The Imaginary Leader
Obama is clearly enjoying himself as president. He’s already had one vacation and last week hit the Tonight Show to gab with Jay Leno. Earlier this week in a 60 Minutes interview Steve Kroft asked him if he was punch drunk.
“You’re sitting here. And you’re laughing. You are laughing about some of these problems,” Kroft told the president. “Are people going to look at this and say, ‘I mean, he’s sitting there just making jokes about money?’ How do you deal with—I mean: explain … Are you punch-drunk?”
The man is clearly enjoying the attainment of his lifelong goal. Meanwhile the ship of state drifts onward, leaderless.
Obama’s supporters talk about his vaunted leadership skills, but sixty plus days in to his presidency we have yet to see it. The biggest piece of legislation during his term, the Stimulus bill, was crafted by Democrats in Congress. They are also responsible for Obama’s budget. The various bailouts were crafted by Tim Geithner’s Treasury working closely with Larry Summers and Congressional Democrats. His Foreign Policy is run by the State Department.
Personally I don’t believe his leadership skills exist. I think that Obama is more of a figment of the imagination than a real man. People believe that he is a leader, so they follow him. They believe he is a talented speaker but their imaginations edit out the teleprompters.While Democrats made much of George W. Bush’s lack of experience prior to becoming president, at least Bush governed a state – one of the largest and more complex ones in the country. Obama lacks executive experience, so it’s no surprise that he doesn’t know how to lead.
Throughout his career he has been pulled up the ladder of power by men (and at the very genesis of his career, a woman) more powerful than himself and placed on higher rungs, propelled by more by the ambition of others than his own. Now that he has achieved the pinnacle of power, there is no where left to go – no one above him to pull him any higher. Having fallen upward, Obama does not know how to govern – which is why he has resorted in recent weeks to campaign mode – bashing the Republicans and traveling to an Indiana factory to push the Stimulus plan.
Even the New York Times, which acted as his unofficial press department during the 2008 campaign, is expressing worry over the failure of their Chosen One to lead. Krugman doesn’t like his economic policies; Dowd doesn’t like the way Michelle Obama has been sidelined or the playboy persona the President is projecting; Rich frets over the growing taxpayer revolt which his newspaper refuses to discuss; and Tom Friedman whines about Obama’s failure to speak frankly to the American people about the economic situation. The paper itself is horrified that Obama hasn’t freed the remaining terrorists at Guantanamo and issued them suicide bomb vests with maps to the New York City subway system in the breast pocket.
Canadian columnist David Warren, writing for the Ottawa Citizen, blames Obama’s leadership failure on his narrow intellect.
All his life, from childhood through university through “community organizing” and Chicago wardheel politics, through Sunday mornings listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to the left side of Democrat caucuses in Springfield and Washington, he has been surrounded almost exclusively by extremely liberal people, and moreover, by people who are quick and clever but intellectually narrow.He is a free soul, but he is also the product of environments in which even moderately conservative ideas are never considered; but where people on the further reaches of the left are automatically welcomed as “avant-garde.” His whole idea of where the middle might be, is well to the left of where the average American might think it is. To a man like Obama, as he has let slip on too many occasions when away from his teleprompter, “Middle America” is not something to be compromised with, but rather, something that must be manipulated, because it is stupid. And the proof that it can be manipulated, is that he is the president today.
For the past year reality has been pushed aside for the fantasy that is President Obama. A leader without any leadership qualities of his own; a talented speaker who cannot utter a word without reading it; a transformational figure to all but those who refuse to accept the fantasy.
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