Facts are ruinous to you koan.
Barack Obama's Legacy of FAILURE
From The New Political
President Obama’s recent comment that he “wishes he were president of China” shows both that he is in over his head and that it would be wrong to see him elected to a second term.All American presidents face ups and downs during their administrations. In the history of the American presidency there have been dark days; the Civil War, the Great Depression, 9/11, Watergate and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But through it all, I highly doubt that any previous leader ever wished he were the president of China.
Like 53 percent of American voters, I stood behind Barack Obama in 2008. While I’d never voted for a Democrat before, and won’t again, I was terrified by the idea of having Sarah Palin one heartbeat away from the presidency.
After his election, I was hopeful that President Obama’s youthful, optimistic style would provide a welcome counter balance to doom-struck post-9/11 era.
My optimism about Obama’s presidency endured the initial battle over health care reform. While the final bill is far from perfect, it is undeniable that health care is devouring a rising a greater share of GDP with each passing year and something needed to be done to “bend the cost curve” and help make America’s odd mix of state, national and private health care systems more rational.
Looking back, the health care debate was a proverbial peak behind that current at Obama’s leadership style.
The debates about health care revealed Obama to be an absentee president. It’s one thing for an executive to be indifferent to the details of policy. But for most of the debate about health care, Obama was simply absent. He preferred to spend his time going on talk shows and playing with the family dog.
If Obama’s non-role in the health care debate was troublesome, his indecisiveness on the decision to commit troops to Afghanistan was terrifying.
I was in Washington D.C. for a conference at the Marine Corps University in the fall of 2009 with a number of high-ranking military officers and policy experts from around the world. The sense of frustration with the lack of leadership from the White House was palpable in the room and the unanimous opinion was that the kind of public back-and-forth coming from the administration was unhelpful on ground in Afghanistan.
The final outcome of Obama’s Hamlet-esque dithering on Afghanistan was a bloody disaster. Obama’s decision to “split the difference” by sending more troops to Afghanistan while declaring to both the Taliban and our “frenemies” in the region (Iran and Pakistan) that we were leaving in July 2011 was too cute by half. To make matters worse, Obama followed up with more public dithering on the withdrawal date, now apparently set for sometime in 2014.
On the domestic front, Obama has apparently continued Bush-era torture policies. Worse, he’s reneged on his promise to close the prison at GITMO on a number of occasions and there are still over a hundred prisoners being held there that have never been tried for any crime.
The final failure of the Obama administration will probably be his handling of Libya. Once Obama publically declared that Gadhafi “must go,” he set himself up to be challenged.
So far, Gadhafi’s response has been “or what?”
“Or, um, I don’t know,” declares our ditherer-in-chief.
It’s too bad that Obama doesn’t consult Bill Clinton about Libya. At the end of his presidency, Clinton lamented his inaction in Rwanda during the genocide there in 1994.
It took Clinton eight years to realize that, as the global Leviathan, anything bad that happens in the world happens with implicit American consent. Thankfully, Clinton learned the lessons of Rwanda and acted more quickly to stop the killing in the Balkans in the mid 90s.
Now Obama will learn the lessons of Rwanda. If Gadhafi holds onto power, as it appears he will, the blood of the dissidents will be on Obama’s hands.
And all of this brings us back around to Obama’s wish that he could be president of China. There are two implicit points in Obama’s wish: first, he wishes he didn’t have to deal with the democratic process in the US and make rules by fiat. While this is an unsettling belief for an American leader, it’s really just a good argument for checks and balances over executive authority.
But the second implicit point is more intractable: Obama is uncomfortable with America’s role as global Leviathan. Well, too bad. If you don’t want to be the world leader, go back to teaching law at the University of Chicago. You won’t have to lead anybody in the faculty lounge.
For everyone else, the time has come to begin the search for new leadership. What America needs is the later-day Ronald Reagan. We need somebody who is comfortable with America’s role as global leader and can restore confidence at home and abroad. And we don’t have four more years to waste while we hope for change. |
