Friday, May 17, 2013

Raindrops wash away reeling O's fake veneer

 

New York Post

Raindrops wash away reeling O’s fake veneer

By MICHAEL GOODWIN

Last Updated: 7:18 AM, May 17, 2013

Posted: 1:25 AM, May 17, 2013

Watching President Obama trying to dodge raindrops and responsibility yesterday reminded me of the moment when Dorothy pulls back the curtain and discovers that the Wizard of Oz is “just a man.” Stripped of his spell of mystery and power, the wizard is worse than mortal. He’s a fake.

So it was with Obama in the Rose Garden. His performance was tired and trite, ordinary to the point of dull. His veneer of passion was so transparent that you could see him trying to summon his old-time magic by pushing the buttons and pulling the levers that got him out of tight spots before. “Folks” and “I” and “me” and “my” — stop!

The magic is gone, his act thin enough to say, as he recently did about Benghazi, that “there’s no there there.”

Standing under an umbrella held by a Marine, Obama looked simultaneously imperious and small, no match for the rising tide of scandals swamping his presidency. At a moment that demanded genuine resolve, his answers were evasive, especially about whether he knew the IRS was politically profiling conservative groups. His response, that “I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the [inspector general] report,” wasn’t even an artful dodge.

Serious trouble could be ahead if the president can’t give a straight answer to “What did you know and when did you know it?”

Similarly, his attempt to duck the Benghazi fallout by suggesting that Congress didn’t commit enough money for security, was, like his earlier bids to escape responsibility for the attack, preposterous and misleading.

He doesn’t seem to understand it yet, but Fear & Smear has run its course. The one-trick pony needs a second act to go with his second term.

That’s no small order. And it’s not because the Benghazi terror attack, the IRS targeting and the Justice Department snooping on The Associated Press all happened on his watch.

If it were a matter of bad luck, he would be a hapless but sympathetic president. The problem is that all three scandals reflect his views, policies and personnel. He wanted a big, activist government to transform the nation. He got it, and now his chickens are coming home to roost.

You would never know that from his reaction to the national uproar. His instinct is to see everything through a political prism, and the scandal trifecta is no exception. To him, politics explains the sun rise.

“My thinking was when we beat them in 2012, that might break the fever, and it’s not quite broken yet,” Obama told a group of celebrity donors in New York Monday night. “I genuinely believe there are Republicans out there who would like to work with us, but they’re fearful of their base, and they’re concerned about what Rush Limbaugh might say about them. And as a consequence, we get the kind of gridlock that makes people cynical about government.”

There you have his worldview in a nutshell. His presidency is at a crossroads, and he thinks it’s Rush Limbaugh’s fault and the other side has a “fever.” If only he had more power, people wouldn’t be cynical about government. Talk about scary visions.

Not incidentally, the IRS agents putting the screws on conservative groups shared his disdain for them.

Unfortunately, because he beats the Limbaugh drum so often, we must assume Obama is sincere. That makes him a man who believes the presidency is a matter of “us against them” and who holds a bunkered mentality more fit for sports and gangs than the Oval Office.

His self-grandiosity doesn’t permit the normal give-and-take of governing. He’s trapped, crippled really, by the view that politics is a zero-sum game.

And so, faced with a problem, any problem, he invariably heads back to the campaign trail in the desperate hope that the next election will give him the blank check he needs to function. Without it, he’s lost.

But blank checks are, like wizards, fantasies better suited to childhood. Especially now, America needs a president willing and able to grow up and deal with the real world.

We’ll know soon enough whether we have one.

mgoodwin@nypost.com

NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc.

nypost.com , nypostonline.com , and newyorkpost.com are trademarks of NYP Holdings, Inc.

Copyright 2013 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy | Terms of Use



Read more:
Scandals strip Obama of his magic - NYPOST.com http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/yanking_the_curtain_off_the_great_oahwRZ1bqD84S4KKKqF3CJ#ixzz2TZIpCatb

 

No comments:

Post a Comment