Posted on 06/08/2014 8:12:08 PM PDT by neverdem
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Less than two years after voters gave President Barack Obama a strong mandate for a second term, the White House is struggling against perceptions that it is losing its grip.
At home, the bungled rollout of the Obamacare website and the shocking revelations about an entrenched culture of incompetence and fraud in the VA have undercut faith in the President’s managerial competency.
Abroad, a surging Russia, an aggressive China, a war torn Middle East and a resurgent terror network are putting his foreign policy credentials to the test. With the GOP hoping to seize control of the Senate in November’s midterm elections, and the inevitable decline in presidential power that occurs as second term presidents move toward lame-duck status, Obama risks being sidelined and marginalized for the remaining two years of his term.
Last week’s tempest over the Bergdahl exchange seemed to roll all the President’s troubles together into a single storm. The decision to free five Taliban fighters from Guantanamo in exchange for an American soldier with a complicated past energized the President’s opponents, befuddled and angered important Congressional allies, and renewed questions about the political instincts of the President and his closest aides. The White House apparently thought that the release would be a moment of national unity and celebration and arranged for Sgt. Bergdahl’s parents to meet Obama in a highly publicized Rose Garden ceremony that now looks like a huge political blunder.
It’s been a long and bumpy road to this point. Few American presidents came into office viewed with so much optimism and hope. Obama was swept and re-swept into office with a clear expectation that being smart — or at least not being stupid — would be enough to mend fences around the globe and at home. Things aren’t so cheery now, and not being George W. Bush may not, it appears, be sufficient.
Obama is not, however, prepared to pick up his toys and go home. Stymied in Congress, where a coalition of Republicans and red state Democrats have effectively blocked his major initiatives in both the House and the Senate, the President is determined to use his executive powers to carve out a legacy whether Congress likes it or not. The new EPA regulations to cut CO2 levels from power generators and his decision to sidestep Congress on the release of five Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo in exchange for Sergeant Bergdahl show a White House anything but resigned to the prospect of presidential decline.
In both foreign and domestic affairs, Obama has plenty of executive authority to use. Moreover, the signature accomplishment of his first term, the ACA health care law, is potentially the most significant piece of domestic legislation since the 1960s and was written to give the executive branch the power to redesign much of the American health system as the President’s appointees in the federal bureaucracy set about implementing the law. The Dodd-Frank Act, intended to stabilize Wall Street and prevent another 2008 style financial crisis, gave the executive branch broad authority to re-regulate the financial sector.
Why, then, does a feisty President with more power than any of his peacetime predecessors, one who is determined to use those powers to the max, look so much a victim of events he can’t control?
It isn’t for lack of ambition; Obama aspires to be a transformational leader at home and abroad. The ACA attempts to redesign an industry that accounts for 17.2 % of GDP. The EPA’s new regulations cover 66% of the country’s energy production. Overseas, he’s picked goals like getting a global climate treaty, destroying Al-Qaeda, democratizing the Arab world, eliminating nuclear weapons and achieving détente with Iran.
These are big goals; achieving them would give Obama a significant place in the history books. But there’s a catch; large and complex projects are hard to carry out, and the President seems to consistently underestimate the difficulties in turning compelling visions into practical programs. As a result, he now finds himself haunted by goals and expectations he set for himself, caught in a gap between promise and performance that has proved unexpectedly hard to close.
The implementation of the ACA was problematic in ways that go far beyond the famously awful website. While a substantial number of people have gotten access to health insurance thanks to the law, the implementation challenges remain epic — and the public still isn’t fully behind the new system. Many of the law’s provisions have already been suspended, amended, and reinterpreted so many times that it is now probable the President will leave office without being able to roll the whole law out as projected. Even government accountants have given up figuring out what the law means or how it will work: this week, the CBO stated that it was henceforth impossible to score Obamacare.
Meanwhile, the problems at the Veterans Administration — problems candidate Obama vowed to fix back in 2008 — erupted last month in a scandal that 79% of Americans blame at least in part on Obama’s management. A shock poll in The Washington Post showed 48% of Americans now think that President George W. Bush was better at “getting things done” than his replacement-compared with 42% who think the opposite.
Meanwhile, President’s Obama’s repeated calls for gun control legislation and immigration reform have fallen flat.
Overseas, the gap between promise and accomplishment is, if anything, more daunting. Early in his first term Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in a decision that struck even his most ardent admirers as premature; there isn’t much talk today of a repeat visit to Oslo.
Not since the end of the Cold War has an American president faced this much disorder and trouble in the world. The “reset” with Russia ended with the attack on Crimea. The Arab Spring has foundered in chaos, dictatorship and war. The President’s declaration that “Assad must go” has proved as hollow as his demand that Syria cease chemical warfare attacks on its citizens. Al-Qaeda and related jihadist groups are active and growing from West Africa through Central Asia; in some ways the terror threat today is greater than ever before. The war in Afghanistan, a war that candidate Obama vowed to win, is sputtering inconclusively toward a less than stellar close. An increasingly feisty China is challenging the United States and its allies, and North Korea grinds grimly ahead with its nuclear program.
Once again, the President seems to have underestimated how much effort would be required to achieve the goals he set out. He clearly underestimated the difficulties of building a stable and businesslike relationship with Russia and was shocked and surprised at Putin’s attack on Ukraine. He underestimated the difficulty of getting the Israelis and Palestinians to reach a peace agreement, overestimated the strength of the democratic forces in Egypt, and seems not to have fully understood the difficulties in winning the Afghan war until after he committed American troops to a surge. His administration has also seriously underestimated China’s readiness to oppose American policy in the Pacific; the South and East China seas are becoming more dangerous and more militarized by the day.
With 30 months to go, Obama still may have a chance to regain control of both the domestic and international agendas, but to do that he’s going to have to change his approach. He needs to focus on the nitty-gritty, day-to-day business of governing; six years into his administration, the public is fed up with promises and hungry for concrete accomplishments.
President Obama needs to show that he knows how to get things done, or increasingly the world will move on as if he wasn’t there.
Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Policy and the Humanities at Bard College, and edits the American Interest Online. Follow him on Twitter @WRMEAD
Choose your Masques.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-vqepLziio
They’re handing out the weapons
And your armour’s ready too
But the most important item
Has been left up to you
You must make a firm decision
And once it’s made you’ll find
That the form that you have chosen
Can entirely fill your mind
For the mask you have selected
Stands for Chaos or for Law
And you cannot take it off now
‘til you’re no longer in the War
And the Masks of War are grinning
And from under them you howl
Out the slogans of the part you play
for the Battle’s starting now
Choose your Masks
The ranks are forming
Choose your Masks
The day is dawning
Choose your Masks
And choose the side that you’ll be on
And learn the words of your new song
For the Battle will be long.....so long........
Remember how mercilessly Clint was mocked for that?
I don’t know anyone who didn’t vote.
However I do know that the GOP set us up.
The intersection here, is who gets our vote when set up.
It won’t be for the set up candidate.
If we can continue to grow that kind of voter, then we won’t be “set up” again.
Now *that* is the only allignment there is, in my book.
He is a chameleon, shedding masks.
It has been a difficult war.
Lord we are trying to root out the rot.
I don’t know anyone who didn’t vote.
Plenty of FReepers didn’t vote.
And that is statistically why we lost.
Oh I know the long and the short of it, but it sure would be easier to get our guys in with the GOP than with radical liberals in charge.
I think it was a major mistake.
Millions of single voter conservatives did not show up because they drank the MSMs propagandist.
So it is, sit was.
Let us not make that mistake again.
Obama's pattern in Iran has been replicated throughout Islam and may well explain the recent prisoner swap. The pattern is to say what is necessary to get elected and then proceed to negotiate away every American national interest that can be identified. If Iran gets the bomb, which now looks to be a moral certainty, the entire balance of power in the Middle East will be radically altered and not to our favor. Iran will be able to intimidate the entire Gulf where much of the world's oil is still produced and we can expect one regime after another to face the choice of arming themselves with nuclear devices or appeasing Iran. The likelihood of atomic war will have increased more than arithmetically.
Note, all of this is being done under the color of successful negotiations no matter how implausible they might appear under a close examination. The same charade was probably contemplated by Obama in the prisoner exchange. He has ordained that America's time in Afghanistan must come to a close and his legacy is in danger; Afghanistan will be left a shambles. So Obama is undertaking a series of negotiations of which the prisoner exchange is merely his opening gambit in order to redefine as a victory that which is in reality a tragic and futile ending to a war costing so much American blood and treasure. He will walk away from an Afghanistan which is breeding and nurturing terrorists proudly declaring victory and citing a series of empty promises which he will tell America is successful policy.
We see the pattern repeated in Israel in which Obama would force Israel into extremely dangerous negotiations with inevitable surrenders but the craven surrender tidied up with a "peace" treaty declaring that black is white.
Everywhere Obama turns we see rhetoric substituted for reality. We see bluster camouflaging surrender. We see a pattern here replayed everywhere Obama casts his gaze. America is under threat from China, Russia, Islam, and communism in Latin America and every threat has metastasized and become more lethal because of Barack Hussein Obama. That is the international picture but we have not even considered the domestic threat to America represented by the shadow government of Barack Hussein Obama.
Obama's pattern in Iran has been replicated throughout Islam and may well explain the recent prisoner swap. The pattern is to say what is necessary to get elected and then proceed to negotiate away every American national interest that can be identified. If Iran gets the bomb, which now looks to be a moral certainty, the entire balance of power in the Middle East will be radically altered and not to our favor. Iran will be able to intimidate the entire Gulf where much of the world's oil is still produced and we can expect one regime after another to face the choice of arming themselves with nuclear devices or appeasing Iran. The likelihood of atomic war will have increased more than arithmetically.
Note, all of this is being done under the color of successful negotiations no matter how implausible they might appear under a close examination. The same charade was probably contemplated by Obama in the prisoner exchange. He has ordained that America's time in Afghanistan must come to a close and his legacy is in danger; Afghanistan will be left a shambles. So Obama is undertaking a series of negotiations of which the prisoner exchange is merely his opening gambit in order to redefine as a victory that which is in reality a tragic and futile ending to a war costing so much American blood and treasure. He will walk away from an Afghanistan which is breeding and nurturing terrorists proudly declaring victory and citing a series of empty promises which he will tell America is successful policy.
We see the pattern repeated in Israel in which Obama would force Israel into extremely dangerous negotiations with inevitable surrenders but the craven surrender tidied up with a "peace" treaty declaring that black is white.
Everywhere Obama turns we see rhetoric substituted for reality. We see bluster camouflaging surrender. We see a pattern here replayed everywhere Obama casts his gaze. America is under threat from China, Russia, Islam, and communism in Latin America and every threat has metastasized and become more lethal because of Barack Hussein Obama. That is the international picture but we have not even considered the domestic threat to America represented by the shadow government of Barack Hussein Obama.
Nice.
bttt
If blacks ever want to vote Democrat again, they should consider the fact that Democrats picked the worst candidate possible to be the first black President which to me is one hell of an insult. They damn well KNEW this guy was an absolute fool, but they pushed him like a God anyway. So now not only is he the first black President but hands down the worst President in this nations history which just does a hell of a lot for black pride doesn’t it.
Sadly, with two U.S. Supreme Court appointments and scores of federal judges, his far left wing legacy is sealed as regrettably it is for this nation. Depite all of this he has 40% of the vote on any time of the day. Solid pro-abortion NARAL and Planned Parenthood; GLTB and Silicon Valley and Hollywood billionaires (Soros?), the cotton and banana plantation crowd, and the left wing media. Any election begins with NY; CA; IL;MA; WA; OR potheads; RI; and VT in the bag!
And he started the whole fiasco by not honoring American blood shed in Iraq, while kissing Persias arse and NK arse and Venezuelas arse all of whom were in league.
Oh this fellows is duplicitous and Machiavellian, but he is not stupid.
The king of 3 card monte, a common cheat, but not so common.
Now we have the Bergdahl matter, 5 hardcores in exchange for a traitor.
All according to plan...
You’re right.
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