That’s humility and wisdom for you: six weeks into a four-year term, and he’s already prepared to declare himself “very good at it.” I guess that’s what happens when you’re the kind of guy who gets a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing. Thank goodness he likes being President, though — because, you know, it’s all about him. …
Mark Thiessen comes up with a list of Obama’s foreign policy failures.
(During the convention), Condi Rice took on President Obama’s foreign policy leadership, declaring “We cannot be reluctant to lead and you cannot lead from behind.” Here are ten areas where Obama’s reluctance to lead has cost America dearly in the past three-and-a-half years:
Obama has failed to lead on Iran. Sanctions and negotiations are failing, and Iran has made more progress toward a nuclear weapon in the past three-and-a-half years under Obama than it has in the three decades since the Iranian revolution – with more centrifuges, more stockpiles of high enriched uranium, and more hardened facilities than when Obama took office. Iran has no fear that Obama will take military action to stop them – because they know full well that Obama has staked his presidential legacy on ending wars, not starting them.
Obama is failing to lead in Syria. Iran’s closest ally in the Middle East is massacring tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children while America sits on the sidelines doing nothing – because Russia and China won’t let us.
Obama is failing to lead on Afghanistan. He launched a surge but then undermined it by announcing our withdrawal before the additional forces arrived – sending a signal to the Taliban that they could simply wait for America’s pre-announced retreat to re-take major swaths of the country and invite al Qaeda back. …
Bret Stephens has more on the global has-been who never was.
… Consider the record. His failed personal effort to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. His failed personal effort to negotiate a climate-change deal at Copenhagen in 2009. His failed efforts to strike a nuclear deal with Iran that year and this year. His failed effort to improve America’s public standing in the Muslim world with the now-forgotten Cairo speech. His failed reset with Russia. His failed effort to strong-arm Israel into a permanent settlement freeze. His failed (if half-hearted) effort to maintain a residual U.S. military force in Iraq. His failed efforts to cut deals with the Taliban and reach out to North Korea. His failed effort to win over China and Russia for even a symbolic U.N. condemnation of Syria’s Bashar Assad. His failed efforts to intercede in Europe’s economic crisis. (“Herr Obama should above all deal with the reduction of the American deficit” was the free advice German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble offered this year.)
In June, the PewResearchCenter released one of its periodic surveys of global opinion. It found that since 2009, favorable attitudes toward the U.S. had slipped nearly everywhere in the world except Russia and, go figure, Japan. George W. Bush was more popular in Egypt in the last year of his presidency than Mr. Obama is today. …
Powerline says Liz Warren is increasingly compared to Martha Coakley who lost to Scott Brown the last time.
“Elizabeth Warren was supposed to be the Great Liberal Hope, the one Democrat tough enough to evict Scott Brown from Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. Then she started campaigning.” So begins a devastating critique of Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy that appeared in Boston Magazine.
Shockingly, as the reader who alerted me to this article put it, the Harvard prof who lives in Cambridge isn’t connecting in the suburbs with middle class and union folks:
To nearly everyone who knows her name, Elizabeth Warren has become a symbol. But in the months since she announced her intention to unseat Scott Brown, Elizabeth Warren has become something else: a candidate. And that is proving to be the challenge. . . .
At public events, she sticks to her stump speech and rarely strays from her talking points. …