Posted on 09/18/2013 11:01:05 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
NYT's Maureen Dowd Slams Obama for Post-shooting Tea Party Attack: He's 'One Weird Cat' By Tim Graham Created 09/18/2013 - 1:46pm
It’s a bit shocking when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd hits the same note as Brent Bozell. In a Wednesday column titled "Losing the Room," she slammed President Obama for jarringly pressing “ahead with his political attack, briefly addressing the slaughter before moving on to jab Republicans over the corporate tax rate and resistance to Obamacare.”
But Dowd sounded sad: “The man who connected so electrically and facilely in 2008, causing Americans to overlook his thin résumé, cannot seem to connect anymore.” Dowd wrote Democrats no longer think of him as a “cool cat,” but as a “weird cat”:
As Peter Baker wrote in The Times, the president is finding himself increasingly “frustrated” by the defiance of Democrats who are despairing of his passive, reactive leadership.
Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat from Montana on the banking committee, told Jonathan Martin for Politico in February, after he scraped through to a second term, that the president was not engaged with the Hill, that he had not met with Obama at the White House since 2010, and that he was sorely missing aides like Rahm Emanuel, who tirelessly worked and stroked Democrats in Congress.
Tester was one of three Democrats who spurned the president on his favorite to run the Federal Reserve, Larry Summers. The White House didn’t call Tester until Friday, when it was too late; Summers was allowed to twist in the wind, like Susan Rice before him.
Top Democrats who used to consider Obama one cool cat now muse that he’s “one weird cat,” as one big shot put it.
Of course, Dowd had to calibrate by knocking conservatives:
Obama still has a secret weapon: Congressional Republicans, who might yet shut down the government or cause a cataclysmic default and make the president look good.
But, for now, puzzlement grows over the contrast between Obama’s campaign leaps and his governing lassitude. Obama biographer Richard Wolffe notes that the 2012 campaign had some of the same problems with leadership and direction, but looked good compared with the mid-20th-century Romney crowd, “who couldn’t get an app to work.”
Dowd concluded by expressing distaste for Obama’s haughtiness in a weekend interview with a very friendly George Stephanopoulos:
Unlike Bill Clinton, who excels at boiling down complex arguments to simple ones, Obama prefers to wallow in the weeds, reminding people that he’s the smartest man in the room and expecting their support because he feels he is only doing what’s complicated and right...
ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos asked the president about criticism of the administration’s serpentine Syria policy, citing a frustrated backer of the plan to strike Syria, Senator Bob Corker, a Republican of Tennessee. Corker said that the careering around left Obama diminished as president, and he observed that the president seemed caged in the role, like he wanted to “slip the noose.”
“I think that folks here in Washington like to grade on style,” Obama said dismissively of his Syria critics.
But why is it so often the president’s style to be unable to sell the substance — even on issues where most people agree with him?
Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus – like Dowd, a longtime “objective reporter” before her columnist days – also disliked the Stephanopoulos interview in her column "Losing on Style" Wednesday:
Style points? Seriously? Style points? That’s what President Obama thinks the criticism of his zigzag Syria policy amounts to?
As presidential spin, this is insulting. As presidential conviction — if this is what he really believes — it’s scary.
Marcus also looked at the domestic picture around the budget and concluded: "So Obama enters yet another treacherous period in a weakened state, with his political allies distrustful and his political opponents caught up in their own dysfunction. Machiavelli advised that it is better to be feared than loved; at the moment, in Congress, Obama is neither."
some of them are panicked because he is not moving FAST EBOUGH to implement socialism
Why not have the true Republicans request a BINDING, updated, “Federal Financial Impact Statement” for 2012-2013 for Obama”care?”
It should take a month or two to complete, allow for a vote to delay Obama”care” for a year, and then show the great financial harm to our Economy that the Statement’s numbers will document.
Wharton, Stanford, Michigan and Princeton could also file their independent Financial Impact Statements to compare to the Office of Budget and the Congressional Budget Office Financial Impact Statements.
As B. Hussein is fond of saying: “We need to get all the facts first.”
She’s beautiful... or was and may yet be again. If you’ve stood in line at the grocery counter and seen the Enquirer, You’ve read that the lovely Catherine Zeta-Jones is having some personal difficulties.
Still a definite upgrade from Ms. Dowd.
If he’s lost Maureen Dowd ...
Can’t help but love FR for the predictability of its scions.
Eventually Laz will find something he’d hit, and OS will remind Ms. Dowdy once again why Michael “too much oral gives you cancer” Douglas cast her aside.
Just gave me two more reasons to donate to FR :-)
Hey Old Sarge, she’s now 61. In your picture she would be lucky to be 35! You are providing Laz with a “false target!”
Methinks the any sadness was not for BHO, but for all the contortions the LSM has done, and continues to do to provide cover for all of the sophomoric BS that BHO drags the liberals through
Oh, and Vette? Catherine is only 43...
How far behind can losing Chris Matthews be?
“The man who connected so electrically and facilely in 2008, causing Americans to overlook his thin résumé, cannot seem to connect anymore.”
He did not connect with me, and I did not overlook his thin resume. However, too many Americans - low-information voters all - did. Tragic.
Feeling better, thank you.
I call bullcarp on that. The Dems in the House and Senate are sticking by him with the same robustness they always have. The others don't matter.
President Obama doesn't understand that the more he speaks the less people listen. Maybe he grasps the lips-to-ears problem in the abstract, but he doesn't seem to apply the sobering ratio to himself. So a speech in Berlin—as a senator campaigning for the presidency in 2008, proclaiming that he is a "citizen of the world,"—was not enough. He had to give another this June, as president, reminding us that he is a citizen of the world.
It didn't seem to bother him that the audience for the first was 200,000, and for the second, 4,500. At this rate five years from now, he'll be speaking to a hundred members of the Brandenburg Gate Rotary Club.
A steady diet of any orator will stale after a while. One supposes that even Winston Churchill's speeches would overwhelm the serial listener at some point, though I've never experienced the sensation myself. But in Churchill's case the danger would be overstimulation rather than stupefaction, that combination of boredom and inability to think straight that Obama induces.
I dont care if I get throat cancer!!!!
Maureen Dowd is 61.
Her husband, Michael Douglas made some bizarre comments on how he thinks he ‘caught’ throat cancer due to recreational activities. Mike is slammed in the press for a few days, he quickly backpeddles. One month later, Mike and Catherine Of Wales are “Officially Separated”. Coincidence? I think not.
“When you’re a Jet, you think everything you say is just great.”
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