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.
he's a
VICTIMMMMMMMMMM!!!
Must be his skin color.
In over their heads . . . .
Reminds me of my all time favorite by Dr. Hook:
In Over My Head
Written by Eddie Rabbit, Even Stevens, and Daniel E. Tyler
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cN5GLN74XU
“The Increasingly Self-Pitying Obama White House”
Which is the proper WW II historical analogy?
Stuck in Stalingrad...
Banzai...
Nuts...
“What we are seeing, I think, is a group of supremely arrogant people humbled by events.”
Ya think???
“O” = Alligator mouth, gerbil a%$!!
What a bunch of Pussies !
I see the grey is back in Barry’s hair.
There’s an old saying that goes something like “Self-pity makes for poor box office.” I haven’t seen this much self-pity in the White House since the Jimmy Carter years.
Amateur Hour.
Governing is such a bore, when all you wanted was to rule.
“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 this is true, why then are most politicians such flaming a$$holes?
“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.”
What a wimp. What a pair of wimps. No wonder that, upon taking office, Bammy guy sent Tony Blair’s Churchill bust back to the Brits.
ping
Recall the bills and money management skills these grifters had before they were anointed to the ultimate bling jobs? They were up to their eyeballs in debt. Now the country is. See any pattern?
That might actually be a job they would be capable of handling. Of course, they'd need to hire somebody to handle the money, pay the bills and keep the shirts in stock.
How apropos! Vanity Fair is a perfect description of Obama's White House.
You missed - Obama was groomed for the job. He was chosen by Valerie Jarret’s dad and his fellow Socialists to be the last, best hope to reshape American into a socialist country with the Chicago machine in firm control for generations. The kind that lines the pockets of their cronies and keeps everyone else in poverty. Look at the city of Chicago to see what they have in mind for the rest of America.
You're right as rain. How could he even make it through the application stage with no documentation, much less the interview?
"...or the way it was in the old Soviet Union," Jarrett continued, "when Pravda would tell the people everything they needed to know."
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