As the Obama administration marks 18 months in power today, no one should be terribly surprised that it is the hardest-Left U.S. government since that of FDR. For those who paid attention, Obama’s hyperliberal U.S. Senate record pierced like a dive light through the squid ink of Hope and Change that Obama squirted at anyone who demanded programmatic specifics. (At 95.5 percent in 2007, according to the National Journal, Obama was the Senate’s No. 1 Left-liberal.)
However, after Obama’s nearly flawless campaign (rattled by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racist rants, but little else), the big surprise one and a half years after Obama’s momentous and truly moving inauguration is the staggering incompetence of his government. Like some Americans, I expected a nanny-state, socialist agenda from Obama & Co. However, I thought that at least they would manage things smoothly and professionally, in somewhat refreshing contrast to the general ineptitude of the detached, tongue-tied Bush-Rove years. Instead, what America and the world have witnessed is an extravaganza of frequent gaffes, blunders, and catastrophes:
February 2009 brought news that Obama had shipped off to the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., a bust that former prime minister Tony Blair had presented to Pres. George W. Bush soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks. This was not a sculpture of Mr. Bean, but rather of Winston Churchill. Among other things, this legendary statesman helped drive Adolf Hitler to suicide. If Obama dislikes Churchill, he could have moved the bust from the Oval Office to the Cabinet Room, the State Department, or even the Smithsonian, especially after the British offered to let the U.S. government keep it for four more years. Instead, Obama exhibited the kind of discourtesy that any third grader would avoid: The last thing a nine-year-old would do is send a gift back to the giver. If one doesn’t care for a gift, one just smiles, accepts it, and shoves it in a closet. Obama spurned that basic social grace and, instead, kicked hot gravel into the eyes of America’s closest ally, alongside whom we currently are fighting in Afghanistan. Wasn’t Obama supposed to be the antidote to George Bush, reputedly the self-absorbed amateur who alienated America’s friends?
The Obama administration decided to update photographs of Air Force One in action. Why not show the presidential jet flying over Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty? Great idea! Team Obama could have arranged to take those pictures during a scheduled presidential trip, and invited the public to witness the excitement from below. Instead, on April 27, 2009, Air Force One flew to New York sans the commander-in-chief and started circling Lady Liberty while “posing” with a fighter jet hot on its tail. Manhattanites ran for their lives, fearing that another September 11–style assault was underway. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who got no advance notice of this plan, called it “an ill-considered, badly conceived, insensitive photo op — with the taxpayers’ money.”
Obama leapt into the controversy over Cambridge, Mass., police sergeant James Crowley’s arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. (Crowley had responded to a call about a break-in; it turned out that Gates owned the house into which he and a cab driver had forced their way; Gates became belligerent about being confronted by the officer, and Crowley arrested him for disorderly conduct.) As this case unfolded, Obama opined that Crowley had “acted stupidly.” The ensuing ethnic uproar made Americans hot and bothered, as such imbroglios usually do.
Obama then had to cool things down by wasting his time and political capital hosting a July 30, 2009, “Beer Summit” to reconcile Gates and Crowley in the White House Rose Garden. Jimmy Carter crafted real peace between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. Bill Clinton engineered a symbolic handshake between Israel’s Itzhak Rabin and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat. Obama got Harvard’s Gates and the Cambridge police department’s Crowley to lift their beer mugs together. Change, indeed!
Van Jones — who, in his own words, “was a communist” and was “trying to be a revolutionary” as recently as 1992 — served as White House green-jobs “czar.” He resigned last September 5 after his name surfaced on a 2004 petition suggesting that the George W. Bush administration “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war,” and soon after apologizing for calling Republicans “a**holes” in a Feb. 11, 2009, speech.
The Jones flap highlighted Team Obama’s insufficient scrutiny of some presidential appointees.
“He was not as thoroughly vetted as other administration officials,” one White House staffer told the Washington Post. “It’s fair to say there were unknowns.”
“He’s got every right in the world to be a self-avowed Communist, but the Secret Service would no more allow a self-avowed Communist into the White House than they would Charlie Manson, so that’s what I don’t get,” Democratic campaign strategist Bob Beckel told Fox News. “There’s something more in here about the breakdown of the system,” Beckel continued. “Yes, it broke down with the Obama administration, but it also broke down with those people who are responsible for doing the background check.”
The dysfunctional vetting system also failed to block the appointments of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. They both embarrassed Obama due to tax delinquencies (Geithner’s own and that of Solis’s husband). True, many Americans endure IRS problems. But then again, we usually expect better of our cabinet nominees, especially those who supervise the IRS.
Rather than simply dispatch a group of celebrities, a couple of cabinet secretaries, or perhaps the First Lady, President Obama himself jetted to Copenhagen last October 2 to try to secure the 2016 Olympic Games for his hometown of Chicago. With the presidency’s prestige on the line, America was humiliated when the Olympic site-selection committee knocked the U.S out of contention in its first round of votes before giving the games to Rio de Janeiro. America that day won the Olympic gold medal in the national pie-in-the-face catch.
Attorney General Eric Holder ignited another firestorm with his November 13 plan to try September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 perpetrators in Manhattan federal court, just a five-minute walk from Ground Zero. The administration says this will prove to the world that even KSM can get a fair trial in America. But when NBC News’s Chuck Todd asked Obama if he understood why some take offense at the idea of KSM enjoying all the legal rights that U.S. citizens possess, Obama said: “I don’t think it will be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.” So, the verdict sheet in this “fair trial” already reads “Guilty.” While Justice seems to have backpedaled on its blockheaded decision, it still has made no definitive statement repudiating a KSM trial in NYC.
Obama’s first state dinner honored Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India — a rising power and increasingly close friend. But no one recalls any of that. Singh holistically was eclipsed by Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the publicity-craving couple who crashed the November 23 affair and sparked a lengthy uproar about slack security at the Executive Mansion and an attitude of indifference within the White House social office.
No one begrudges a president’s receiving the best advice possible before making a decision, especially on life-and-death matters of war and peace. But Obama’s public handwringing and endless, nearly open-air deliberations made him look weak and indecisive before announcing last December 1 that he would send 30,000 fresh troops into Afghanistan. Such discussions should have happened quietly. Behind closed doors, Obama could have debated options with his aides and then boldly announced his conclusion. Instead, the whole world watched a military leader unable to make up his mind while his talkative advisers virtually conducted National Security Council meetings in TV news studios.
After one of Nigeria’s most prominent bankers walked into the U.S. Embassy in Abuja last November 19 and told American diplomats to expect his son to show up soon with a bomb, “the system worked,” as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab paid cash for a one-way Delta Airlines ticket to Detroit on Christmas Day, boarded the jet with no luggage, and then tried to detonate a bomb stitched into his underwear. “The system worked” only when a flying Dutchman on the jet quickly pounced on Abdulmutallab, soaked his smoldering bomb with water, and neutralized it before it could kill 279 passengers and eleven crew members on final approach to Detroit — and likely more victims on the ground.
Obama-administration officials questioned the 23-year-old terror suspect for 50 minutes and then read him his Miranda rights, as though he were a car thief. And then he clammed up. While Abdulmutallab reportedly began talking again, that did not happen until some two weeks later, giving his al-Qaeda comrades in Yemen, and perhaps elsewhere, plenty of time to disappear.
While citizens collectively chugged their eggnog and wondered when the next bomber might attack, Obama exercised his own right to remain silent. Rather than reassure his fellow Americans and rebuke our terrorist enemies, Obama continued his Hawaiian vacation and made no public appearance to address this (or any other) matter for five full days. Meanwhile, even as Americans reeled from a near calamity in the skies above the Motor City, National Counterterrorism Director Michael Leiter left December 26 to begin a six-day family ski vacation.
Obama’s campaign appearances and TV commercials on behalf of Democrats Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine, and Martha Coakely did not save them from center-Right Republicans Bob McDonnell, Chris Christie, and Scott Brown. They defeated these Democrats with ease in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, respectively.
Since April 20, the Gulf Coast oil catastrophe has seen the Obama administration reject foreign offers of ships and other clean-up equipment. The Environmental Protection Agency spent five weeks analyzing Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R., La.) urgent request to build sand berms to protect marshes. This delay allowed oil to seep in and destroy habitat and wildlife.
After lengthy deliberations, the Army Corps of Engineers on Day 74 scotched a plan by Jefferson Parish, La., to use rocks to shield Barataria Bay. President Obama had no verbal contact with top BP executives for 58 days, even as he golfed six times, huddled with Bono, and rocked to the sounds of Sir Paul McCartney at a White House concert. Meanwhile, petroleum rolled in with the waves.
Even Democratic operative James Carville slammed Obama as disengaged. “It just looks like he’s not involved in this!” Carville said May 26 on ABC’s Good Morning America. “Man, you have got to get down here and take control of this! Put somebody in charge of this and get this thing moving! We’re about to die down here!”
Yes, Obama has scored some impressive legislative victories, whether one believes these measures should be repealed or, conversely, harnessed to elevate his bust onto Mt. Rushmore. Obama approved a $787 billion “stimulus” measure on Feb. 18, 2009. He signed Obamacare into law last March 23 and is expected soon to enact a 2,300-page repaving of Wall Street. Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor sits on the Supreme Court, and Elena Kagan looks poised to join her there.
For all his flaws, Obama can get some things done — hate them or not.
The only encouraging word for limited-government advocates is that Barack Obama and company have spent so much of the last 18 months striding down the street and then stumbling into potholes. Smoothly delivered socialism would be much harder to vanquish.
— NRO contributor Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
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