The Increasingly Self-Pitying Obama White House

Commentary Magazine ^ | August 9, 2010 | Peter Wehner

[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.

[penelopesire]

“Pray for America.”

First thing I do each morning and the last thing I do at night...Pray for our country to survive these evil fools and for God to expose their evil plans and corruption to the American people.

I still stand by my original prediction...Obama will be forced to resign or get impeached before his first term is over. Obama,his administration and the democrats are completely out of control and the impeachable offenses are starting to stack up pretty high. Not to mention the unprecedented abuses of power.

[bitt]

see #30 - fabulous!

I stole it.

[bitt]

EVEN THESE 2 IDIOTS COULDN’T STAND TO WATCH THIS IMPOSTER RISE ON THE SHOULDERS OF THE EASILY LED:

PHONE CALL AT 3 A.M.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yr7odFUARg

VP BITE-ME, ‘ON THE JOB TRAINING’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAaLEJwkh9c

[FrankR]

That’s ok...I stole it from someone else anyway....it’s one of my favorites too.

[bitt]

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/Can-John-Kerry-Get-Us-Out-of-Afghanistan-1736

another hilarious jab.

[SaraJohnson]

Who would have ever dreamed that Democrat Party thugs from Chicago, led by a radical, racist Black community organizer, would have trouble running the country?

[potlatch]

Hi bitt! Thanks for pinging. That is a fantastic gif, think I’ve seen Frank post it before and admired it.

[x]

“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?

Buchan was an adventure novelist, and he thought of politics as a big adventure novel, whether it really was or not.

Also, he was inside the establishment tent. People who were outside of it, in his day or ours, probably did think of politicians as mostly jerks or jokes.

But the big difference between Kennedy's world and Obama's is that people can get away with a lot more self-pity nowadays.