I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts.
There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don’t see how you politically survive this.
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.
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Updates:
2:00 pm EDT, May 28th, 2010 — Stressed Out or Tone Deaf? Obama Chicago Vacation Raises Eyebrows
2:06 pm EDT, May 28th, 2010 — President Obama attacks BP over ‘worst oil disaster’
(sadly senses his first impulse on this guy was right)
(will still have to defend him)
The truth is that Barack Obama is not more responsible for this oil spill than Sarah “Drill Baby Drill” Palin. It just happened. It was bad practice by BP and should not impair either Obama’s presidency nor the concept of offshore drilling.
Good article and right on target with the exception that the first premise of the article itself is false. “He was supposed to be competent”….oh yeah? Who says? Anybody with their eyes open knew he was anything but. As he continues to clearly demonstrate.
That all highly depends on what you think makes someone competent
I don’t understand why Noonan thought Oblamebush would ever be competent. There was never any indication of it before he was elected. In fact the only thing I could see that he was any good at was reading a teleprompter.
You’re all saying this as hard partisans predisposed to reject him based on ideology and demography. No centrist or leftist is “competent” to someone on the right … otherwise “they’d act like me”
Cy please stop your “partisan” nonsense. Oblamebush has shown his massive incompetence in this gulf disaster in part by trying to blame Bush. I’m sure he has enough bright people on staff that could have taken action should he have simply given the order. A simple don’t let that oil get to ground would have started a chain of events like bringing in supertankers and pumps that capture both oil and water. Once on board the water could have been removed. Any oil that escaped that operation could have been contained in large part by booms. Instead nothing was done. This isn’t the first undersea blow out it is just the biggest and it was made the biggest by an incompetent twit sitting in the white house or at least in the white house when he wasn’t out playing hoops in the back yard.
You make it sound so simple. Why aren’t you running for president?
Also, do you judge Bush so harshly for his Katrina non-response?
“I’m sure he has enough bright people on staff that could have taken action should he have simply given the order.”
You give this leadership challenged lout far more credit than I am willing to, Joe. Take a look at his hand picked staff. He has surrounded himself with the biggest collection of overt Chicago mindset, albeit well educated, weirdos and nincomepoops imaginable.
Cy says “Also, do you judge Bush so harshly for his Katrina non-response?”
Of course you are (as usual) overlooking the part that the Mayor Nagin of New Orleans and the Democrat governor Blanco had in the Katrina response.
Competence becomes evident after the fact. So far Obama has displayed zero competence in anything. He is without question, the most divisive President in recent memory and has done irreparable damage to the country, both financially and politically. Furthermore, he has appointed entirely incompetent people into his administration. The guy is a joke….hopefully, the U.S. can survive his Presidency without tearing itself apart.
Pretty hard to shut down drilling if you can demonstrate successful containment strategies that mitigate the scope of environmental damage…
“Why aren’t you running for president?”
I’m not an American and by the way the super tanker idea is not mine it has been used quite successfully before.
Secondly we are discussing the competence of the clown presently in the White House not the clown formerly in the White House. No one who knows me has ever accused me of being a Bush fan. I couldn’t believe it when the Republicans picked him as their candidate let alone the Americans elect him as president until I look at his competition from the Democrats. However since you seem to want to deflect lets look at the difference between the Bush and Oblamebush’s disasters. In the Oblamebush disaster there is no conflicting jurisdictions unlike the conflicts in the Bush disaster Bush gave the orders to mitigate Katrina even before the event took place but they were ignored by the other levels of government. Oblamebush has no other levels of government to fight with. The blowout occurred where only the federal government has jurisdiction. The resulting preventative measures attempted by the other levels of government once the oil entered their jurisdictions have been ignored by Oblamebush. If you can’t see a difference then you are a worse blind partisan than those you love to accuse of being blindly partisan.
With the state that America is now in, changing governments will not change anything.
America has to start making cuts to everything and the first thing to go should be the ‘pork barrelling’ by senators and congressmen.
Everything else should also be on the table as americans wont stand for anything less.
“With the state that America is now in, changing governments will not change anything”
That’s the whole premise behind the constantly maligned TEA Party, UV. Not to simply change the government, but to drain the entire Washington swamp.
The only similarity between this and Katrina is the “progressives” indeed think some big Daddy will take care of natural disasters. They can’t seem to understand that government cannot remove all risk from the real world.
John Luft nails the difference to this oil spill and Katrina with “ you are overlooking the part that the Mayor Nagin of New Orleans and the Democrat governor Blanco had in the Katrina response.” Moreover the Katrina problem was really a State problem not a Fed problem, Mississippi got hit worse than LA and it solved a lot of its problems on its own. The oil on the other hand is in Fed waters.
We can’t change the way progressives think about their need for a Daddy, but need to be careful as conservatives that we don’t simply start howling that our bureaucracy is better than Obama’s bureaucracy in November. That’s all Hudak is doing to McGuinty, for example.
What conservatives have to do is carefully explain that we are not going rob you blind with taxes and lie to you that we can fix all the problems on the planet, because we can’t. The voter has to decide…do they want to be lied to by Big Daddy and submit their wallets to him or do they want to live in the real world and “drain the swamp”.