Matt Bai at The New York Times calls Obama the “shuffle President” – as in iPod shuffle, the name is not meant to be offensive.
Barack Obama is a born storyteller, which makes it all the more confounding that as president he refuses to inhabit a neat political narrative. Obama’s themes are clear enough (salvaging the American economy, reversing the Bush years), but his legislative priorities seem to rotate in and out like so many suitcases on a conveyor belt. One day his presidency hinges on health care, then he’s lobbying for a cap-and-trade plan to reduce carbon emissions and then he’s out there trying to re-regulate the financial world or sell a new treaty with the Russians. “An administration about everything is an administration about nothing” is the way the conservative columnist Peggy Noonan put it in The Wall Street Journal. Colin Powell made a similar point, telling John King of CNN, “I think one of the cautions that has to be given to the president – and I’ve talked to some of his people about this – is that you can’t have so many things on the table that you can’t absorb it all.”
Some of this itinerancy must be attributed to the sheer scope of the wreckage Obama inherited. When you’ve got failing banks and corporate giants, two ongoing wars, melting icecaps and mountainous health care costs, it’s hard to see what gets pushed to the margins. It’s also true, though, that Obama’s style reflects, whether he means it to or not, a cultural shift on the importance of narrative. Americans acclimated to clicking around hundreds of cable channels or Web pages experience the world less chronologically than their parents did. The most popular books now – business guides like “Good to Great” or social explorations like “The Tipping Point” – allow the casual reader to absorb their insights in random order or while skimming whole chapters.
Bull. Much of the “wreckage” is a direct result of Obama’s policies. Unemployment is soaring after Obama assured us that a breakneck passage of his ”stimulus” would keep unemployment at 8%. It is at 9.5% today. Obama assured us he had a plan to save people from foreclosure. Ask the 1.5 million people in foreclosure this year how that worked out.
For heaven’s sake, India just told Obama to stuff it when the administration tried to ram global warming nonsense down that nation’s throat.
Obama is not in iPod shuffle mode – he is in completely random mode. As in he has not got a clue how to deal with any of this. So he bounces, clueless, from one crisis to another, mouthing the same hope-changey campaign rhetoric. But solving nothing whatsoever.
Spare me the “sheer scope of the wreckage” bravo sierra.
While there WAS a genuine banking crises (curiuosly under-investigated then or now, BTW), the fact is, that crises was largely under control, Iraq AND the “war on Terror” was essentially won, foreign policy was stable and largely favorable, a unemployment had not kicked in ernest, and as for “global warming”, the less said, the better (literally).
As I have said elswhere, Obama has zero executive experience, and don’t think he has any knowledge of or care for American history, so all that he has are the leftist shibboleths of academia and Reverend Wright. That is where ALL of his “gut hunches” are going to come from. And thus those hunches will be catastrphically wrong, again and again and again.
Maybe, just maybe, if God still cares about the USA, and I hope he does, a clear message will be sent: Obama is EXACTLY what the academic/cultural/media left has dreamed about. He is their ideal, their end result.
And this is where it gets us. Are you listening, Generation Owe? You have been lied to… big time.
I’m not sure that the bouncing from issue to issue and crisis to crisis isn’t a deliberate plan to keep anyone from focusing on what he’s doing in any one area for too long. This random juggling act may just be specifically designed to confuse everyone just long enough for him to ram one agenda item after another down our throats while we’re looking in another direction. I’d would rather that I be wrong about this and Gaius be right – that he just has no clue how to be a leader or a problem solver. But this little voice in the back of my head keeps nagging at me that the Obamessiah may just be brighter than we have been giving him credit for. And that scares the bejassus out of me.
martian, you are afraid of something very much worth fearing.
But I do think Obama’s smarts are all surface. The fact is, he has left himself no wriggle room here. He essentially gambled that the leftist BS he has marinated in for 30 years works anywhere outside of coffeeshops and faculty rooms, and it doesn’t. He has not prepared any fallback positions that preserve his credibility, and and he is so convinced of his own wonderfulness that he thinks a big national speech in March of 2009 has the same impact as one in October of 2009. After all, in the words of Han Solo… “Hey….. It’s me!” “I am so wonderful, how can they ever tire of me?”
It is not despite “hey, it’s me” that he is in trouble, it is because of it. That WILL work as long as he keeps genuinely pulling the rabbit out of the hat, over and over. Were that the case, the strategy you fear would work.
But he is glaringly turning out to be all hat and no rabbit.
(If my words make anyone complacent, please believe the exact opposite of what I say, and act accordingly. The left will NEVER stop pushing. Ever. So too must their opponents.)
Andrew, you do have some valid points. Especially where his ego is concerned. He has no fallback position because he thinks all he has to do is make another speech where he substantially changes what he said before and everyone will stop remembering what he said before and start believing what he says now. He has some justification for this – it has worked for him so far with ample backing from the Democratic Party Propaganda Ministry (mainstream mnedia). He did this all during the campaign and it worked.
Unfortunately for him, even with the colusion of the DPPM (MSM) people are starting to notice when he changes things. Take the stimulus. He and his disciples insisted that it HAD to be passed immediately because it would have an immediate effect on the economy and start saving jobs within weeks of its passing. Well, we know how that worked out – it fell flat on its face and accomplished NOTHING. So, now he says it was always planned that it would take effect gradually over a 2 year period and the DPPM (MSM) are dutifully parroting this idea. The only problem is that there are now millions of people unemployed who were employed when the package was passed and expected that it would save their jobs like the great Obamessiah said it would. They are all sitting there idle and saying to themselves and anyone else who will listen, “Wait a minute. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He said my job was going to be saved. And now he’s saying that he never said that? I heard him. I supported him because he said my job would be saved. I won’t make that mistake again.”