Posted on 06/08/2014 8:12:08 PM PDT by neverdem
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Less than two years after voters gave President Barack Obama a strong mandate for a second term, the White House is struggling against perceptions that it is losing its grip.
At home, the bungled rollout of the Obamacare website and the shocking revelations about an entrenched culture of incompetence and fraud in the VA have undercut faith in the President’s managerial competency.
Abroad, a surging Russia, an aggressive China, a war torn Middle East and a resurgent terror network are putting his foreign policy credentials to the test. With the GOP hoping to seize control of the Senate in November’s midterm elections, and the inevitable decline in presidential power that occurs as second term presidents move toward lame-duck status, Obama risks being sidelined and marginalized for the remaining two years of his term.
Last week’s tempest over the Bergdahl exchange seemed to roll all the President’s troubles together into a single storm. The decision to free five Taliban fighters from Guantanamo in exchange for an American soldier with a complicated past energized the President’s opponents, befuddled and angered important Congressional allies, and renewed questions about the political instincts of the President and his closest aides. The White House apparently thought that the release would be a moment of national unity and celebration and arranged for Sgt. Bergdahl’s parents to meet Obama in a highly publicized Rose Garden ceremony that now looks like a huge political blunder.
It’s been a long and bumpy road to this point. Few American presidents came into office viewed with so much optimism and hope. Obama was swept and re-swept into office with a clear expectation that being smart — or at least not being stupid — would be enough to mend fences around the globe and at home. Things aren’t so cheery now, and not being George W. Bush may not, it appears, be sufficient.
Obama is not, however, prepared to pick up his toys and go home. Stymied in Congress, where a coalition of Republicans and red state Democrats have effectively blocked his major initiatives in both the House and the Senate, the President is determined to use his executive powers to carve out a legacy whether Congress likes it or not. The new EPA regulations to cut CO2 levels from power generators and his decision to sidestep Congress on the release of five Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo in exchange for Sergeant Bergdahl show a White House anything but resigned to the prospect of presidential decline.
In both foreign and domestic affairs, Obama has plenty of executive authority to use. Moreover, the signature accomplishment of his first term, the ACA health care law, is potentially the most significant piece of domestic legislation since the 1960s and was written to give the executive branch the power to redesign much of the American health system as the President’s appointees in the federal bureaucracy set about implementing the law. The Dodd-Frank Act, intended to stabilize Wall Street and prevent another 2008 style financial crisis, gave the executive branch broad authority to re-regulate the financial sector.
Why, then, does a feisty President with more power than any of his peacetime predecessors, one who is determined to use those powers to the max, look so much a victim of events he can’t control?
It isn’t for lack of ambition; Obama aspires to be a transformational leader at home and abroad. The ACA attempts to redesign an industry that accounts for 17.2 % of GDP. The EPA’s new regulations cover 66% of the country’s energy production. Overseas, he’s picked goals like getting a global climate treaty, destroying Al-Qaeda, democratizing the Arab world, eliminating nuclear weapons and achieving détente with Iran.
These are big goals; achieving them would give Obama a significant place in the history books. But there’s a catch; large and complex projects are hard to carry out, and the President seems to consistently underestimate the difficulties in turning compelling visions into practical programs. As a result, he now finds himself haunted by goals and expectations he set for himself, caught in a gap between promise and performance that has proved unexpectedly hard to close.
The implementation of the ACA was problematic in ways that go far beyond the famously awful website. While a substantial number of people have gotten access to health insurance thanks to the law, the implementation challenges remain epic — and the public still isn’t fully behind the new system. Many of the law’s provisions have already been suspended, amended, and reinterpreted so many times that it is now probable the President will leave office without being able to roll the whole law out as projected. Even government accountants have given up figuring out what the law means or how it will work: this week, the CBO stated that it was henceforth impossible to score Obamacare.
Meanwhile, the problems at the Veterans Administration — problems candidate Obama vowed to fix back in 2008 — erupted last month in a scandal that 79% of Americans blame at least in part on Obama’s management. A shock poll in The Washington Post showed 48% of Americans now think that President George W. Bush was better at “getting things done” than his replacement-compared with 42% who think the opposite.
Meanwhile, President’s Obama’s repeated calls for gun control legislation and immigration reform have fallen flat.
Overseas, the gap between promise and accomplishment is, if anything, more daunting. Early in his first term Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in a decision that struck even his most ardent admirers as premature; there isn’t much talk today of a repeat visit to Oslo.
Not since the end of the Cold War has an American president faced this much disorder and trouble in the world. The “reset” with Russia ended with the attack on Crimea. The Arab Spring has foundered in chaos, dictatorship and war. The President’s declaration that “Assad must go” has proved as hollow as his demand that Syria cease chemical warfare attacks on its citizens. Al-Qaeda and related jihadist groups are active and growing from West Africa through Central Asia; in some ways the terror threat today is greater than ever before. The war in Afghanistan, a war that candidate Obama vowed to win, is sputtering inconclusively toward a less than stellar close. An increasingly feisty China is challenging the United States and its allies, and North Korea grinds grimly ahead with its nuclear program.
Once again, the President seems to have underestimated how much effort would be required to achieve the goals he set out. He clearly underestimated the difficulties of building a stable and businesslike relationship with Russia and was shocked and surprised at Putin’s attack on Ukraine. He underestimated the difficulty of getting the Israelis and Palestinians to reach a peace agreement, overestimated the strength of the democratic forces in Egypt, and seems not to have fully understood the difficulties in winning the Afghan war until after he committed American troops to a surge. His administration has also seriously underestimated China’s readiness to oppose American policy in the Pacific; the South and East China seas are becoming more dangerous and more militarized by the day.
With 30 months to go, Obama still may have a chance to regain control of both the domestic and international agendas, but to do that he’s going to have to change his approach. He needs to focus on the nitty-gritty, day-to-day business of governing; six years into his administration, the public is fed up with promises and hungry for concrete accomplishments.
President Obama needs to show that he knows how to get things done, or increasingly the world will move on as if he wasn’t there.
Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Policy and the Humanities at Bard College, and edits the American Interest Online. Follow him on Twitter @WRMEAD
We knew his background and political history when he first ran for President. Then he presented himself at the 2008 Convention as some Roman God and his followers fawned over him. Remember the "faintings" in the audience and his calls for help?
It's just my opinion but I believe most Democrats, including a majority of black voters, figured he was a sure winner. Regardless of his lack of credentials, some of those who did not vote for him were, of course, called racists.
Well, racists can be found among all nationalities, races and religions. Did 95% of black people vote for him because he was a Democrat and/or because he was half-black? He did not get my vote since I did not believe he had the necessary qualifications.
Hat tip Nathan, I could not agree more.
The following link is to an old FR thread, about an even older conservative booklet called “The Revolution Was”, written in 1938 about FDR and the New Deal. I post excerpts once in awhile. It is ALL happening again - amazingly, chillingly so. Only worse.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2185147/posts
An Excerpt:
There was a prodigious literature of revolutionary thought concealed only by the respectability of its dress....
To the revolutionary this same dreary stuff was the most exciting reading in the world. It was knowledge that gave him a sense of power. One who mastered the subject to the point of excellence could be fairly sure of a livelihood by teaching and writing, that is, by imparting it to others, and meanwhile dream of passing at a single leap from this mean obscurity to the prestige of one who assists in the manipulation of great happenings; while one who mastered it to the point of genius — that one might dream of becoming himself the next Lenin....
Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme, charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern.
But it could not be so embarrassed and all that line was wasted, because, in the first place, it never intended to make that kind of sense, and secondly, it took off from nothing that was implicit in the American scheme. It took off from a revolutionary base.
The design was European. Regarded from the point of view of revolutionary technic it made perfect sense. Its meaning was revolutionary and it had no other. For what it meant to do it was from the beginning consistent in principle, resourceful, intelligent, masterly in workmanship, and it made not one mistake......
Having passed this crisis, the New Deal went on from one problem to another, taking them in the proper order, according to revolutionary technic; and if the handling of one was inconsistent with the handling of another, even to the point of nullity, that was blunder in reverse.
The effect was to keep people excited about one thing at a time, and divided, while steadily through all the uproar of outrage and confusion a certain end, held constantly in view, was pursued by main intention.
The end held constantly in view was power.
My guess is that the blacks will never see it that way, yet the backlash may ensure that another black person will find it difficult to be elected president for quite a while.
Oh I recall all that, and I told every black person in 2008 that this guy aint down for the struggle,
He is here to rule,He aint black he aint white, he is a shape shifter set on power.
Bread and circuses brother.
Bread and circuses.
See the bearded lady!
The tourtoise boy!
Old as the hills itself
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNb6SxXcD7g
Divide and Conquer
A load of clichés. Getting rid of nuclear weapons, blah blah blah, yada, yada, yada...
None of Obama’s REAL goals is mentioned: Swamping the U.S. with Mexicans and Muslims, destroying the dollar, destroying the suburbs, destroying health care, killing millions of babies, killing white people, killing lower-class black people, filling the ranks of the military with illegal alien invaders, shutting down all activities of Christian churches, etc.
Since they are incapable of real accomplishments, they can’t use those to get the scandal off the news. They do it by creating a new scandal. We’ve been through about 20 Obama scandals, and none of them has stuck simply because it was pushed out of the news by the next scandal.
You talk as though the Democrat party were not just as much America-hating Communists as Obama, and that they COULD have chosen a President who wouldn’t destroy the U.S.
They COULD NOT choose anyone who is not wicked, because they are all baby-murderers. No one but a demonically wicked person would ever be considered as their candidate.
There is no point even talking about what such wicked, demonic, stupid people could have done better. Obama was nurtured, almost from birth, to become the President who would collapse the United States for good. Definitively. Defunct. They didn’t put a “fool” in the White House—i.e., a fool like Carter. They put an illegal alien Muslim Communist there to engineer the end of the U.S. (Well, actually doing the thinking and engineering is Valerie Jarrett’s job.)
Thank you for posting that.
As a completely irrelevant aside, I was amused by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observation that revolutions are not made by people wearing spectacles. Evidently the Great Justice was unacquainted between the date of the Russian Revolution, 1917, and Holmes' death in 1935 with photographs of Trotsky.
He never quite turned out to be the promised warm-up act for all those rock concerts back in Europe of 2008.
In 2008 we had his measure.A Marxist project trained in a madrassah.
Frank Marshall Davis and Cora Weiss and Bill Ayers created his legend.
Percy Sutton, Al-Mansour, Prince Talal paid his Harvard way.
He is guided by a Jarrett from Iran daughter of the Jarrett associate of Davis.
His Arab Spring removed secular rulers and replaced them with Islamist ones.
He stays Israel and allows Iran to pursue that chaos which will release his alter ego, the Twelfth Imam.
He violates the Constitution he despises and none dare call it treason.
As he opens the gate to release the enemy commanders and welcome the deserter roundly condemned by his comrades.
He is the anti-American from Wright's hate factory.
He is the Lenin on the block from the Alinsky academy of Lucifer.
The sham Christian blaspemes and the loyal Marxist strikes.
His last act will include a cataclysm to make Pearl Harbor pale into insignificance.
Perhaps an EMP from his negotiating partner the Ayatollah.
Jimmy Carter's catastrophe was converted to farce by its curtailment at the hands of Reagan.
In our slumber the rough beast its hour come round at last slouches toward Bethlehem.
Awake. Speak. Vote.
Spot on. Neo-communism, fascism, what is the difference, really! Obama was coddled and raised basically as a red-diaper baby. The recurring theme in his upbringing was a detachment from affection for the USA that ranged from indifference to hostility.
But the little minded narcissist has had a lot of help. And still gets a lot of help. Otherwise, he would still be a community organizer in Chicago.
Sorry, I had to stop right there.
Under the current political climate and lack of principled opposition the damage will not be reversed.
There is a third possibility, namely the Barak Obama is merely what he shows the world that he is, a left of center liberal with conventional notions that big government is needed to solve big problems.
These "problems" are contrived. The children today are constantly reminded of "problems". Government is the problem.
Sorry I didn’t respond. You nailed it.
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