The Amateur
Page 5
Doris Kearns Goodwin suggested that “A New Foundation” might not be the wisest choice for a motto.
“Why not?” the president asked.
“It sounds,” said Goodwin, “like a woman’s girdle.”
If the meeting proved anything, it was that Barack Obama didn’t have the faintest idea 1) who he was; 2) why he had been elected president; and 3) how to be the commander in chief and chief executive of the United States of America.
In short, he didn’t know what he didn’t know.
He believed, wrongly, that his so-called “personal narrative” had gotten him elected. Even as president, he never tired of telling the same old stories—more myth than reality—about his idealistic white mother and brilliant African father; his American-as-apple-pie white grandparents, Gramps and Toot; his cockeyed Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro; and his transformation from a confused young man of mixed race named Barry to a proud African-American adult named Barack Hussein Obama.
He further believed, wrongly, that he was not only a different kind of leader by virtue of his race, strange name, and exotic upbringing, but that he was a child of destiny, a special person who had been singled out for great things. In his mind, he had been elected to be a transformational president and to save America from itself.
None of this was true. Barack Obama wasn’t elected because of his charisma and biography. And he certainly wasn’t elected to turn America into a European-style quasi-socialist country in which the state controls economic and social matters. The political stars had aligned for him in the election year of 2008 because the American people were scared to death about the economy, fed up with George W. Bush and the spendthrift Republicans, disillusioned by the seemingly endless war in Iraq, and sick at heart over the decline of their society’s values.
But Obama couldn’t see any of that.
He was blind to reality because he suffered from what could only be described as a messianic complex—meaning that he believed he was destined to become America’s savior. “My attitude is that you don’t want to just be the president,” Obama told an interviewer for Men’s Vogue. “You want to change the country.”
For a long time, people didn’t understand that there was a method in his madness. As Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, pointed out, “Among today’s liberal elite, bad faith in America is a sophistication, a kind of hipness. More importantly, it is the perfect formula for political and government power. It rationalizes power in the name of intervening against evil—I will use the government to intervene against the evil tendencies of American life (economic inequality, structural racism and sexism, corporate greed, neglect of the environment and so on)....”
Obama’s acolytes in academia, the media, the churches, and the world of entertainment encouraged this dangerous delusion. Micah Tillman, a lecturer in philosophy at the Catholic University of America, said: “Barack Obama is the Platonic philosopher king we’ve been looking for for the past 2,400 years.” At a campaign rally in South Carolina, Oprah Winfrey had referred to Obama as “The One,” a reference to both Jesus Christ and Neo from the movie The Matrix. The New York Times called his election “a national catharsis.” His hometown newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times , wrote, “The first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review has a movie-star smile and more than a little mystique. Also, we just like to say his name. We are considering taking it as a mantra.”
Obama’s political apostles never seemed to tire of coming up with fresh examples of his divinity. Some examples:
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: “I’ve been following politics since I was about 5. I’ve never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament.”
Newsweek editor Evan Thomas: “In a way Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He’s sort of God. He’s going to bring all the different sides together.”
Film director Spike Lee: “You’ll have to measure time by ‘Before Obama’ and ‘After Obama’.... Everything’s going to be affected by this seismic change in the universe.”
Jonathan Alter in his book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One: Rabbi David Saperstein, reading from Psalms in English and Hebrew, noticed from the altar that the good men and women of the congregation that day, including the Bidens and other dignitaries, had not yet stood. Finally Bishop Vashti McKenzie of the African Methodist Church asked that everyone rise. At that moment Saperstein saw something from his angle of vision: “If I had seen it in a movie I would have groaned and said, ‘Give me a break. That’s so trite.’” A beam of morning light shown [sic] through the stained-glass windows and illuminated the president-elect’s face. Several of the clergy and choir on the altar who also saw it marveled afterward about the presence of the Divine.
The absurd, not to say blasphemous comparison of Obama to the Almighty became so embarrassing that Vice President Joe Biden couldn’t resist the opportunity to tease the president about his messiah complex. Speaking at the 2009 white-tie Gridiron Club Dinner, Biden said. “[President Obama] can’t be here tonight because he’s busy getting ready for Easter. He thinks it’s about him.”
During his dinner with the historians, Obama indicated that he had a preference for a corporatist political system in which the economy would be collectively managed by big employers, big unions, and government officials through a formal mechanism at the national level. Also known as state capitalism, it is a system in which the government picks winners and promotes economic growth.
This corporatist approach was hardly a new idea. It had been around for more than one hundred and fifty years. It had been tried in the 1930s and 1940s by Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascists, and in Europe after World War II by democratic-socialist governments in Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, among others. In America during the 1970s and 1980s, leftwing Democratic presidential candidates Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis revived the idea, arguing that America should replace free-market capitalism with what they called “a neo-corporatist state.”
Though the corporatist idea had an unbroken record of failure both in Europe and America, where voters had decisively rejected Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis, Obama was determined to embrace this discredited economic, political, and social philosophy. He planned to achieve his “transformational” presidency by vastly expanding the reach of Washington into the everyday life of American citizens.
In that regard, the American president whom Obama most closely resembled was not JFK, Reagan, Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt. It was Woodrow Wilson, whose conception of himself was aptly described by the noted conservative historian Forrest McDonald (also missing at the White House dinner) as “little short of messianic.” Indeed, McDonald wrote about Wilson:... the day after his election, the Democratic national chairman called on him to confer about appointments, only to be rebuffed by Wilson’s statement, “Before we proceed, I wish it clearly understood that I owe you nothing. Remember that God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States.” He was a master of oratory who described every issue, no matter how trivial, in terms of a great moral crusade, always with himself as the nation’s (and later the world’s) moral leader—and he believed what he was saying. Given this attitude, it followed that people who opposed him were unenlightened or evil; it was therefore impossible to meet them halfway.
Forrest McDonald’s description of Woodrow Wilson captures Barack Obama to a T.
In the fall of 2011—shortly after Obama botched the budget-deficit negotiations with Congress, and the United States government lost its Triple-A credit rating for the first time in history—I met under hush-hush conditions with one of the historians who had dined at the White House with Obama during the infancy of his presidency. We met in a restaurant on the outskirts of a large American city, where we were unlikely to be seen. Our conversation, which lasted for nearly two hours, was conducted under the condition of anonymity.
Disillusioned liberals viewed Obama as a failed messiah. But conservatives had never fallen for the messianic talk. To conservatives, Obama’s problems stemmed less from his inflated self-image than from his unmitigated incompetence. He was the community organizer who had never held a real job and had brought the country to the brink of ruin because of his callow understanding of the way the world worked.
I wondered if the historian I met at the deli agreed with this assessment.
“There’s no doubt that Obama has turned out to be a major enigma and disappointment,” the historian admitted. “He waged such a brilliant campaign, first against Hillary Clinton in the primaries, then against John McCain in the general election. For a long time, I found it hard to understand why he couldn’t translate his political savvy into effective governance.
“But I think I know the answer now,” the historian continued. “Since the beginning of his administration, Obama hasn’t been able to capture the public’s imagination and inspire people to follow him. Vision isn’t enough in a president. Great presidents not only have to enunciate their vision; they must lead by example and inspiration. Franklin Roosevelt spoke to the individual. He and Ronald Reagan had the ability to make each American feel that the president cared deeply and personally about them.
“That quality has been lacking in Obama. People don’t feel that he’s on their side. The irony is that he was supposed to be such a brilliant orator, but in fact he’s turned out to be a failure as a communicator. And his failure to connect with people has had nothing to do with the choice of his words or how well he delivers his speeches. It’s something much more fundamental than that.
“The American people have come to realize that, in Barack Obama, they elected a man as president who does not know how to lead. He lacks an executive sense. He doesn’t know how to run things. He’s not a manager. He hasn’t been able to bring together the best and brightest talents. Not to put too fine a point on it, he’s in over his head.”
CHAPTER 7
BUNGLER-IN-CHIEF
[Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize] would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.
—Christopher Hitchens
Calling Barack Obama an amateur can be tricky business.
After all, amateurs are often viewed in a positive light. In fiction, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is an amateur detective, and the foppish young English nobleman Sir Percy Blackeney turns out to be the dashing Scarlet Pimpernel. In real life, two of history’s greatest scientists, Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel, were amateurs. So was the great golfer Bobby Jones. And who can forget the finest amateur boxer of all time, Cassius Clay, who won the light-heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics before he turned professional as Muhammad Ali?
Obama would appear to be the polar opposite of the amateur who does what he does for the pure pleasure of it. No matter how much Obama likes to parade as a nonpartisan reformer, he is, in fact, the product of Chicago-style politics, which is a byword for patronage, nepotism, bribery, and corruption.
Since 1972, four Illinois governors (out of seven) have been convicted of corruption. “A new report... documents the extent to which the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago have been hotbeds of corruption,” reports the February 25, 2012, issue of The Economist.
Chicago ... has the dubious distinction of being the federal district with the most convictions since 1976. Since then, 1,828 elected officials, appointees, government employees and a few private individuals have been convicted of corruption in Illinois, and 84 percent of these were in its Northern District—a judicial zone which contains the entire Chicago metropolitan area. During this time around one-third of the city’s aldermen have been convicted of corruption. No mayors have been convicted or indicted—not even Bill Thompson, who was backed by Al Capone.
Chicago is where Obama cut his political teeth. His wife Michelle worked for Mayor Daley’s political machine, as did his senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett. Obama and his crew of Chicago operatives don’t abide by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules of political combat. As Sean Connery memorably said of “the Chicago way” in the movie The Untouchables: “He brings a knife to the fight, you bring a gun; he puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue.”
“If we have learned anything about Barack Obama the past three years it’s that he enjoys hitting,” columnist Daniel Henninger wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “He will be merciless with [the Republican nominee]. Ask Hillary. Ask the respectful Republicans that Obama [has] pistol-whipped.... Ask Wall Street’s Democrats.”
So what do I mean when I call such a bare-knuckled political warrior an amateur? I simply mean this: judged by the skillset that is necessary for the chief executive and commander in chief of the United States of America, Obama is the Bungler-in-Chief.
“Obama has a political sense, but he lacks an executive sense,” says Walter Anderson, a leadership expert whose lectures at the New School for Social Research in New York City were turned into a bestselling book, The Confidence Course. “He has the same vulnerability that many legislators have; he’s skillful at getting elected, but he’s often lost when it comes to governing and inspiring others. In my view, it’s a mistake to compare Obama to Jimmy Carter, as some do. Carter was a micromanager in all things. Obama is anything but.”
“Obama is politically astute,” says Tavis Smiley, the African-American talk-show host who has often criticized Obama. “I was in awe of how well run and on message his presidential campaign was. In all my life, I never saw a campaign run so brilliantly. And so it’s been interesting to see how off course and off track Obama has gotten in the White House. And what’s occurred to me is that campaigning and governing are entirely different things, and that all the things that served Obama so well in the campaign have come back to haunt him in his governance.”
William Safire, the late New York Times columnist and lexicographer, might have had Barack Obama in mind when he noted in Safire’s Political Dictionary:Because there are a great many more amateurs than pros, the public image of the amateur is that of a fresh-faced, civic-minded citizen out to do battle for a cause he believes in, versus the cigar-chomping image of the political professional.... The appearance of being an amateur, then, is something to be coveted; the act of doing political work amateurishly is something to be avoided.
Obama has cultivated the appearance of being a political amateur. He likes to be seen as above the fray. He hates to be seen getting his hands dirty in the nitty-gritty of politics. During his presidency, he has rarely appeared at the Democratic Party’s most important annual event—the Jefferson Jackson Day fundraising dinner. He lets others in the White House deconstruct polling data and analyze electoral maps, because he thinks that such behavior is beneath him. And he refuses to make “robo-calls,” recorded phone messages asking people to go out and vote.
“Obama does little to disguise his disdain for Washington and the conventions of modern politics,” writes the New York Times’ Peter Baker, the author of a book on the impeachment of Bill Clinton. “When he emerges from the Oval Office during the day, aides say, he sometimes pauses before the split-screen television in the outer reception area, soaks in the cable chatter, then shakes his head and walks away. ‘He’s still never gotten comfortable here,’ a top White House official told me. He has little patience for what Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser, calls ‘the inevitable theatrics of Washington.’ ... He has yet to fully decide whether he is of Washingt
on or apart from it.”
Obama’s consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, is even blunter about it. She told New Yorker editor David Remnick that Obama was “just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”
All of this helps explain why Obama bungled last year’s deliberations by the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, otherwise known as the Supercommittee. “A Ronald Reagan or a Bill Clinton would have been much more effectively engaged in twisting arms and, where necessary, dispensing favors,” wrote The Economist. Obama’s detachment from the political battle, the British magazine went on to say, “should not have been surprising, given his lamentable failure a year ago to endorse the effective and brave conclusions of the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission that he personally appointed.”
Obama’s arrogance, his sense of superiority, and his air of haughtiness—but above all, his amateurism—are responsible for his record of political fiascos. Two days after his inauguration, he overruled his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and signed orders saying that the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay would be closed within a year. At the time of the signing, he didn’t have the faintest idea where he would put the terrorists. It turned out that nobody in America wanted terrorists in their backyard, and so nearly four years later most of them are still there in Gitmo.
Again against the advice of Rahm Emanuel, Obama supported Attorney General Eric Holder’s harebrained scheme to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks, to New York City to stand trial in a civilian court not far from the site of the ruins of the World Trade Center. Ultimately, Obama had to abandon the notion of trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as a civilian.