I think I posted earlier (or maybe that was on Twitter) a comment about the President that went like this: ” Obama carefully preparing to get angry about the oil spill.”
Wherever I posted it, that was weeks ago. The oil is still gushing. Americans were convinced in 2008 that he would finally be a President who would fight for them. Represent them. Get angry and passionate for them. They must now feel stranded. I’m disappointed to say the least.
President Barack Obama has effectively and with great skill, marginalized himself through all of this–the oil spill, health care, Afghanistan. For all of the things he’s done in his more than 1 year as President, what his non-reaction to and seeming internal confusion about each of these major issues suggest is that he’s lost the command he so easily gained during his campaign.
During his 2008 campaign he was a warrior. Now he looks like a man defeated.
During his campaign he convinced me that he was one who was too smart to use political propaganda–who knew that Americans were tired of political posturing. He seemed to me to be above it all. He was a clear break from the normal politician–he was here for the people and not to protect his own political viability. He was the American President.
Maybe he would be one of those Presidents who didn’t care who he offended as long as he defended the American people from politics run amok.
That’s what I hoped then. That’s not at all what I see now. What I see now is a President too scared to offend anybody at all. A President who confuses diplomacy with being a doormat. Who isn’t taking charge at all, but is being blown away by the harsh political winds of Washington DC.
At the risk of saying something that sounds like it’s from the intro to MTV’s “Real World”, President Obama needs to stop being careful and start leading this country.
Here’s a part of Peggy Noonan’s peice:
The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They’re in one reality, he’s in another.
Here’s her complete article: Peggy Noonan: He Was Supposed to Be Competent – WSJ.com.
Tags: Barack Obama, leadership, oil spill, Politics
