But yes, 0bama has adopted the image of the neutered progressive male: caring, sensitive, surrounded by bullish, aggressive and rather unpleasant women who show very little signs of respecting him. He is, as is a constant comedic refrain on FR, a rather effeminate individual with a veneer of machoism constructed around gang signs and the basketball court. In a bar fight one might expect his worst bruise to be caused by the door hitting him on the ass during a hasty retreat. This may be all perception - I don't know the fellow personally and don't care to - but if so it's a nearly universal one.
The problem, though, is that he is a failure as an executive and has built a staff that is better at advancing the ideological objectives of its members than protecting and guiding the boss. In Susan Power we have, at the National Security Council, an individual whose first priority is neither nation nor security, but the subordination of her country into a grander internationalist world order. In Hillary Clinton we have a feckless amateur at the State Department whose expertise and interests are purely domestic, attempting to learn a difficult and demanding job on the fly and perceived still by 0bama's real inner circle as a rival, not a team member. These are not the only ones by far, but the author pointed them out and, I think, rightfully so.
The problem is made worse by the apparent fact that 0bama doesn't really possess any strongly-held doctrines of his own in these arenas, at least insofar as they might diverge from the mind-numbing academic cant that now populates the halls of the highest offices in the land. "Responsibility to Defend"? Sure, Susan, that sounds terrific in the postdoc seminars, let's go bomb somebody on its basis. What is missing here isn't masculinity, it's a dose of common sense.
In fact, what foreign leaders perceive happens to be the embarrassing truth: 0bama is a weak, flighty, poorly-educated mannequin stuck into office on the basis of empty celebrity. He is very much a product of a society besotted with popular culture and superficiality. He is playing President for people who are playing government like an amateur talent show, convinced that the applause is real.
And the real danger in this is that he will be swayed in matters of foreign policy not by any threatened damage to the United States but by a threat to the damage of his image. A foreign leader careful to repeat the politically correct liberal verities of the moment and sufficiently adulatory in public (one can imagine what they say in private) will be able to make this empty puppet dance because he or she has seen others do it. And those others are his staff, and their foremost interests are not those of the nation.
Hillary is indeed what you say, but she has been in Dc since 1993, and presumably knows more than the president she serves. The question, though,, is what DOES she know? What ARE her views? Realist, like Scrowcroft? Idealist, like Carter’s? The scuttlebutt was that she was tougher than Bill. What is the truth of that? We are unlikely to hear the truth of that in the next ten years, when the memorists start publishing their stuff, if then. But, the saying goes, Scuttlebutt is always right unless it is wrong; it is the official stuff you cannot believe.
Ugh, BtD, if you’re going to criticize someone at least get her name right. I mean Samantha Power, of course.