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.
Well, if you were on his economic team and was forced to do 6 YEARS worth of work in only 18 months, you'd change your snarky tune there buddy!
[your post:]----The liberal craves the good old days when they controlled the flow of information. They will try to get it back.----
-----
Younger Freepers, she is not kidding. The American people trusted the lying sack of lefty crap and believed that the media was fair and unbiased. Cronkite's signoff line was "That's the way it is!"
The internet exposed the late anchor for the left-wing enemy of freedom that he was. Here's my signoff line to Walter Cronkite and Obama's elfs, "That's the way it WAS!"
That SOB thought he could waltz into the White House, wave his magic finger and poof, everything would be perfect.
Give him a no limit credit card and let him be king. The narcissistic, psychopathic ass is taking the country down with him.
I’m not sure who I detest more, Obama and the people in his administration or the idiot Americans who voted for them!
c. All of the above
The administration whose philosophical source is Ressentiment and they are pitying themselves? What a shock. They will only redouble their efforts to identify scapegoats.
Mmmmm, Mmmmm, Mmmmmommy, everybody’s picking on me!
Laughed right out loud! Then promptly sent it on! Great work!
Excerpted:
The Increasingly Self-Pitying 0bama White House
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.
[snip]
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 0bama 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 0bama 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 0bama 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.
The MSM created, covered up for and elected these miserable crybabies.
The “brilliant” 0b0z0 is nothing but an incompetent communist who takes orders from Soros and his ilk.
I dare the bastard to show his school records.
Hardball Panelist Whines: Townhallers Only Getting News From Limbaugh, Drudge and Fox News
NBC’s Chuck Todd, substitute hosting for Chris Matthews on Monday’s Hardball, invited on Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum and the Politico’s Jonathan Martin to navel gaze about what ailed the political structure as Todd questioned “Is Washington broke and beyond repair?” Pivoting off a Purdum article, that in part, blamed lobbyists, Martin offered his own explanation as he brought up the typical mainstream media boogeymen of the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
After Todd noted that it’s not just the “lobbying community” causing distress in D.C., that the “media is playing a role here” and “it’s not clear which came first, the polarized Washington or the polarized way that people get information,” Martin buttressed Todd’s point by offering his personal account of a Florida townhall meeting where he claimed voters there were only “listening to Rush Limbaugh,” “reading Drudge” and “watching Fox News.”
(snip)
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.
Later we found out it was lies and propaganda, and
now we don’t buy your guff.
Old Walter should have hung beside Jane Fonda.
Hey, guys. 2010’s here...and it’s knocking.
Cheers!
LOL.
I think they’re filled with hate, resentment and vindictiveness and they intend to get more than even with the electorate that’s onto their Marxist plans.
It’s the Chicago Way.
All the displays of extravagant arrogance come with the territory in Chicago because nobody ever has to worry about reelection.
Obama just might find it different in the 2012 national election, but maybe the unions, the new acorn, the new black panthers and the devil only knows what else, will come through for him to steal him a second term, God forbid.
Pray for America.
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