Washington Post: Obama was the Worst President Ever
A presidency in free-fall
washingtonpost.com
By Jennifer Rubin June 14 at 1:00 PM
President Obama, with House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi at his side, walks from a meeting room after making a last-ditch appeal to House Democrats to support a package of trade bills vital to his Asian policy agenda on June 12. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
If the only negative event last week had been the humiliating loss on trade authority, President Obama might already have reached the nadir of his presidency. But when you consider the direction of the war against the Islamic State, a massive cybersecurity breach and another embarrassing and indefensible capitulation on Iran, one senses that the president is a lame (dead?) duck marking time until January 2017.
The free trade debacle was, from the perspective of Republicans, a time for schadenfreude. So many times in the past the president had ignored their concerns, ridiculed their views and attacked their motives that, despite their own support for free trade, the president’s loss brought a measure of satisfaction on the GOP side. The Post noted, “The outcome was especially frustrating for a president who has spent four years unable to advance major initiatives — including a tax and budget ‘grand bargain,’ stricter gun control and immigration reform — through Congress in the face of relentless Republican opposition.” His singular ability to offend and ignore friends and foes alike has proved to be his undoing.
That the Democrats sunk their own pork-laden trade adjustment package carefully negotiated by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made the president’s predicament all the more satisfying in conservative quarters. Now, perhaps Democrats will reconsider or, from the GOP perspective, perhaps trade authority can be passed without the union goodies, but the image of a president doing too little, too late and too ineffectively remains.
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The parade of horribles for the White House did not stop there. If foreign policy has often been the refuge for second-term presidents, in Obama’s case it has become a scene out of “The Perils of Pauline.” First denying, then sending the most minimal amount of troops to show he is “doing something,” the president’s failure to degrade let alone defeat the Islamic State is undeniable. He can blame Iraq, or President George W. Bush, but the fault is his own and the stakes could not be higher for the U.S. Fred Kagan, one of the authors of Bush’s successful Iraq surge, writes, “The story of Iraq is, in some respects, even more tragic for being more avoidable. Had the Obama administration succeeded in negotiating a deal to keep American forces in Iraq after 2011, the US would have been positioned to prevent ISIS from gaining the strength and ground that it did leading up to the fall of Mosul and could have prevented that disaster. American inaction in the last few weeks has allowed ISIS to seize control of Ramadi — an eminently avoidable calamity that has completely disarranged any hope of Iraqi forces retaking Mosul this year.” Nor is it acceptable to adopt the notion that if Iraq can’t win this, then we can’t do it for them:
[T]he idea that fighting ISIS is someone else’s problem is profoundly wrong. As General John Allen recently declared, “[ISIS] is not an Iraq or Syria problem; [it] is a regional problem with global implications.” ISIS is actively encouraging attacks in the West. It sits on a flow of thousands of Western citizens going into the fight, being trained, and returning to their homelands, radicalized and militarily effective. It poses such an existential threat to the Shi’a community worldwide that it is driving a global mobilization of both Sunni and Shi’a that will reach into Europe, the US, and Australia. There is no fact-based argument to be made anymore that ISIS can somehow be contained. It must be defeated, or it will bring the fight to our homes. . . .
America should not be observing this calamity from a distance, tepidly supporting local proxies to whom we hope to outsource the solution and arguing with ourselves about who is to blame for it all. If this nightmare continues to unfold, if ISIS manages to pursue its genocidal plans against the Shi’a, or if the regional Shi’a groups and states mobilize instead to fight a regional war against the Sunni, then we will all ultimately bear the blame for having failed to prevent another holocaust.
American strategy against ISIS does not need fine-tuning. It needs a fundamental change, starting with an acceptance of the fact that we must own this fight. The war before us is not a war of choice: ISIS is already at war with us. We can wait until ISIS manages a truly horrible attack in the US, as we have before, and then leap spasmodically to avenge ourselves, but that is surely the path of folly as well as amorality — amorality because Muslim lives matter, too.
But Obama is not the man for the job. His presidency is premised on conflict and reality avoidance. And so the remainder of his term becomes one giant gamble: Can we get through the next 18 months without a serious attack on the homeland, with no irreversible disasters in the region?
And speaking of disasters, the Iran negotiation has become Orwellian. We declare we cannot give up on, say, Iran’s disclosure of its military aspects to date, for that makes inspection impossible. We then give up. The State Department, to the fury and disbelief of the Foggy Bottom press corps, denies we ever promised to hold the line. (If you really want to be depressed, take a gander at Friday’s press conference in which State’s spokesman tries to convince the media that Secretary of State John Kerry never said PMDs were an essential part of any final deal.) One wonders if the president can’t convince his own party of the merits of free trade whether he will be able to bamboozle them to stick with him on a patently absurd deal with Iran. (Meanwhile, Iran has stepped up support of the Taliban, prompting presidential hopeful Rick Perry to declare, “Reports that Iran is supporting the Taliban with cash and arms are the latest alarming consequence of the vacuum of leadership created by President Obama’s failed foreign policy. Iran has time and again looked for any opportunity to pursue its regional ambitions, which opens the door to more sectarian violence in the future.”)
And, finally, in one more instance of government ineptitude, the White House was forced to acknowledge a second horrific cyberbreach exposing confidential data on the federal workforce. “Now, not only has information been stolen from military and intelligence personnel in this second attack, but also the breach likely extends outside of the federal government,” Forbes reports. Somewhere, Carly Fiorina is updating her stump speech to make the case that perhaps now is not the time to turn over the Oval Office to a woman who thinks her home server is “protected” by Secret Service officers surrounding the perimeter of her home.
In sum, the president, 18 months before he leaves office, is becoming a pitiful figure, lacking the power of persuasion and the credibility and respect a commander in chief needs to rally his own side and keep our foes at bay. Worse, he is increasing cynicism and fear of government itself, which will have a corrosive effect on governance for his successor. At times like this, one wishes we had a parliamentary system, where a vote of no confidence could whisk away a failed head of government.
Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective. |
