Worrying about Obama
Robert: Tom Friedman has a great column out in Sunday’s Times that identifies Obama’s main problem so far as his failure to construct a unifying patriotic narrative out of all the policies and positions he has put forth so far.
Friedman is onto something. It was inevitable, I suppose, that Obama would crash at some point and come down to earth like the rest of us. And I don’t think he’s totally lost the magic. But something has been lost since the summer and the uproar over health care reform, and death panels and all of that.
Obama and his advisers are sly like foxes, so it may be that in the long term he will be positioned just right. But right now, something is missing, wouldn’t you agree? It looks like Congress will pass some form of health care reform, giving coverage to more people, but it’s been a messy and ugly and drawn-out process.
I don’t think Americans really like drawn-out, messy debates on legislation. For all our talk about democracy, seeing Congress at work is something a lot of people seem profoundly uncomfortable with. The long Congressional debate (the public sausage-making as it were) also punctures the illusion of the president as the universal omnipotent leader who can single-handedly change a nation’s destiny.
What do you think? Maybe it’s not quite time for Democrats to panic, but I’m feeling quite uneasy and a little scared.
Paula: I have to say that I agree with you here. For quite a while I was holding on to the notion that people had unrealistic expectations about Obama and that it was their problem, not his. But lately, like you, I’ve begun to grow uneasy.
I am dismayed on two fronts: health care, where I do feel that a more forceful line is required, and Afghanistan, where I begin to worry that points made during the campaign have taken on a life of their own. In order to make the point that Bush had attacked the wrong target, he made Afghanistan the antidote to Iraq and simply got himself into a new quagmire. This, in a sense, is what happened to Bush, as much as I hate to draw a comparison. He started by supporting a position for a variety of reasons and then the position hardened because, well, he was now associated with it.
In a sense, I wish Obama’s approach to health care and to Afghanistan could be reversed: that he were more hard-line about health care and more flexible about Afghanistan — or perhaps, I’m simply wishing that he could still exude the sort of sagacity that I associated with him during the campaign.
Finally, I have to say that even his speechifying has begun to worry me — there is a repetitive sing-song aspect to it that has begun to grate; it suggests he isn’t able to emphasize and subordinate, only to sermonize. I know I am being extremely hard on him here — and perhaps it’s a function of the degree to which I was enamoured of him before. In the end, I wonder if my Hillary-supporting friends were right — is he too young and untried?
As for Hillary — she seems to be doing an unusually good job. I was never a big fan of hers, but I have to say that she seems to have managed just the right balance of talking tough and wearing a powder blue head scarf.
Robert: He is young and untested. But he is at once extremely confident and yet humble enough to encourage and follow honest counsel by his advisers. And most remarkable, he doesn’t seem to have an ounce of pettiness in him. I think this will help him in the long run. And he’s got to avoid escalating in Afghanistan!
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It does my good to see two more ardent Obama supporters start to wake up.
I do have to shake my head in wonder at the the power of self-delusion that causes statements like:
“And most remarkable, he doesn’t seem to have an ounce of pettiness in him.”
Obama’s attempted demonization of Fox News, a puerile feud that forced even his most ardent media supporters to stand united against him, was as petty and childish an act as I have seen in a president.
Then there is the snub of General McChrystal; an act akin to a small child sticking his fingers in his ears and chanting “Lalalalalala” in a vain attempt to avoid hearing bad news.
As for being “humble enough to encourage and follow counsel by his advisers”; what you see as humility, I see as a lack of focus and of true commitment to anything other than self-promotion.
We almost agree on the subject of Hillary Clinton. As much as it pains me to admit, she has not been the unmitigated disaster I had foreseen. Though she has been far from effective thus far, it is more a comment on Obama’s misuse of the office she holds than it is on her abilities.
The “demonization” (an overly dramatic and therefore inaccurate term, but let it pass) of Fox News is a mere nothing and scarcely unheard of in the history of media avoidance. FDR used to make the reporters he didn’t like stand at the back of the room in press conferences, which amounted to being sent to Outer Mongolia in that era of more primitive communications technology. Nixon had his enemies list, made up heavily of press people. Hoover consistently avoided members of press organizations he considered unfriendly.
The “snub” of McChrystal is, likewise, a tempest in a teapot, but also not without precedent. The fault is entirely McChrystal’s for trying to get out in front of his commander-in-chief. A directly similar, though of course far more dramatic, instance of this is MacArthur’s publicly and repeatedly announcing policy contrary to the administration’s during the Korean War. In that case the commander-in-chief, Truman, quite rightly fired him.
There is entirely too much reverence for military brass in this country, sez this Army veteran and father and father-in-law of two serving military members.
Preacher,
Obama is a self-interested politician. I do not deny that. But when I speak of his lack of pettiness, I compare him to say, William Jefferson Clinton or George Walker Bush.
In Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial” he quotes Republican after Republican speaking about how juvenile and petty George W. was. Dick Armey, the former majority leader and a pretty staunch conservativem, told Woodward about an incident that brought this all home to him.
Armey and Bill Clinton basically hated each other. But they would put that aside when meeting. In fact, Armey started this ritual whenever he went to the White House to see Clinton. He would take a name tag and hand it to Clinton and Clinton would sign it. Armey would then leave the White House and hand it to some visiting citizen outside the White House. The visitor would be delighted and Armey sort of enjoyed this little exchange.
George W. arrives in the Oval Office. Armey comes to meet with him. Armey hands Bush or one of his staffers a name tag and says, Hey, I had this little thing with President Clinton. Could you please sign the tag. W. says, no way, I ain’t signing no tag. Armey could not believe it. To Armey, this just reflected the guy’s arrogance, stubbornness, pettiness, insecurity and a host of other flaws. And remember: Armey is a conservative from Texas.
Obama’s appointment of Hillary Clinton to State, his appointment of Robert Gates to Defense, his relationship with Joe Biden. The man is not insecure and is not petty.
Refusing to meet with a network that routinely challenges your citizenship status (an act of xenophobia and racism if you ask me) is not petty in my book. It’s reasonable. Anyway, his advisers and Fox will talk and at some point, he’ll grant interviews with them. For all his faults, he does not hold grudges very long.
I am not surprised that you completely missed the point.
Obama and his staff were being petty and short-sighted by selecting Fox news for censure. No, he is not the first to do so, but this isn’t the 1940’s either. Kennedy got away with screwing anything in a skirt while Clinton got lambasted for a single, plump intern… times change. The proof is that the rest of the media got frightened enough to make a stand against the White House and force them to back off, an act that would have been unthinkable in previous eras.
As for comparing McArthur to McChrystal, you have got to be kidding me. The differences far outnumber the few similarities between the generals, the wars and the politics of the time.
I don’t care if you are an Army Vet, so am I and so is every eligible male in my family for the last 200 years, as well as no small number of the females.
Obama made a big deal about the mistakes Bush made in Iraq; how Afghanistan was the real battlefield, how he was going to take charge etc etc (ad nauseum), and it is the height of folly to leave the commander sitting for 3 months, waiting for a meeting while we have troops actively engaged in the ground. Is it a surprise that McChrystal finally went public in an attempt to get Obama off the pot?
It’s MacArthur, but I’m not surprised.
Preacher,
General McChrystal serves under the command of the Secretary of Defense and the Commander in Chief.
The role of generals is generally not to shape policy. He has no business going public with his recommendation to Obama. The President tapped him for the job and his job is to make recommendations privately to the president and to carry out the orders as given by the commander in chief.
Secretary of Defense rightly rebuked McChrystal for speaking out of turn on Afghanistan.
Where was McChrystal and the other generals on the Iraq War debate when it was clear we had an idiot in the White House who knew not one wit (nor cared to know) about strategy and war and Iraq? Where were the public criticisms of a strategy that needlessly resulted in the maiming of tens of thousands of young Americans?
Thousands died, and tens of thousands of American lives were hurt by the incompetence of the Bush Administration in recklessly waging that war. That was the time for generals to publicly speak out if they wanted to be bold. But as for McChrystal’s views on the importance of Afghanistan, frankly no one asked him his views on the strategic importance of the war in Afghanistan.
He spoke out of turn, and if he does so again, I can guarantee that Gates and Obama will relieve him of his command there and rightfully so.
Amen, Robert, exactly. If McChrystal has objections and suggestions, he makes them through the chain of command, not outside it. We can’t have active-duty military commanders voicing contrary opinions all over the place like MacArthur. And like John K. Singlaub, whom Jimmy Carter rightly sacked for publicly criticizing American policy in Korea and failing to respect the president’s authority as commander-in-chief.
As you say, if McChrystal does it again, he should be tossed out on his ear. He will then be lionized, as MacArthur and Singlaub were, by right-wing Republicans and urged to run for president.
“Armey hands Bush or one of his staffers a name tag and says, Hey, I had this little thing with President Clinton. Could you please sign the tag. W. says, no way, I ain’t signing no tag. Armey could not believe it. To Armey, this just reflected the guy’s arrogance, stubbornness, pettiness, insecurity and a host of other flaws.”
Seriously? Based on a man’s refusal to jump into someone else’s game/ritual on a moment’s notice, the person who didn’t get what he wanted brands him as all those things, including “a host of other flaws”? Was there any more to this story, or shall we just take Armey’s word for it, without wondering why he was so verbosely appalled at what seems such a little thing to someone who is not already personally invested in slamming GWB just for being mentioned?