I was one of those Democrats who campaigned for Hillary till the last moment, so maybe I am really biased against Obama. I am, sadly - sadly because the country has had to suffer - vindicated because my greatest fears about Obama have been confirmed. I felt then and am convinced now that Obama has held this narcissistic view that being the first black President would be his greatest accomplishment and that he was interested in making history primarily for the benefit of African-Americans and only secondarily - though a close second - solving the country's problems. In retrospect, he probably felt that the country's problems were insoluble and therefore it was not his job to solve them and that successive presidencies after his would complete the job. He in retrospect never saw himself as another FDR.
It seems crystal clear now, according to our 20-20 hindsight, that he did not understand the gravity of the problems that confronted Americans and how he could use the power of his presidency to solve a big chunk of those problems. He may have understood the statistics, having a full grasp of those statistics, but he did not seem to know in his heart what the economic problems did to the psyche of average Americans. This is why he did not act immediately, with the urgency of FDR's fight against the Great Depression. He did not seem to know that the people being hurt the most by the economic meltdown were African-Americans, 92% of whom had voted for him in the 2008 elections.
Obama should have multi-tasked, fighting for his health care reform and solving the jobs crisis at the same time. Instead, he chose to merely throw money at the unemployment problem and concentrated on his history-making health care reform. All that time, the much-respected columnist of the New York Times, Bob Herbert, was imploring him to treat the unemployment problem as his version of FDR's World War II, yet Obama's response was only a professorial acknowledgment that there was a huge unemployment problem plus speeches about the need to solve that problem. When he noticed that Republicans were blocking his half-hearted attempts to solve the problem, he did not go to the American people and denounce the obstructionist Republicans in Congress.
Hillary has always struck me as a bulldog who won't let go once her jaws are locked on a problem. She has always been a problem solver and a clear, decisive thinker. It's what came out of the Senate when she served there. It's what came out of the Lewinsky scandal, when she decisively sided with Bill and not let her emotions rule the day.
Obama's governance has been marked by his obsession with writing history. He refused to go after those who lied us into the Iraq war and those who created the mess in our economy, intent on creating a historic post-partisan legacy. He didn't much care what kind of health care plan came out of Congress, he only wanted to make sure that there was a health care plan that history would credit him for. He seemed to be uninterested in the details of the stimulus bill that he signed, 1/3 of which consisted of tax cuts that he was ambivalent about. He simply made sure there was a stimulus bill and that he would be credited by history as the President who stopped the economy from sliding into the ravine.
Obama does not seem to have any patience for details and is terrified of conflict. His 2004 speech before the Democratic convention said it all. "There are not red states or blue states, there is only the United States of America."
This was received by Americans gleefully and wholeheartedly and Obama got rave reviews. It was also naive. It was like Bush standing on the decks of the U.S.S. Lincoln and declaring "Mission Accomplished."
Obama was very, very wrong. The fact was, there were blue states and red states, and in many of those states, there were blue towns and red towns, blue communities and red communities, blue families and red families, blue brothers and red brothers.
The great divisions that had riven the country would not suddenly disappear just because we wished them to disappear. Obama, incredibly, did not have the foresight to know that his election into the Presidency, should that happen one day, would exacerbate the deep divisions in the country. He did not seem to know that his ascension to the Presidency would turn red states into deep red and blue states into deep blue.
How can a man so eloquent, so intelligent, so celebrated as a brain-iac be so naive and/or innocent?
The answer may lie in the fact that Obama is not really a black man. He is only half-black. In fact, psychologically he may have thought of himself as white when he was growing up under the care of his Caucasian grandparents in Hawaii. I am speculating, I know, but it is entirely possible that Obama did not grow up as a black boy. He probably did not know he was black unless he looked at himself in the mirror. And even while looking in the mirror he may not have seen a black boy.
This is key. If he did not know that he was a black boy and later a black man, he would not be aware of the deep hostility that many Americans, especially in the deep South and the heartland, hold for people of color. And if he in fact knew of this hostility, he seemed not to be aware of the intensity of this hostility in the first two years of his Presidency. He seemed to think that the opposition's wall of defiance had been erected because of policy differences only and not because of his being a black man with a black wife and a black family.
I think now in his third year he is fully aware of the racial roots of the livid hostility that permeates the air in most gatherings where the opposition talks about him. The problem, however, is that he is not fully equipped psychologically to handle the ferocity of the hatred and insults hurled in his direction at every turn.
"Kenyan," "Socialist," "Commie," "Muslim apostate" - these are just some of the epithets that white racists are using to diminish him. And yet, incredibly, he thinks that his best response is not to give a response, or at best a tepid response. Or a discussion of policy.
At a time when there is a war for the hearts and minds of Americans, Obama's followers are being led by a man who doesn't think there is a war. He thinks that the root causes are just policy differences and therefore the conflict could be won by exceptionally good policy. He did not think, initially, that the Tea Party-led Republican House members, for example, were willing to bring the whole economy down if the demands of those Tea Party Republicans were not met. He thought that if he crafted policy that was reasonable, the Tea Party-ers would come to their senses.
He was wrong and the country now suffers because America is perceived as being led figureheadedly by a leader who just doesn't get it. The country in fact is now led by a minority Tea Party that doesn't reflect what Americans visualize for the country, but who is willing to destroy America in order to rebuild it, an America that would rise from the ashes of their own destruction in the image of the Tea Party movement. Shades of American Vietnam policy - napalm bombing of whole villages in South Vietnam by American forces so new communities would someday spring up and be like model cities that the American military had envisioned.
A brilliant piece of psychoanalysis came out in the New York Times today which encapsulates what Obama's calculations and/or character flaws might be that have led to his continued insistence that the best policy is to compromise with his uncompromising opponents who are intent on his destruction and character assassination.
The author - Drew Westen, a psychology professor at Emory University and the author of "The Political Brain - The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation" - offers lucid conjectures on why Obama is Obama. It would be a crime not to repeat the author's words, digest them and peruse them in this, the post-mortem on the Obama presidency, which will either end in January 2013, or virtually earlier if he decides to become a non-factor, stepping aside for a suddenly resurrected Hillary.
"The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb — that “centrist” voters like “centrist” politicians. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated. Centrist voters prefer honest politicians who help them solve their problems. A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.
"... Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.
"... (Obama's) stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive voice, as if the cause of others’ misery has no agency and hence no culpability. Whether that reflects his aversion to conflict, an aversion to conflict with potential campaign donors that today cripples both parties’ ability to govern and threatens our democracy, or both, is unclear.
"A final explanation is that he ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation.
"But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks."
What an indictment. The problem for Obama is that the people who are saying these and similar things about him are not his opponents - they are his supporters and people who voted for him in 2008 and are no longer inclined to vote for him next year.
I can't see any future for Obama in these few months leading up to the elections in 2012 - does the election season start in December this year or in January next year or have the general elections already started? (Obama versus an unidentified Republican) - and he would do everybody a big favor by simply getting out of the way and letting the Clintons try to salvage the Democratic Presidency that is still the country's hope against the abuses and terroristic tactics of the Tea Party-led Republicans.
I suspect that there will be a growing grass-roots movement to encourage Hillary to step into the primaries. But, life is long, with many twists and turns. Obama can still salvage his unraveled presidency by issuing an executive order that declares United States debt as a sacred promise that America will always honor. His executive order will abolish the debt ceiling and declare that debt ceilings are unconstitutional since the 14th amendment clearly states that all legitimately acquired public debts of the U.S. shall be honored. This would effectively prevent another debt ceiling debate in the future and reassure the world that the U.S. will never, ever default on its obligations.
The resulting debate would put Obama front and center once more in the public's consciousness, resurrecting his image as a consequential President and not as a spectator in the history that is now being made by Tea Party Republicans.
The only hitch to this grand design is that Obama would not do this. It will require boldness and a willingness to gut it out, to stick it out the way Bill Clinton did during the impeachment hearings and the subsequent trial in the Senate. Obama does not have it in him to be subjected to threats and actual Congressional deliberations on his impeachment. Obama thinks his job is to be re-elected and any constraints on his electioneering are out of the question.
And he still wishes to this day that people would just get along.
This is why Democrats will increasingly call for Hillary to come forward and claim the Presidency which should have been hers to begin with had the country not been bamboozled by an eloquent but vastly inexperienced and untested Obama. Remember the 3:00 a.m. phone call that Hillary had warned all of us about?
