Obama the Great (or Not)

Another Failed Presidency
By Geoffrey P. Hunt

Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency
since Woodrow Wilson. In the modern era, we've seen several failed
presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed presidents have one
strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of
course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming
traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet
his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant
overture to China.

But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing
everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in
forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy
Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing
because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed
loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because
he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of
American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is
failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his
intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.

But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president
riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his
tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free
fall. In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point
advantage. This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?

No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about
himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised
or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't
connect with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the
rest of us. All successful presidents have a narrative about the American
character that intersects with their own where they display a command of

history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that
resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We
admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who
seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. Presidents we admire are
aspirational peers, even those whose politics don't align exactly with our
own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, Reagan.

But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing
about economics, is historically illiterate, and woefully small minded for
the size of the task-- all contributory of course. It's that he's not one
of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like
a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he
doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense..
His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't
add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in
don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience.

In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this
man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers,
banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital
administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green
job. Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For
those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were not
offended, you just didn't give me enough time; if only I'd had a second
term, I could have offended you too."

Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a
useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of
the legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get
voted out next year. With a new Congress, there's always hope of
legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after
that.

Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them. The coyotes howl
but the wagon train keeps rolling along.