Posted on 08/10/2010 5:33:51 AM PDT by NCjim
According to the preview offered by Vanity Fair:
[Todd] Purdum spends a day inside the West Wing and talks to Obama’s top aides, who tell him about the challenges of playing the Beltway game, ugly as it has become, even as their boss insists they find a way to transcend it.
“There’s a relentlessness to this that’s unlike anything else, especially when you come into office in a time of crisis,” says Obama senior adviser David Axelrod. “We did not exactly ease into the tub. The world is so much smaller, and events reverberate much more quickly, and one person can create an event so quickly from one computer terminal.”
Larry Summers, who served as Clinton’s Treasury secretary for the last 18 months of his term, says, “It used to be there was a kind of rhythm to the day” with the tempo picking up after the markets closed and as newspaper deadlines approached, between four and seven P.M. “That’s gone.” And, according to Rahm Emanuel, C.I.A. director Leon Panetta thinks “it’s a huge problem” that Washington runs at such “a highly caffeinated speed.”
Emanuel calls it “F***nutsville,” and Valerie Jarrett says she looks back wistfully to a time when credible people could put a stamp of reliability on information and opinion: “Walter Cronkite would get on and say the truth, and people believed the media,” she says.
It got so bad last December that President Obama and Emanuel would joke that, when it was all over, they were going to open a T-shirt stand on a beach in Hawaii. It would face the ocean and sell only one color and one size. “We didn’t want to make another decision, or choice, or judgment,” Emanuel tells Purdum. They took to beginning staff meetings with Obama smiling at Emanuel and simply saying “White,” and Emanuel nodding back and replying “Medium.”
I’ll reserve final judgment until I read the entire piece. But based on these excerpts — which presumably reflect the thrust of the 10,000-word article — what is striking is the degree of self-pity we find in Obama’s advisers, which is reflected in the president’s words and attitude as well. Team Obama sounds nothing so much as overmatched and overwhelmed, unable to understand what has gone wrong, and increasingly bitter toward the nation’s capital and the pace and nature of politics.
What we are seeing, I think, is a group of supremely arrogant people humbled by events. They are turning out to be a good deal more incompetent than they (and many Americans) ever imagined. They see impending political doom in the form of the midterm elections. Yet this is not leading them toward any apparent serious self-reflection; rather, they are engaging in an extraordinary degree of whining, finger-pointing, and self-indulgence.
It was said of President Kennedy that he was a happy president. “Happiness, [Kennedy] often said, paraphrasing Aristotle, is the full use of one’s faculties along lines of excellence, and to him the Presidency offered the ideal opportunity to pursue excellence,” Theodore Sorenson wrote in Kennedy. “He liked the job, he thrived on its pressures.”
One doesn’t get that sense with Obama or his key advisers. In 18 months they appear to have developed deep grievances and an increasing unhappiness and frustration with the duties of governing.
Life in the White House is challenging; anyone who has worked there can testify to that. And Washington, D.C., is certainly an imperfect city, as all are. But the impression Team Obama is trying to create — that no group has ever faced more challenges, more difficulties, or more hardships — is silly and somewhat pathetic. Politics is the worthiest ambition, wrote John Buchan (the author of JFK’s favorite book, Pilgrim’s Way); it is the greatest and most honorable adventure.
If Obama and his aides don’t see that or anything like that — if they view politics and governing only through a lens tinted by bitterness, frustration, and resentment — then it is time for them to step aside. If not, then they should man up. Self-pity is a terribly unattractive quality.
boo hoo
****Valerie Jarrett says she looks back wistfully to a time when credible people could put a stamp of reliability on information and opinion: “Walter Cronkite would get on and say the truth, and people believed the media,” she says****
Yes, Valerie there was a Santa Walter propogandist....then the American people woke up!!!!!
Biggest CRYBABIES I’ve ever seen!! DON”T RUN FOR PRESIDENT NEXT TIME, BARRY!
Sounds like another tax-payer funded, multi-million dollar vacation is due for the commie pig boy-king 0b0z0 and his hedonistic phat ass wife maBelle michelle! Piss be upon him and his whole rotten to the core family! Bastard pigs!
Snivel snivel. The “Party House” complains about how tough things are.
Well, they sure said they could do everything better once they got into office. The real world is not sitting around in an echo chamber. I’ll bet most of them would like to go back to their holes and play with their fortunes.
They made their bed, now they can lie in it.
Mature people would step back and say "We learned something. We're going to change. We will build something that works for our opponents as well as for ourselves."
Not a chance in the world of that happening.
Well we sure got here fast. I believe there were a few stories during the Carter years about how broken Washington is and how it’s impossible to “get things done”. snicker Also I was on a website the other night where a lefty was whining about how the filibuster has never been used this much before and that’s why the Democrats who control the House the Senate the White House and most of the federal courts can’t get anything done. Oh yeah, and he also said Democrats voted for the wars because they were tricked and fed false info by the Bush White House. Hahaha delusional rationalizing.
They are Chicago thug grifters. But we knew that before the election, didn’t we?
And the soup was cold at the White House party last nite!
How do you really feel rc?
Kennedy was happy? Kennedy was a man with little ability for self-control. I sincerely doubt that he was happy.
But the Camelot mythos lives on.
Obama wanted the job.
He ran for the job.
He got elected to the job.
He found out he didn’t like the job.
He takes frequent vacations and golf outings to get away from the job.
He blames everything on the previous job holder.
Obama just can’t handle it. The job is bigger than he is. The Presidency is bigger than he is.
White House inhabitents: When you stink, flies are naturally drawn to you.
And it’s worse if you’re working for the biggest t*rd in the land.
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