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Contents:
How a Presidency Unravels: George F. Will, Washington Post, Nov. 22, 2013— For concision and precision in describing Barack Obama’s suddenly ambivalent relationship with his singular — actually, his single — achievement, the laurels go to Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.).
Missing in Action: Barack Obama, the Cool Man of Competence: David Shribman, Globe & Mail, Nov. 20, 2013 — Barack Obama’s presidential administration has been criticized for lacking sophistication in foreign affairs, lacking vision in domestic affairs, lacking collegiality in congressional relations and lacking sensitivity in political endeavours. But now the President and his administration are facing a new, even more stinging critique: They lack competence.
Obama Has No Hope to Fix Fractured America: Michael Goodwin, New York Post, Nov. 24, 2013— As he climbed the political heap, a young Barack Obama roused audiences with promises to unite the nation. He was a Senate candidate in 2004 when he told the Democratic national convention, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is a United States of America.”
An Outbreak of Lawlessness: Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Nov. 28, 2013— For all the gnashing of teeth over the lack of comity and civility in Washington, the real problem is not etiquette but the breakdown of political norms, legislative and constitutional.
Pew Survey Shows Americans Reject Obama’s Foreign Policy; 6-out-of-10 Believe Iran Can’t Be Trusted: Joshua Levitt, Algemeiner, Dec. 4, 2013
Low-Information Leadership: Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 3, 2013
Obamacare-Speak: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, Nov. 21, 2013
Congress: Rein in O: Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2013
An Executive Without Energy: William Galston, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 26, 2013
George F. Will
Washington Post, Nov. 22, 2013
For concision and precision in describing Barack Obama’s suddenly ambivalent relationship with his singular — actually, his single — achievement, the laurels go to Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). After Obama’s semi-demi-apology for millions of canceled insurance policies — an intended and predictable consequence of his crusade to liberate Americans from their childish choices of “substandard” policies sold by “bad apple” insurers — Scalise said Obama is like someone who burns down your house. Then shows up with an empty water bucket. Then lectures you about how defective the house was.
What is now inexplicably called Obama’s “fix” for the chaos he has created is surreal. He gives you permission to reoccupy your house — if you can get someone to rebuild it — but for only another year.
At least he has banished boredom from millions of lives. Although probably not from his.
The place to begin understanding the unraveling of his presidency is page 274 of The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. The author, David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, quotes Valerie Jarrett, perhaps Obama’s closest and longest-serving adviser, on her hero’s amazingness: “He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . 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.”
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? (Although he did recently say, “What we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.” Just to buy.) It is, however, fair to note that what ordinary people ordinarily do is their jobs, competently. Obama’s inability to be satisfied with anything so banal has plunged him into Jimmy Carter territory. Carter’s presidency crumbled when people decided they still liked his character but had no confidence in his competence. Obamacare’s misadventures, and Obama’s response to them, have caused people to doubt both his character and his competence.
The White House, disoriented by adoration — including the self-adoration — of its principal occupant, sits in a city that has become addicted to its own adrenaline. It is in a perpetual swivet stoked by media for which every inter-institutional dust-up is a crisis. This year began with the “fiscal cliff” crisis. (You may have forgotten, there having been so many supposedly epochal events to keep track of: All the Bush tax cuts were set to expire; the “crisis” ended when only those cuts for the wealthy were allowed to lapse.) Then came spring and the “sequester crisis,” meaning discretionary spending “slashed” by “draconian” cuts of . . . 2.3 percent. Autumn brought the crisis of the shutdown of (part of) the government and the crisis surrounding the inevitable raising of the debt ceiling. The ostensible crisis was that the Obama administration might choose to default on the nation’s debt even though government revenues were 10 times larger than required to service the debt.
Good grief. The 1854 passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a crisis. As was the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the Great Depression and Pearl Harbor. But as for 2013’s blizzard of supposed crises: Arguments between the houses of Congress, or between the executive and legislative branches, about money should not be called crises; they should be called politics. The separation of powers that is the essence of the constitutional system assumes rivalrous institutions. When, however, the conflict is not about money but about the nation’s constitutional architecture, perhaps the language of crisis is apposite.
The New York Times reports that last March Henry Chao of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which superintended creation of the HealthCare.gov Web site, told a conference that he had worries: “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.” When such an embarrassing experience occurred, Obama responded like a ruler of a banana republic unfettered by constitutionalism and the rule of law. Although no president has even a line-item veto power (which 44 governors have), this president asserts the power to revise the language of laws by “enforcement discretion,” and suggests no limiting principle.
But even this is a crisis only if Congress makes it so by supine acquiescence. Congressional Democrats are White House poodles. They also are progressives and therefore disposed to favor unfettered executive power. Republicans are supposed to be different.
MISSING IN ACTION: BARACK OBAMA, THE COOL MAN OF COMPETENCE
David Shribman Globe & Mail, Nov. 20, 2013
Barack Obama’s presidential administration has been criticized for lacking sophistication in foreign affairs, lacking vision in domestic affairs, lacking collegiality in congressional relations and lacking sensitivity in political endeavours. But now the President and his administration are facing a new, even more stinging critique: They lack competence.
For weeks, the administration has been in full, dramatic upheaval. There was the invasion of Syria that was called off. There were the talks with Iran that broke off. There was the government closing that endangered the country’s credit ratings. There was the beginning of a new round of negotiations on spending and revenues. And then came the disastrous rollout of the health-care plan, followed by the news that an oft-repeated presidential pledge no longer held, and finally last week’s furious backpedalling to make things right if not exactly to right the ship. How bad is the Obama competence meltdown? When Mr. Obama announced his decision to permit Americans to keep their current health-care plans for an additional year after all, the Financial Times’ brief 11-paragraph account included these words: salvage, embattled, contrition, concession, on the defensive, complicated, admitted, failure (twice), eclipsed, problem (twice), humiliating, angry, fed up, botched, challenges (twice), flaws, paled.
This is not a vocabulary of competence, and (to employ some of those very words here, rearranging them as if they were small fragments on the refrigerator) the challenge now is for the embattled President to overcome the problems inherent in his complicated but botched health-care plan, to soothe the angry and fed-up American public, and to salvage his presidency. A less kind commentator might arrange those words more savagely, but this version will do. So will this, almost certainly the most dramatic a statement of contrition in presidential history since the Bill Clinton years: “We fumbled the rollout on this health care law. Am I going to have to do some work to rebuild confidence around some of our initiatives? Yeah.”
The magnitude of the political crisis Team Obama faces now cannot be overstated. The public long ago abandoned hope that the President might be as strategic in foreign affairs as Richard Nixon, as accomplished in diplomacy as George H. W. Bush, as tough-minded in congressional negotiations as Lyndon Johnson, as empathetic in human relations as Bill Clinton. For a long while Americans seemed content with the President they had. The RealClearPolitics composite poll findings in mid-November last year, a kind of Dow Jones Industrial Average for politics, showed Mr. Obama with an approval rating 4.1 points greater than his disapproval rating – not great but good enough to get him re-elected and to set him gliding toward his second inauguration. But questions of competence now have robbed him of public support. That same RealClearPolitics composite now shows a 14.2-point gap – in the other direction.
American politics is full of swift reversals; only weeks ago the President was basking in triumph for out-waiting and outwitting congressional Republicans in the struggle over the government closing. Now those same Republicans – pilloried for their extremism and their intransigence in insisting on changes in, if not outright repeal of, Obamacare – have the offensive and he is on the defensive. In the same spirit, it is, of course, possible that Mr. Obama will be able, as he put it at a Wall Street Journal forum Tuesday, to “remarket and rebrand” the health-care overhaul, though he conceded “that will be challenging in this political environment.” It is possible, too, that government computer magicians will fix the Obamacare website and that the four million people in 28 states who have received letters saying their health policies have been cancelled will forgive and forget.
Possible, but not likely. The danger for Mr. Obama is that his notion of an overhaul of the country’s immigration laws – once an administration priority, now a convenient means of changing the topic of conversation – is not exactly moving through congressional waters like a watermelon greased with Vaseline. America’s allies likewise do not seem soothed by assurances the United States will stop spying on their political leaders and their corporate captains.
John F. Kennedy, celebrated this week in commemorations leading to the 50th anniversary of his assassination, once described the presidency as “the most unpleasant job in existence,” and right now Mr. Obama is finding out the sad and sobering truth in that statement. But it was Kennedy’s immediate Democratic predecessor, Harry Truman, whose perspective Mr. Obama needs right now. “Being a president is like riding a tiger,” the 33rd president said. “A man has to keep riding or be swallowed.” The President may indeed ride out this storm. But, as he has discovered, charm will not do it. Above all, Mr. Obama has portrayed himself as a man undeterred by difficulty. He now has to return to his own roots, which is to say the cool man of competence. Obamacare, the remainder of his term, his historical legacy – they all depend on it. If he is to ride into history as more than the first black president he must prove above all that he was competent to be president.
OBAMA HAS NO HOPE TO FIX FRACTURED AMERICA
Michael Goodwin
New York Post, Nov. 24, 2013
As he climbed the political heap, a young Barack Obama roused audiences with promises to unite the nation. He was a Senate candidate in 2004 when he told the Democratic national convention, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is a United States of America.” In 2007, he declared early in his presidential run that “I don’t want to pit red America against blue America. I want to be the president of the United States of America.” A year later, after he won the Iowa caucus, he promised, “We are not a collection of red states and blue states. We are the United States of America.” And on the November night in 2008 when he was elected president, he insisted his victory proved “we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and always will be, the United States of America.”
Oh, well, that was then. Reading those “yes we can” speeches now is like gawking at museum relics. Obama’s promise to heal a polarized nation has proven to be as big a lie as his promise that you can keep your health insurance. America is now so divided and demoralized that there is no hope Obama can fix it. As last week proved, he doesn’t even pretend to try any more. On the same day that he supported his party’s move to neuter Republican power in the Senate by restricting the filibuster, 37 news organizations complained that the White House was acting like the Soviet Union in manipulating public opinion.
Journalists argued that Obama aides block news photographers from official events, then use government workers to take pictures and videos of him for social-media sites. “This is just like Tass,” a New York Times photographer told his paper, referring to the Soviet propaganda arm. “It’s like government-controlled use of the public image of the president.” Meanwhile, Obama met with a gaggle of far-left pundits to drum up support as he battles record-low polls. The developments are snapshots in the collapse of a presidency. More and more people are realizing that Obama’s idea of unity is that everybody must agree with him, and that he has no tolerance for those who don’t. Yet he responds to this awakening by digging himself deeper into a partisan hole. Step away from the shovel, Mr. President.
Historians, I believe, will conclude that his refusal to roll up his sleeves and honestly engage critics was a character flaw that morphed into a political strategy. Despite the flowery promises to unite the country, or maybe because of them, he boxed himself into a pose of being above politics. His aggrandizing self-regard and contempt for others leaves him incapable of routine compromise. Confronted with problems, he defaults to one of two options: total domination or total surrender. The result is that he is a Caesar wannabe at home and a Chamberlain abroad. As he stiff-arms Republicans and most of the media, he seems ready to accept a nuclear-armed Iran. Even as his support falls below 40 percent and a majority say they don’t trust him, he paints himself as the victim. He defended his party’s decision to end the long Senate tradition of requiring 60 votes for most appointments by saying Republicans are determined to “obstruct everything . . . Just to refight the results of an election.” See, it’s all about him. Never mind that other presidents struggled with the same rules. Never mind that opponents, including some Democrats, have legitimate differences with him and want him to work harder to build a consensus for the good of the country. And never mind his obvious hypocrisy on changing the rules. In his first year in the Senate, with the GOP holding the majority, he warned that one-party rule would mean “the bitterness and the gridlock will only get worse.” That Barack Obama was a man to admire. He made history by promising to restore Americans’ trust in each other and their government. “I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree,” he vowed on election night in 2008. Five years later, Americans finally are being honest with themselves. They now realize that Barack Obama doesn’t exist anymore, if he ever did.
Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post, Nov. 28, 2013
For all the gnashing of teeth over the lack of comity and civility in Washington, the real problem is not etiquette but the breakdown of political norms, legislative and constitutional. Such as the one just spectacularly blown up in the Senate. To get three judges onto a coveted circuit court, frustrated Democrats abolished the filibuster for executive appointments and (non-Supreme Court) judicial nominations.
The problem is not the change itself. It’s fine that a president staffing his administration should need 51 votes rather than 60. Doing so for judicial appointments, which are for life, is a bit dicier. Nonetheless, for about 200 years the filibuster was nearly unknown in blocking judicial nominees. So we are really just returning to an earlier norm. The violence to political norms here consisted in how that change was executed. By brute force — a near party-line vote of 52 to 48. This was a disgraceful violation of more than two centuries of precedent. If a bare majority can change the fundamental rules that govern an institution, then there are no rules. Senate rules today are whatever the majority decides they are that morning.
What distinguishes an institution from a flash mob is that its rules endure. They can be changed, of course. But only by significant supermajorities. That’s why constitutional changes require two-thirds of both houses plus three-quarters of the states. If we could make constitutional changes by majority vote, there would be no Constitution. As of today, the Senate effectively has no rules. Congratulations, Harry Reid. Finally, something you will be remembered for. Barack Obama may be remembered for something similar. His violation of the proper limits of executive power has become breathtaking. It’s not just making recess appointments when the Senate is in session. It’s not just unilaterally imposing a law Congress had refused to pass — the Dream Act — by brazenly suspending large sectionsof the immigration laws.
We’ve now reached a point where a flailing president, desperate to deflect the opprobrium heaped upon him for the false promise that you could keep your health plan if you wanted to, calls a hasty news conference urging both insurers and the states to reinstate millions of such plans. Except that he is asking them to break the law. His own law. Under Obamacare, no insurer may issue a policy after 2013 that does not meet the law’s minimum coverage requirements. These plans were canceled because they do not. The law remains unchanged. The regulations governing that law remain unchanged. Nothing is changed except for a president proposing to unilaterally change his own law from the White House press room. That’s banana republic stuff, except that there the dictator proclaims from the presidential balcony.
Remember how for months Democrats denounced Republicans for daring to vote to defund or postpone Obamacare? Saboteurs! Terrorists! How dare you alter “the law of the land.” This was nonsense from the beginning. Every law is subject to revision and abolition if the people think it turned out to be a bad idea. Even constitutional amendments can be repealed — and have been (see Prohibition). After indignant denunciation of Republicans for trying to amend “the law of the land” constitutionally (i.e. in Congress assembled), Democrats turn utterly silent when the president lawlessly tries to do so by executive fiat.
Nor is this the first time. The president wakes up one day and decides to unilaterally suspend the employer mandate, a naked invasion of Congress’s exclusive legislative prerogative, enshrined in Article I. Not a word from the Democrats. Nor now regarding the blatant usurpation of trying to restore canceled policies that violate explicit Obamacare coverage requirements. And worse. When Congress tried to make Obama’s “fix” legal — i.e., through legislation — he opposed it. He even said he would veto it. Imagine: vetoing the very bill that would legally enact his own illegal fix.
At rallies, Obama routinely says he has important things to do and he’s not going to wait for Congress. Well, amending a statute after it’s been duly enacted is something a president may not do without Congress. It’s a gross violation of his Article II duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. A Senate with no rules. A president without boundaries. One day, when a few bottled-up judicial nominees and a malfunctioning health-care Web site are barely a memory, we will still be dealing with the toxic residue of this outbreak of authoritative lawlessness.
On Topic
Pew Survey Shows Americans Reject Obama’s Foreign Policy; 6-out-of-10 Believe Iran Can’t Be Trusted: Joshua Levitt, Algemeiner, Dec. 4, 2013 —U.S. President Barack Obama scored less than a 40% approval rating for nine of 10 foreign policy issues posed to the American public in a new Pew Research Center survey released on Tuesday.
Low-Information Leadership: Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 3, 2013 — The president’s problem right now is that people think he’s smart. They think he’s in command, aware of pitfalls and complexities. That’s his reputation: He’s risen far on his brains. They think he is sophisticated. That is his problem in the health insurance debacle.
Obamacare-Speak: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, Nov. 21, 2013 — The Obama administration once gave us “man-caused disasters” for acts of terrorism and “workplace violence” for the Fort Hood shootings. Now it has trumped those past linguistic contortions by changing words to mask the Obamacare disaster.
Congress: Rein in O: Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2013 —In all likelihood, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (DNev.) will proceed with a vote on sanctions after the Thanksgiving break. The question, however, is what will go into a new sanctions bill.
An Executive Without Energy: William Galston, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 26, 2013 — On Jan. 28, 1986, over the objections of engineers who described a high probability of catastrophic failure, senior NASA managers authorized the launch of the Challenger. The shuttle exploded 73 seconds into its flight. In the last week of September 2013, a "pre-flight checklist" indicated that 41 of the 91 Healthcare.gov functions for which a key contractor was responsible were not working.
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