Re: Has Obama Peaked? Yes, He Has
- From: babeejm <jmtsmall@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:17:51 -0800 (PST)
On Nov 13, 12:05 pm, jose el fontanero <josefsop...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Has Obama Peaked? Yes, He Has
By Steven Stark
To listen to some pundits, Barack Obama's public image began taking a
serious beating when the off-year election returns came in a week ago.
Or maybe it was the undeserved Nobel Prize, his approach to the war in
Afghanistan, or when he revved up his pursuit of national health-care
reform.
But the pundits, as usual, are wrong. In reality, Obama peaked the
night he was elected.
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Steven Stark RealClearPolitics
Barack Obama
That astonishing evening was both a blessing and a curse for our 44th
president. As the first African-American elected to the Oval Office,
Obama made the history books in indelible fashion, generating an
uplifting sense of national pride and renewal along the way.
That alone is more than many presidents accomplish in a lifetime. But
that achievement- if that's what you want to call it - came a very
long year ago, before he was even president. The 10 months since he
took the oath of office have been a letdown, even to most of his
supporters.
Obama still doesn't seem to grasp that the collective Election Night
reverie is over, and that now we are waiting for him to lead us in
real time. Sure, a little bit of hubris was probably inevitable, but
it led Obama to conclude, despite what he said back then, that the
historic election had been about him. When in the end, as always, it
was about us.
That night began to reveal an unfortunate truth: having reached a
pinnacle on the day he was elected, Obama's popularity and
relationship with the American people had nowhere to go but down.
That's a difficult adjustment to make, and is reminiscent of the
apocryphal story about the obsessed fan and her friends who worshipped
and followed the Rolling Stones. One night, the fan finally got to
spend the evening with Mick Jagger. After she emerged from the hotel
the next morning, her friends asked her how it went.
"Well," she said, "he was alright. But he's no Mick Jagger."
Something similar was bound to happen with Obama. Some figures grow
during their time in the presidency; others diminish. Obama's path was
pre-ordained: unless he was able to achieve significant political
victories immediately, he was destined to become - at least for a
while - the incredible shrinking president.
It hasn't helped matters that Obama is the first president to serve in
the post-Internet age. For a while, the mainstream media - what little
of it is left, anyway - gave Obama a virtual free ride. Even as they
have become more skeptical, however, they've been drowned out by the
increasingly loud faithful on both sides who reflexively praise or
trash him.
Who knows what to believe or how to figure out equilibrium anymore?
The press used to be a check on presidents, but no longer. In the
current Balkanized media environment, it's possible for Obama to read
glowing reports from the adulatory left about his performance -
regardless of how badly he screws up - while automatically
discrediting the opposition press. As a logical result of this
situation, he's become both overconfident and unable to figure out
what the vast middle of the electorate really wants. In a nutshell,
that's the quandary Obama has faced to this point - though he doesn't
seem to know it.
Rookie mistakes
This isn't to say that Obama hasn't also made the understandable
mistakes that rookies always commit. Like most who are new to the big
leagues, Obama hasn't spent enough time in public life to befriend the
right people. As a result, he relies too heavily on the folks who got
him where he is - whether from the campaign or Chicago - when he
really needs advisors who see the world differently than he does, and
are willing tell him what he doesn't want to hear.
In terms of practical leadership, then, Obama has let Congress take
the lead (which, if he were an effective leader, he wouldn't allow to
happen), even though its approval ratings are some 30 points below
his. Worse, when it comes to finding "experts" to solve our national
crises, he has relied on all the usual, conventional suspects, such as
Tim Geithner and Larry Summers - even though they're the sort of
people who helped get us into this economic mess in the first place.
Having bought into a solution to the financial crisis that centered
around bailing out Wall Street - essentially a continuation of the
Bush policy, despite what the Tea Partiers think - he's left himself
open to a populist insurgency that poses the biggest threat to his
political success. It's no surprise that Main Street no longer trusts
Obama- it never will.
Another rookie mistake of Obama's is his belief that, in order to
wrest control back from adversity, he must repeat what he did as a
successful candidate. In his case, that means making endless public
appearances, delivering the same speeches, and attacking his political
enemies with the talking points of the day. But Obama isn't in Kansas
or anymore. Or, more to the point, Illinois.
Put simply, Obama has misread his mandate. Perhaps he thought he was
elevated to pass health care - they loved it in Iowa! - but in fact it
was the economic crisis that got him elected, is now our national
preoccupation, and will be the solution of which (or lack of one) that
determines whether he's re-elected.
Obama seems to have forgotten all the stuff he proclaimed in the
campaign about a new type of non-divisive presidency, even though that
promise of bipartisanship was the facet of his candidacy that appealed
the most to independents. Of course, the Republicans have made
bipartisanship difficult. But he was the one in the campaign who
claimed he could deal in a new way with those across the aisle - in
contrast with his primary opponent, Hillary Clinton, who once called
that opposition "the vast right-wing conspiracy."
Obama further miscalculated what a president actually does and is
expected to do in a constitutionally weak office. When it comes to the
economy in an interdependent world, there's not a whole lot under his
office's control.
Now that we, as a nation, have awakened from our post-election, post-
racial dream state, we've begun to notice that our president may not
be much interested in being a chief "executive," given that he's never
run anything before or expressed the slightest inclination to do so.
He has big ideas, to be sure, but that's only a small part of the job.
The hard, nitty-gritty labor of figuring out how government can
actually work better - the operative word is "governing" - seems to
hold no appeal for him.
Put another way, where are our flu shots? It's worth recalling that,
in what seems a lifetime ago, it was Clinton - not Obama - who
promised to be ready on Day One.
Even giving speeches is overrated, especially in a media universe so
oversaturated that the president can't get nearly the mass audience he
could just a generation ago, when there were only three networks and
no Internet. The bully pulpit has become a megaphone, and not a very
large one at that.
The question now is whether Obama can learn and change. It's not an
easy one to answer. Yes, all presidents have to grow in office to
prosper. Many of the challenges Obama faces - to say goodbye to most
of his old friends or recalibrate his political antenna - have been
ably surmounted by others with less talent and far less brains. But
brains are overrated in the presidency: just look at the politically
successful Ronald Reagan and the unsuccessful Jimmy Carter.
Besides, what Obama needs to do requires more of a psychological
transformation than an intellectual one. The milestone-minded,
transformative nature of his candidacy can never be replicated or
matched - you can only be elected the first African-American once. He
needs to come down from his mountaintop because, in this country, only
the faithful appreciate a president who consistently makes us listen
to him, rather than the other way around.
So far, the signs aren't good. In his quest to surpass what he's done
before and reprise his role as the nation's Moses, Obama appears to be
on the verge of an "historic" remake of one-sixth of the American
economy, namely health care - despite the fact that a solid majority
of Americans oppose the change. Whatever the merits, pushing for major
societal change without bringing society along is a guarantee of
prolonged strife, and is as unprecedented in its own way as his
election was. It is - dare we say it? - very George W. Bush-like in
its disregard of the popular will; meaning that, in the ultimate
irony, history may pair these two as mirror reflections of one
another.
Obama was the ideal leader to help us reach a watershed moment and
cross a racial threshold. Unexpectedly for him - and for us - that was
the easy part.
===================
"It happened the night he was elected."
It's been downhill ever since.
After election night there was nothing left for that man but to go downhill..and let's not forget the fact that Michelle and O couldn't sweet talk
the IOC into giving Chicago those Olympics in 2016.
.
- References:
- Has Obama Peaked? Yes, He Has
- From: jose el fontanero
- Has Obama Peaked? Yes, He Has
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