Obama: Alone Again, And Loving It
By Donald Sensing
MoDo piled onPresident Obama last week again by noting his long-recorded preference for solitude.
But what started as an affectation has turned into an affliction" as Obama intentionally becomes more and more withdrawn and more isolated not merely from the whole country, not simply from the Republican opposition, but from members of his own party."His circle keeps getting more inner," says MoDo. Indeed.
Various commentators and bloggers are wondering whether the president's compulsion for golf is evidence of mental instability, perhaps of psychological inability to cope with the intense demands of the office. And this is not just a rightist view. Even on-the-left Ezra Klein wrote the same thing, though more obliquely,
As Ezra Klein wrote in Vox: “If Obama’s speeches aren’t as dramatic as they used to be, this is why: the White House believes a presidential speech on a politically charged topic is as likely to make things worse as to make things better.”Which is to say, the president does not know what to do to make a given situation (Ukraine, Gaza, Iraq, Libya, the southern border, Obamacare, etc. ad infinitum) better, cannot assess in advance whether anything he does will make any difference for better or worse, and therefore decides not to decide. Fore!
Maybe all of these armchair analyses have some merit, maybe not. But it does seem pretty clear that whether by intention or default, Barack Obama is temperamentally, emotionally and intellectually suited for something other than the highest office in the land - at least as that office is constituted in America.
I think that Obama temperamentally, emotionally and intellectually sees himself as chief of state rather than head of the government. The problem is that in America both roles are done by the same person, the president. That this is so was an outright rejection by our Founders of the British model, where two persons each occupy one role. The monarch is the chief of state and the prime minister is the head of government. In the two-plus centuries since the Revolution, the prime minister's power has expanded and the monarch's diminished, but the basic separation of roles has remained.
For a long time Obama has been mocked for a manner that often seems more monarchical than democratic. In the 2012 debates with Mitt Romney, Obama actually complained about the Constitutional constraints upon his powers. But does he really see himself this way:
With no more elections to go for him, his detachment and apparent uninterest in the grind of the presidency has drawn the attention and sometime ire even of staunch members of his own party. Obama seems not to care. The gritty details of policy and its execution are not for him. As chief of state that's not his job, anyway.
In October 2009, a bare nine months into Obama's second term, I expressed doubts about the validity of Edward Bernard Glick's column that what drove Obama to seek the highest office in the land was "the perks that go with it: Air Force One, Camp David, rent-free living quarters, chefs, chauffeurs, valets, bodyguards, and countless modern-day equivalents of Greek slaves and Turkish janissaries" (" President Perks"). I wrote at the time,
What seems to be motivating Mr. Obama's performance as chief executive is not the perks of the office (although I don't think they play a small part). I think what we are witnessing is a combination of two factors:
A Mae West personality coupled with,
The return of the Peter Principle ...
This is a man who simply craves attention, who thrives on it, who consumes it as nourishment. That's the first Mae West-ism at work, to get looked over, not overlooked.Now I think Glick was spot on. Over time, it seems to me that the perks of the office have assumed greater influence on where he goes and what he does. But the Peter Principle has become evermore obviously at work here too. It is the that in hierarchies of any sort capable people will advance ever higher until the reach a level where they fail, sometimes spectacularly so. That is called their "level of incompetence."
After John F. Kennedy was elected, President Dwight D. Eisenhower spent many hours with him. One of the key lessons was this: "All the decisions you will make," said Eisenhower, "will be hard decisions." Dwight went on to explain that the easy things will be tended to by cabinet secretaries and others of the administration with executive authority. But the tough ones will always be kicked to higher levels to be decided. At every level, the decisions become more and more difficult until, at last, the presidential inbox is filled with nothing but the most difficult items.
As others have exhaustively pointed out, there is nothing at all in Obama's pre-presidential resume that shows he ever made highly difficult decisions that depended, at the end, on his own personal reservoir of wisdom and experience. So he does not tackle the inbox because its contents are above his competence. He tends instead to lesser matters that match his lower level of competence and gratifyingly feed the ego.
When Obama started to realize that he is personally unable to perform at the level required -- in other words, when he came to admit to himself he is incompetent at head of government stuff -- then chief of state stuff became more and more satisfying, because those things are all show, little substance.
Fore!
Meanwhile, who's minding the store? We don't really know but we sure have our suspicions.
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