President Obama has less need of enemies. The New York Times writes about their hero in the spirit of an exasperated baseball fan. Yeah the team is great and all, but gee the pitching and fielding and hitting and base running all leave something to be desired. Consider these lines:
Americans need to know that Mr. Obama, whose coolness can seem like detachment, is engaged. This is not a mere question of presentation or stagecraft, although the White House could do better at both…
But a year and a half into this presidency, the contemplative nature that was so appealing in a candidate can seem indecisive in a president. His promise of bipartisanship seems naïve. His inclination to hold back, then ride to the rescue, has sometimes made problems worse.
One wonders to whom and why "a contemplative nature" seemed appealing in a candidate for President. We were electing a chief executive, not a poet laureate.
The Times says that the President's problems are "not a mere question of presentation or stagecraft" when it clearly wants to say that that is exactly what they are. The problem is that the President doesn't seem engaged, that he can seem indecisive. Okay. But if this is not, in fact, "a mere question of presentation or stagecraft," doesn't that mean that he sort of isn't engaged, and is indecisive? The Times can't quite bring itself to say that.
In between the passages above is a paragraph that approaches self-parody.
Any assessment of the 44th president has to start with the fact that he took office under an extraordinary burden of problems created by President George W. Bush's ineptness and blind ideology. He has faced a stone wall of Republican opposition. And Mr. Obama has had real successes. He won a stimulus bill that helped avert a depression; he got a historic health care reform through Congress; the bitter memory of Mr. Bush's presidency is fading around the world.
The cognitive dissonance between the first and last sentences is wide enough to steer an oil tanker through. Among Obama's successes is that "the bitter memory of Mr. Bush's presidency is fading;" yet the Times and Obama himself keep reminding us over and over again how bad Bush 43 was.
They have to. Without a jaundiced "assessment" of the Bush Administration for contrast, how does the Obama Administration look so far? The Times implicitly admits that it has been a pretty poor spectacle.
Even that totally unsupported claim about the stimulus bill contains the weasel word "helped". There are no grounds at all for thinking that the stimulus bill made any difference.
The Times is congenitally incapable of facing the situation. We have a President with about as much substance as a slice of sponge cake. He has spent his career reflecting the opinions of Harvard academics, Chicago machine politicians, a crackpot pastor, and most recently an electorate mad at George W. Bush. When faced with a problem that isn't addressed by the party line, he is at a loss. The Times editorial is how this looks to a bunch of deeply invested believers.
Comments