Obama Finally Creates Bipartisanship Through Dissapointment

It's expected that over at the Wall Street Journal you will find critiques of president Obama's policies a little more in depth than at left leaning lame stream media outlets. Yesterdays opinion piece by Brett Stephens was notably pointed though well said.


Is Obama Smart?

"I think I'm a better speech writer than my speech writers," he reportedly told an aide in 2008. "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm . . . a better political director than my political director."

On another occasion—at the 2004 Democratic convention—Mr. Obama explained to a Chicago Tribune reporter that "I'm LeBron, baby. I can play at this level. I got game."

Stuff we have come to expect from our promiser-in chief. But just like he explained last week that he never meant that change would come tomorrow or next week, it appears that many are wondering if he really has 'got game'.

Then there is Mr. Obama as political tactician. He makes predictions that prove false. He makes promises he cannot honor. He raises expectations he cannot meet. He reneges on commitments made in private. He surrenders positions staked in public. He is absent from issues in which he has a duty to be involved. He is overbearing when he ought to be absent.

Again, not surprising coming from the WSJ. But it appears that the sentiment is not purely partisan. Support on the left is becoming shaky. Especially from Hillary supporters who held their nose and voted for Obama anyways.

Hillary Told You So

At a New York political event last week, Republican and Democratic office-holders were all bemoaning President Obama’s handling of the debt-ceiling crisis when someone said, “Hillary would have been a better president.”

“Every single person nodded, including the Republicans,” reported one observer.

At a luncheon in the members’ dining room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday, a 64-year-old African-American from the Bronx was complaining about Obama’s ineffectiveness in dealing with the implacable hostility of congressional Republicans when an 80-year-old lawyer chimed in about the president’s unwillingness to stand up to his opponents. “I want to see blood on the floor,” she said grimly.

"Blood on the floor". Glad to see that the left is staying the course with their appeals for civilty and their discomfort with rehtoric that could be seen as threatening or violent. But we'll save that for a different post. This post is about the left becoming unnerved with the Obama administrations continued dissapointments.

In his New York Times Sunday Review essay “What Happened to Obama?” Emory University psychology professor Drew Westen summed up the president’s lack of experience with devastating succinctness.

“Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he occasionally, as a state senator in Illinois, voted ‘present’ on difficult issues,” wrote Westen, author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

The presidential scholar Matthew Dickinson went even further with a post under the headline “Run, Hillary, Run!” on the blog Presidential Power. “She did warn you,” Dickinson reminded his readers.

“Remember that 3 a.m. phone call? Remember the warning about the rose-colored petals falling from the sky? Remember about learning on the job? Sure you do. Doesn’t a part of you, deep down, realize she was right?” wrote Dickinson, a political-science professor at Middlebury College. “If I heard it once this last week, I heard it a thousand times: You were duped by Obama’s rhetoric—the whole ‘hopey-changey’ thing. And you wanted to be part of history, too—to help break down the ultimate racial barrier. That’s OK. We were all young once. But now it’s time to elect someone who can play hardball, who understands how to be ruthless, who will be a real ... uh ... tough negotiator in office. There won’t be any debate about Hillary’s, er, ‘man-package.’”

Wow! Is a Hillary run a possibility? During her run for the presidency, at many different points when others pronounced her demise, I never bought in. I always knew, and wrote that Hillary is like Jason from the movie Halloween or a vampire from any vampire flick you want to select. When you think Hillary is dead, DO NOT TURN AROUND AND DROP THE KNIFE, STUMBLING AWAY THINKING THAT YOU HAVE VANQUISHED THE MONSTER!

Until I see a decapitated Hillary, who has been dragged into a church and surrounded by a ring of garlic will I ever count Hillary Clinton 'out'.