Spot on:
So we have seen Four Crises as handled by The Won in the last 6 months: The Fort Hood Massacre, Christmas Day Bomber, the Times Square Bomber, and the BP Oil Spill.
The president has underestimated the problem each time out.
Not all of these things are his fault — or the federal government’s. But each called for a reaction that was greater and later than the president gave.
The Christmas Day bomber went through Amsterdam security, not ours. The Times Square Bomber was a U.S. citizen. BP is responsible for its rig.
The presidential reaction in each case was in slow motion. The president failed to quickly see that this was an emergency and that cost him the ability to lead.
We saw this first with the jihadist major who slaughtered 13 people at Fort Hood — which was the government’s fault; we should never chose PC over security.
That day, the president came out of a meeting with Native Americans (photo op of the day; all presidents do this) and gave a press conference. His first words were not holy crap, there has been a massacre at Fort Hood, but rather a “shout out” to one of the participants in his photo op of the day.
The president was clueless as to the gravity of the situation. His “shout out” was inappropriate and it made the deaths of 13 people less important than the feelings of one tribal leader.
So was anyone surprised when he continued to vacation for 4 days before holding a brief press conference on the Christmas Day bomber?
The Times Square bombing came while he was playing the fool for the press at a snooty dinner in Washington. I don’t fault him that and staying out of the picture was fine because Mayor Bloomberg stepped up to the plate and New York City handled the matter, thank you very much.
Obama should learn from Bloomberg. The lessons:
1. Being cool is not always cool. There are times when you have to grab the megaphone and say, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
2. It is not all about you. Yes, the news bumped the Photo Op Of The Day off Page One. Go with the flow. Try to keep up.
3. Know what is going on. If you fired Elizabeth Birmbaum, say so. If not, say so. A leader does not say “I don’t know” when asked about the status of the director of the pivotal agency in an emergency.
The president’s mettle has been tested four times now. I cannot give him a Gentleman’s D on any of them.
He needs someone in the administration who is willing to tell him, hey, this is a big deal. Because he has a hard time figuring that out on his own.
Those sentiments are also coming from the Left:
At a press conference, Obama said Malia had asked him, as he shaved, “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?” (That hole should be plugged with a junk-shot of Glenn Beck, who crudely mocked the adorable Malia.) Oddly, the good father who wrote so poignantly about growing up without a daddy scorns the paternal aspect of the presidency.
In the campaign, Obama’s fight flagged to the point that his donors openly upbraided him. In the Oval, he waited too long to express outrage and offer leadership on A.I.G., the banks, the bonuses, the job loss and mortgage fears, the Christmas underwear bomber, the death panel scare tactics, the ugly name-calling of Tea Party protesters.
Too often it feels as though Barry is watching from a balcony, reluctant to enter the fray until the clamor of the crowd forces him to come down. The pattern is perverse. The man whose presidency is rooted in his ability to inspire withholds that inspiration when it is most needed.
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Obama invented himself against all odds and repeated parental abandonment, and he worked hard to regiment his emotions. But now that can come across as imperviousness and inflexibility. He wants to run the agenda; he doesn’t want the agenda to run him. Once you become president, though, there’s no way to predict what your crises will be.
F.D.R. achieved greatness not by means of imposing his temperament and intellect on the world but by reacting to what the world threw at him.
For five weeks, it looked as though Obama considered the gushing that became the worst oil spill in U.S. history a distraction, like a fire alarm going off in the middle of a law seminar he was teaching. He’ll deal with it, but he’s annoyed because it’s not on his syllabus.
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Just as President Clinton once protested to reporters that he was still “relevant,” President Obama had to protest to reporters last week that he has feelings.
He seemed to tune out a bit after the exhausting battle over health care, with the air of someone who says to himself: “Oh, man, that was a heavy lift. I’m taking a break.”
He’s spending the holiday weekend in Chicago when he should be commemorating Memorial Day here with the families of troops killed in battle and with veterans at Arlington Cemetery.
Republican senators who had a contentious lunch with the president last week described him as whiny, thin-skinned and in over his head, and there was extreme Democratic angst at the White House’s dilatory and deferential attitude on the spill.
Even more than with the greedy financiers and arrogant carmakers, it was important to offend and slap back the deceptive malefactors at BP.
Obama and top aides who believe in his divinity make a mistake to dismiss complaints of his aloofness as Washington white noise. He treats the press as a nuisance rather than examining his own inability to encapsulate Americans’ feelings.
“The media may get tired of the story, but we will not,” he told Gulf Coast residents when he visited on Friday. Actually, if it weren’t for the media, the president would probably never have woken up from his torpor and flown down there.
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