Barack Obama is on track
to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson.
In the modern era, we've
seen several failed presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed
presidents have one strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in the
vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding
a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned
in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by
his triumphant overture to China.
George Bush Jr didn't fail
so much as he was perceived to have been too much of a patrician while being
uncomfortable with his more conservative allies. Yet George Bush Sr is still
perceived as a man of uncommon decency, loyal to the enduring American
character of rugged self-determination, free markets, and generosity. George W
will eventually be treated more kindly by historians as one whose potential
was squashed by his own compromise of conservative principles, in some ways
repeating the mistakes of his father, while ignoring many lessons in executive
leadership he should have learned at Harvard Business School. Of course
George W could never quite overcome being dogged from the outset by half of
the nation convinced he was electorally illegitimate -- thus aiding the
resurgence of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
But, Barack Obama is
failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy,
domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the
American people. The incomparable
Dorothy Rabinowitz
in the Wall Street
Journal put her finger on it: He is failing
because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe
them.
Fred Barnes of
the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his
message, and is overexposed.
Clarice Feldman
of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is
failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his
intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.
But, there is something
more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of
unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame
duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting,
the Republicans have now seized a
five point advantage.
This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?
No narrative. Obama doesn't
have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative,
much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this
self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He doesn't have an
American narrative that draws upon the rest of us. All successful presidents
have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own
where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core
of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the
majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only
touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are.
Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don't
align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, Reagan.
But not this president.
It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, is
historically illiterate, and woefully small minded for the size of the task--
all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is,
his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from
delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is
unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are
repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His
descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond
with our experience.
In the meantime, while
we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just
about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance
executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post
office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama to
lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For those of you I offended, I
apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn't give me
enough time; if only I'd had a second term, I could have offended you too."
Mercifully, the Founders at
the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a
desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the
executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a
new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for
president again two short years after that.
Yes, small presidents do
fail, Barack Obama among them. The coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps
rolling along.