Barack Obama and the Exhausted Presidency

by Paul A. Rahe

In a recent puff piece, The New York Times reports that our President is tired. This is not the first such report. Back in May, when he treated England’s Gordon Brown so shabbily, the excuse given — according to The Daily Telegraph – was that wrestling with the economic crisis had left Barack Obama too exhausted to be able to focus on foreign affairs.

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We should perhaps discount what was said in May. For, as I have attempted to document in detail here, here, here, here, here, and here, President Obama is a gentleman, and, as such, he is never unintentionally rude. He is, in fact, a master of the insulting gesture, which he seems to reserve for political opponents, such as Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and for political leaders in countries, such as England, France, Germany, Israel, and Poland, which were closely associated with the United States prior to the Age of Obama.

This time, however, Barack Obama may be genuinely tired, and he may be depressed as well. He certainly has warrant. In public, he may claim that he deserves a B+ for his first year in office, but the polling data suggests that he has earned a failing mark, and he has to know better.

As I observed in an earlier post, if Barack Obama harbored any doubts as to whether he was leading his party off a cliff, William Daley — the brains behind the Chicago machine — put these doubts to rest in the op-ed that he published on Christmas Eve in The Washington Post, warning that, if the Democrats did not plot “a more centrist course,” they would “risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.”

Barack Obama has thus far led a charmed life — prep school in Hawaii, Occidental College, Columbia University, Harvard Law School, the Illinois State Senate, the U. S. Senate, the Presidency. He did lose a race for a Congressional seat. But, otherwise, to all appearances, he has never even stumbled.

One fact is emblematic. Obama managed to get elected editor of The Harvard Law Review without having to do what all of his predecessors did — which is to write an article of a quality that would allow it to be published in the journal. With the one exception mentioned above, his political races have been easy. Events consistently broke in his favor. He has never really been tested — until now.

And, of course, now he finds himself in over his head.

Obama’s difficulties are of his own making, and they arise from his failure thus far to recognize what it means to be President of the United States.

American presidents put aside personal pique and pay close attention to protocol. They do not bow to queens, kings, and emperors; they do not warmly embrace dictators and thugs; and they do not direct gratuitous insults at America’s allies.

They know that, for a president, the personal is not political and the political is not personal. What happens has little to do with the man and everything to do with the office he holds, and no president can opt out of the responsibilities that go with the office.

A president who ignores the niceties, who stiffs America’s friends and embraces her enemies, who betrays weakness and irresolution with regard to an ongoing war will soon discover that others can be rude as well — that those who sense his weakness will treat him and, more to the point, his country like dirt. This is what the Chinese did when Barack Obama visited Beijing and Copenhagen, and Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have repeatedly done the like.

This is no minor matter — for what begins with calculated rudeness can turn into something far worse, as John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter learned to their regret.

In the domestic sphere, American presidents do not leave the initiative to Congress, and they do not continue the presidential campaign after the election is over — not, that is, if they know what is good for them.

The President of the United States represents the national interest; Congressmen often cater to particular interests. If legislation is left to the latter, principle tends to give way to patronage, and the result can be a profound embarrassment. Like it or not, when he signed the so-called “stimulus” bill, Barack Obama accepted responsibility for the national debt and for the systematic looting embedded in the bill.

Once the looting begins, Congressmen may not be able to help themselves. The current crop needed — Congressmen always need — adult supervision, and Barack Obama offered them none. The same argument applies to the healthcare proposals passed by the House and the Senate, which are, by any system of accounting, a disgrace.

The Obama administration’s handling of terrorism is of a piece with the pattern of irresponsibility evident in its conduct of foreign policy and its management of domestic affairs.

When news came that a Nigerian trained in the Yemen and equipped with an explosive device had very nearly brought down a Northwest Airlines jumbo jet outside Detroit, Janet Napolitano initially thought it appropriate to say that “the system had worked,” and Barack Obama, after remaining ostentatiously silent for three days, dismissed the matter as “allegedly” the work of an “isolated extremist.”

Both backtracked in subsequent statements, to be sure. But it was clear that, at first, neither took the incident seriously.

It was obvious from the start that it was dumb luck and nothing else that saved the passengers on that flight, that no “isolated extremist” could have done what Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab managed to do, and that the elaborate security procedures put in place after 9/11 had failed ignominiously.

By the time that President Obama first bothered to address the matter, it was already evident that the authorities in the United States had been warned about the man and that he had been trained by a branch of Al Q’aeda in the Yemen; and we now know that the religious leader that Abdulmutallab sought out in the Yemen was the very man with whom Major Nidal Malik Hassan was in communication before he massacred thirteen Americans at Fort Hood.

The event at Fort Hood, which revealed deep flaws in our intelligence apparatus, should have been a wake-up call. What Major Hassan did and what Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to do are not crimes in the ordinary sense of the word. They are acts of asymmetric war, intimately linked with one another, and, if we are to reduce the likelihood of things like this happening again, they need to be treated as such.

Even left-liberals are beginning to figure out that something serious is amiss. The latest of these is, of all people, Maureen Dowd — who, on Tuesday, in a column in The New York Times aptly entitled “As the Nation’s Pulse Races, Obama Cannot Seem to Find His,” posed the following question:

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

In her column, Dowd went on to compare Obama with Star Trek’s Spock, noting his propensity to oscillate between inspiration and listlessness, and observing just how “chilly” he appeared in “his response to the chilling episode on Flight 253, issuing bulletins through his press secretary and hitting the links.” What bothered her most, however, was that the President of the United States did not even “seem concerned.”

When Obama ran for the Democratic nomination, his opponents — Joe Biden among them — warned that he was not ready. When his party nominated him, Republicans made the same point, but to no avail.

Now, if I am correct in my interpretation of the character of his exhaustion, even Obama appears to realize that he may not be up to the job. It seems not even to have crossed his mind when he ran for the office and assumed it that with the office would come responsibilities of a sort that had never previously encountered and that he had no particular desire to shoulder.

Now he is stuck with those responsibilities, and we are — at least, for the time being — stuck with him. Let’s hope that he returns from Hawaii rested, resolute, and intent on carrying out in a responsible fashion the duties associated with his office — for this would require of him a radical change of course.

Someone should give President Obama sign for his desk in the Oval Office. It should read, “The buck stops here.”


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Posted Dec 31st 2009 at 5:41 am in Congress, Defense, Featured Story, Healthcare, Obama, Politics | 353 Comments