Barack Obama: A One-Trick Pony

A bit less than a year ago, I posted piece entitled Is Barack Obama a One-Trick Pony? I raised this question with an eye to three thumbsuckers that had recently appeared – one on Politico by veteran commentator Elizabeth Drew; another, entitled Amateur Hour at the White House, written by Leslie Gelb for The Daily Beast; and a third, drawing on the remarks of these two well-known Democratic scribes, published in The Wall Street Journal by Peggy Noonan.

Noonan had two things to say – first, that no one among her liberal acquaintances really loved Barack Obama the way so many Democrats had loved Bill Clinton; and, second, that the Democrats were wrong to think that passing his healthcare reform would help him. In her view, the passage of “such a poor piece of legislation” would, in fact, do him almost irreparable harm. Moreover, she added, “There is the growing perception of incompetence, of the inability to run the machine of government. This, with Americans, is worse than Obama’s rebranding as a leader who governs from the left. Americans demand baseline competence. If he comes to be seen as Jimmy Carter was, that the job was bigger than the man, that will be the end.”

To this, I added, “The Democrats are getting what they asked for.”

In 2004, they tried a trick. If we nominate a man who won the Purple Heart in Vietnam, they thought, we will win. Never mind that John Kerry disgraced himself in the aftermath of his service in Vietnam, making unjust charges against his brothers-in-arms and resolutely thereafter refusing to apologize to those whom he had slandered. Never mind that he had no executive experience. Never mind that, as a US Senator, he was – to say the least – undistinguished. They wanted to win; and they gave not a thought to what sort of President he might be.

In 2008, the Democrats did the same thing. They had on their hands an inexperienced, recently minted US Senator from Illinois who was – as Joe Biden put it in a candid remark that typifies his propensity for speaking his mind without first thinking about the consequences – “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Never mind, they thought, Obama’s long-standing connections with William Ayers, the unrepentant mastermind of a domestic terrorist bombing campaign in the 1970s. Never mind Obama’s close association with the racist demagogue Jeremiah Wright. Never mind his lack of executive experience, his unfamiliarity with the private sector, and his ignorance of the ways of Washington. With the help of the pliable press, he could be sold – and the Americans would congratulate themselves on their lack of racial prejudice if they voted for him.

“Now,” I then wrote, “comes the reckoning. That is one problem. The other is that Obama’s one trick cannot often be played. As we have seen over the last few months, as he has tried to play this trick over and over and over again, the more we see of him, the less we are impressed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt never held his fireside chats more than three times a year. How many times has Obama demanded airtime from the networks in the last ten months? I shudder to think.” And to this, I added,

There is a third problem. Once in office, presidents are judged more by what they do than by what they say and how well they say it, and Barack Obama is in the process of doing a great deal of harm. His “stimulus” bill was a transparent act of grand larceny, stealing from the future in order to enrich Democratic Party constituencies now. His unlawful handling of GM and Chrysler defrauded the bondholders, rewarded the intransigents in the UAW who were largely responsible for the auto-makers’ decline, and made it harder for American corporations to borrow money.

And every version of the health care reform that he backs threatens to bankrupt the country and force us to raise taxes on a grand scale. If investors remain on the sidelines, if employers are reluctant to hire, and if, in consequence, the economic recovery is anemic and virtually jobless, it is to a considerable extent Obama’s fault.

The simple fact that he has done nothing to rein in a patronage-mad Democratic congress is a sign of his fecklessness as President. As David Ignatius points out in today’s Washington Post, in 2010, there is going to be hell to pay – especially in Democratic strongholds with especially high unemployment, such as Michigan, Nevada, Rhode Island, and California.

Hell has now been paid – not, thanks in part to the incompetence of Jon Cornyn and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, in full measure – but in sufficient measure. And what has Barack Obama learned from the process? To judge by the interview taped for 60 minutes on Friday, nothing at all. According to Barack Obama, he and his party have been punished because of a failure of communication on his part.

When Steve Kroft in the interview pressed him regarding the unpopularity of the massive expansion in the federal government that he had overseen, Obama responded that “one of the reasons the electorate has become disenchanted with him was his failure to properly explain his policies and persuade people to agree with them.” Consider the following exchange:

Kroft: There is this feeling, Particularly among people who are among your most ardent supporters, who feel a little disappointed that they think that you’ve lost your mojo. That you’ve lost your ability, that touch you had during the campaign, to inspire and lead. Everybody in Washington writes about a sort of aloofness that you have. How do you respond to that?

Obama: You know, I think that over the course of two years we were so busy and so focused on getting a bunch of stuff done that we stopped paying attention to the fact that leadership isn’t just legislation. That it’s a matter of persuading people. And giving them confidence and bringing them together. And setting a tone. And making an argument that people can understand. And I think that we haven’t always been successful at that. . . . I take personal responsibility for that. And it’s something that I’ve got to examine carefully as I go forward.

News junkies will recognize the trope. This is the sort of thing that Barack Obama told George Stephanopoulos after the election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in January. It is what he told Peter Baker of The New York Times a month ago. What he thinks he has learned in the course of his education as President is “that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington. It is not enough to be supremely sure that he is right if no one else agrees with him.”

“Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told me, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”

“What is striking about Obama’s self-diagnosis,” Baker reported, “is that by his own rendering, the figure of inspiration from 2008 neglected the inspiration after his election. He didn’t stay connected to the people who put him in office in the first place. Instead, he simultaneously disappointed those who considered him the embodiment of a new progressive movement and those who expected him to reach across the aisle to usher in a postpartisan age.”

In short, the fears that I expressed in late November, 2009 have turned out to on the mark. Newt Gingrich once remarked that the most impressive thing about Bill Clinton was that he never stopped learning. By way of contrast, the most impressive thing about President Obama is his incorrigibility. He really is a one-trick pony incapable of learning anything new. He and his party have just suffered electoral defeat on a scale they have not seen in more than seventy years, but there is not going to be any change of course. Instead, the President is going to deploy his teleprompter and lecture us over and over again. The endless campaign – with its vapid rhetoric – is going to go on and on and on.

If I were John Boehner or Mitch McConnell, I would be pinching myself. Who could believe their luck? The only thing that it would take to complete their good fortune would be the return to prominence of Nancy Pelosi as minority leader in the House of Representatives – for that, coupled with Harry Reid’s continued ascendancy in the Senate, would be a signal that the Democrats have decided over the next two years to wage an all-out partisan war.

In sum – thanks to the unholy trinity of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid – what we can expect in 2012 is a replay of 2010. Second time, same verse, a whole lot louder, and, for the Democrats, a whole lot worse – for this time twenty-three of the thirty-three Senate seats up for grabs will be occupied by Democrats or by Independents who caucus with them, and many of these are located in territory where the party of Abraham Lincoln is now in command.

If the Republicans gird their loins; stick to their guns; avoid compromising deals with the Obama administration; continue to make a principled argument for low taxes, limited government, and fiscal responsibility; and nominate for the Presidency a woman or man who is capable of eloquently articulating that argument, and who has demonstrated executive temperament of the sort I explored in a series of posts – here, here, here, here, and here – the realignment I began forecasting in early August, 2009 will become a reality.