From The New York Post:
Last Updated: 3:45 AM, October 9, 2011
Posted: 2:49 AM, October 9, 2011
The reports are not good, disturbing even. I have heard basically the
same story four times in the last 10 days, and the people doing the
talking are in New York and Washington and are spread across the
political spectrum.
The gist is this: President Obama has become a
lone wolf, a stranger to his own government. He talks mostly, and
sometimes only, to friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett and to David
Axelrod, his political strategist.
Everybody else, including
members of his Cabinet, have little face time with him except for brief
meetings that serve as photo ops. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner both have complained,
according to people who have talked to them, that they are shut out of
important decisions.
The president’s workdays are said to end
early, often at 4 p.m. He usually has dinner in the family residence
with his wife and daughters, then retreats to a private office. One
person said he takes a stack of briefing books. Others aren’t sure what
he does.
If the reports are accurate, and I believe they are, they
paint a picture of an isolated man trapped in a collapsing presidency.
While there is no indication Obama is walking the halls of the White
House late at night, talking to the portraits of former presidents, as
Richard Nixon did during Watergate, the reports help explain his odd
public remarks.
Obama conceded in one television interview
recently that Americans are not “better off than they were four years
ago” and said in another that the nation had “gotten a little soft.”
Both smacked of a man who feels discouraged and alienated and sparked
comparisons to Jimmy Carter, never a good sign.
Blaming the
country is political heresy, of course, yet Obama is running out of
scapegoats. His allies rarely make affirmative arguments on his behalf
anymore, limiting themselves to making excuses for his failure. He and
they attack Republicans, George W. Bush, European leaders and Chinese
currency manipulation -- and that was just last week.
The blame
game isn’t much of a defense for Solyndra and “Fast and Furious,” the
emerging twin scandals that paint a picture of incompetence at best.
Obama
himself is spending his public time pushing a $450 billion “jobs” bill
-- really another stimulus in disguise -- that even Senate Democrats
won’t support. He grimly flogged it repeatedly at his Thursday press
conference, even though snowballs in hell have a better chance of
survival.
If he cracked a single smile at the hour-plus event, I
missed it. He seems happy only on the campaign trail, where the
adoration of the crowd lifts his spirits.
When it comes to getting
America back on track to economic growth, he is running on vapors. Yet
he shows no inclination to adopt any ideas other than his own Big
Government grab. His itch for higher taxes verges on a fetish.
Harvey
Golub, former chairman of American Express, called the “jobs” bill an
incoherent mess. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, he said that among
other flaws, the bill includes an unheard of retroactive tax hike on the
holders of municipal bonds.
“Many of us have suspected that
economic illiterates were setting the economic policy of this
administration,” Golub wrote, adding that the bill “reveals a depth of
cluelessness that boggles the mind.”
The public increasingly
shares the sentiment. A new Quinnipiac polls finds that 55 percent now
disapprove of Obama’s job performance, with only 41 percent approving. A
mere 29 percent say the economy will improve if the president gets four
more years.
The election, unfortunately, is nearly 13 months away.
The
way Obama’s behaving, by then we’ll all be talking to portraits of past
presidents, asking why this one turned out to be such a flop.
Can't say that anything here surprises me. This is the first time in Obama's life that he has been held accountable for his actions. There is no one here to step in and rewrite a "C" term paper into an "A" for him (or just change the grade). No ghost writer to take his notes and turn it into the autobiography that he couldn't finish. No unspoken agreement among his fellow law students to refrain from commenting on the fact that his only signed article was something that would have embarrassed a high school senior taking college prep courses.
Little Barry is all on his own and even the MSM can't (and is increasingly unwilling to try to) disguise the fact that his is simply in way over his head. He was unqualified for the job. Had no experience to help prepare him for the job and had never come face to face with any of the hard cold realities of the real world outside of a very brief stint in a private sector law firm in which he said that he felt that he was "behind enemy lines".
Obama has never before had to consider that the faculty lounge Marxism that he absorbed from his moonbat mother, from his Marxist professors, from the "structural feminists" and "radical foreign students" that he deliberately and exclusively cultivated as friends during his college career might just be utterly wrong. Never before has little Barry had to face the fact that the ideas for a utopian society based on the radical redistribution of wealth that he has never even once thought to question might fail disastrously when put into practice.
And now he can't process the fact that nothing that he has done has worked. Marxism really is The God That Failed.
If the reality of the horror that Marxism brings hadn't been out there for any thinking person to see before Obama was even born I might feel a bit sorry for him. But as it is I can have no sympathy. He made his bed and now he must lie in it.
The tragedy is that for the next 15 months the rest of us must lay there with him.
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