Is Obama a brute or a pushover?
Republicans keep seeing double when they look at the president. For a clearer view, they should watch less Glenn Beck and more Saturday Night Live.
David Frum
A friend of mine worked on the British Conservatives' 1997 election campaign, the party's worst defeat since the reign of Queen Victoria. Later, he reflected on what had gone wrong.
"We had two messages," he said. "One was: 'This is the same old Labour Party and it cannot be trusted.' The other was: 'This man Blair has stolen all our ideas!'"
A political party needs a story about itself and a story about its opponents. If those stories are contradictory, or if they do not accord with well-known facts, the story goes unheard or unbelieved.
Like the British Conservatives of 1997, today's GOP has two stories about President Obama.
The first is that he's a dangerous leftist who threatens American freedoms. This story is told not only by the angry voices on talk radio, but by senior Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich. "The modern left is essentially proto-totalitarian," Gingrich told the editors of National Review on Oct. 7. And President Obama "is a person of the left. The minute you accept that, you understand almost everything."
The second story is the one we heard after the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. In this version, the president is a man without accomplishments—all talk, no action.
Obviously, these stories cannot both be true. Republicans will have to choose. Which fits the facts better?
With each passing month, the case grows stronger for the latter story: the weak Obama, not the strong.
Consider:
· The president made a series of controversial commitments to his base voters: to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, to end "Don't ask, don't tell," to support card-check legislation for unions. His record? No, no, and no. More tellingly, except for Guantánamo Bay, this 53-percent president has not even tried to act on his commitments—unlike George W. Bush, who won election with 48 percent, or Bill Clinton, who won with only 42 percent.
· The president has allowed Congress to write the two most important bills of his first year: health care and cap-and-trade. In both cases, Congress has shrugged off crucial presidential demands. Obama wanted health care to include a "public option." A 60-seat Democratic majority in the Senate has blown him off. He wanted cap-and-trade to auction off emissions rights, raising tens of billions of dollars to close the deficit. Democrats in the House and Senate have decided to give those rights away for free to utility companies.
· The president scrapped missile defense in Eastern Europe and declined to meet the Dalai Lama in an effort to win Russian and Chinese support for stiffer sanctions against Iran. Russia and China pocketed his concessions—and have delivered nothing in return.
· The president was deeply embarrassed by the Pentagon leak of a report calling for more troops for Afghanistan. Question: what happened to the leakers? Reassigned to the Greenland radar station? Nope. Nothing.
For an aspiring dictator—an appellation Fox's Glenn Beck once again applied to the president this week—Obama has compiled a shamefully thin record. But the record does nicely confirm Fred Armisen's "Saturday Night Live" impression of a haplessly feckless president unable to impose his will on anyone. "If I see any more of this hateful rhetoric, I'm going to have to take drastic action. Nah—not really."
The power of caricature is always derived from its basis in reality. As the GOP makes its case against this president, it would do well to follow the proven experts at Saturday Night Live—not the alternate reality of paranoid fantasy.
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13 Comments
Posted by Dylan, Thursday, October 15, 2009, 6:22 pm BHO is like a bully who knows he is in over his head. Bully to the little guys voters. Brute to the Clintons and republicans. Lamb to the world leaders. he is so desperate to be loved. sad, but it is looking to be true.
Posted by nem0.n00ne, Thursday, October 15, 2009, 9:02 pm The man is an empty suit. That was always clear to anyone who really looked at his socalled achievements. To mix my metaphors, we can now see that the Emperor Has No Clothes.
Posted by Yirginia Red, Thursday, October 15, 2009, 10:48 pm Weak and ineffective.That is BHO. Hopefully the GOP will realize this hapless leftist is on his way to self destruction and just let him continue his downward spiral. Why do the worlds leaders act as though they admire him? Because he is not threatening and is perceived as weak and ineffective. Today we learn that the very banks we baled out are giving millions away in bonuses. BHO, do something for us and stop this travesty. This country needs small business, not big banks. If they fail they fail. we need small businesses, not unions.
Posted by Brett, Friday, October 16, 2009, 2:12 pm Here is a big part of the problem with conservatives: you oversimplify everything! Can you possibly understand that there are more choices than brute or pushover? I know it takes a little more use of the ol' noodle, but you need to at least entertain the possibility that there are other options. This kind of 'blackorwhite' no reference to race mentality is what causes a lot of your problems with policy. Naturally and as usual, most everything that Frum says here is inaccurate. Obama is in the process of closing Gitmo. cont.
Posted by Brett, Friday, October 16, 2009, 2:16 pm The first thing he did as POTUS was to sign the order to close it, and now it simply might not be done on time because of republican obstructionism. Obama is ending 'Don't ask, don't tell'. Just because it hasn't happened yet does not mean it isn't in process! Obama isn't the only person in Washington who just has to wave his hand and everything goes the way he wants it to. He is just one man and he does not have unlimited power, although repubs have tried to give that to the POTUS in the past. ...cont.
Posted by Brett, Friday, October 16, 2009, 2:19 pm Regarding health care reform or any other legislation: Congress is the branch that writes and passes legislation, not the executive branch. Also, no one marches in lockstep according to their leader's whims but republicans, so things aren't going to work the same way as they did when the repubs were in charge. Nonconservatives actually think for themselves and act accordingly. That's why Arlen Specter is no big problem for the dems like he seemed to be for the neocons. Obama scrapped the missile defense plan because it was a bad idea. ...cont
Posted by Brett, Friday, October 16, 2009, 2:23 pm The main reason Bush and company pushed the plan so much is to funnel billions of tax dollars to their militaryindustrial complex supporters. Besides, Iran does not have any ICBMs, so the threat the hugely expensive program was supposed to negate doesn't even exist right now. Obama is simply going with the more intelligent an effective plan of protecting against short and mediumrange missiles, which Iran does have. Obama was not 'deeply embarrassed' by any leak of any report. How was he embarrassed? It was simply out of line for a ...cont.
Posted by Brett, Friday, October 16, 2009, 2:26 pm military subordinate to try to influence official policy by stepping beyond his boundaries and going public with his opinion. When has a general NOT wanted more troops? Want another example of Frum's weird foolishness? He actually tries to make Obama look bad by writing 'For an aspiring dictatoran appellation Fox's Glenn Beck once again applied to the president this weekObama has compiled a shamefully thin record.' A 'shamefully thin record' on being a dictator? That sounds like a good politician to me! Do you really think the president .cont
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