Zuckerman Thrashes Obama

US News and World Report editor-in-chief Mortimer Zuckerman simply slashes Obama to shreds. It's to be expected, perhaps - but it's so well done and so spot on, how can one ignore that? There's simply too much of it for an excerpt to do it justice, you have to read it all. From domestic to international affairs, Obama's judgment, understanding of the nation, handling of the press and his own PR - it's just one damning critique after another. And well deserved, I'd add.

Perhaps the inevitable outcome was disappointment—and on this Obama has not disappointed. Alas, he has accelerated the deflation of hope with his extraordinary volume of public appearances. In his first six months, he gave three failed to appreciate that national TV speeches are best reserved for those moments when the country faces a major crisis or a war. Now he faces the iron law of diminishing novelty.

Despite this apparent accessibility, Obama's reliance on a teleprompter for flawless delivery made for boring and unemotional TV, compounding his cerebral and unemotional style. He has seemed not close but distant, not engaged but detached. Is it any wonder that the mystique of his presidency has eroded so that fewer people have listened to each successive foray? The columnist Richard Cohen wryly observed that he won the Pulitzer Prize for being the only syndicated columnist who did not have an exclusive interview with the president.

Poor results. But Obama's problems are more than a question of style. There is doubt aroused on substance. He sets deadlines and then lets too many pass. He announces a strategic review of Afghanistan, describing it as "a war of necessity," only to become less sure to the point that he didn't even seem committed to the policy that he finally announced. As for changing politics in Washington, he assigned the drafting of central legislative programs not to cabinet departments or White House staff but to the Democratic congressional leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the very people so mistrusted by the public. Who could be surprised that the critical bills—the stimulus program and healthcare—degenerated under a welter of pork and earmarks that had so outraged the American public in the past?

Pelosi benefited from $54 million to relocate a Bay Area wine train, not to speak of a secret deal with the drug industry lobby to preclude negotiations on Medicaid drug prices and exclude drug imports from Canada, concessions that had previously been strongly rejected by Obama. Reid favored the gambling industry by arranging an earmark for a Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas high-speed monorail, even though it won't be built for years. Some components of the stimulus did help soften the recession, yet only roughly a third of the $787 billion stimulus has been spent, and too much was spent on programs supported by liberal Democrats, which explains why so much of the stimulus money went toward education, health, energy conservation, and other activities, mostly worthy but not geared to achieving recovery and getting people back to work.

Comments

[Neo]

Just what did Zuckerman expect ?
This is what you get when you elect "Chance Gardner" as POTUS.

[Anon]

Is it possible that some of Obama's moneyed supporters are waking up to the fact that the guy is a total neophyte who has no idea--at all--how to lead or govern?

I still feel though that something is missing from an analysis of how they went so badly wrong...there are A LOT of former Clinton staffers around Obama and you would think that they would have been counseling all along for a centrist approach and trying to reign in the left wingers...but it doesn't seem like that happened. I guess that might mean that it was old Bill himself who was responsible for reigning in the lefties in his administration and once they got Obama as their figurehead they went wild with predictable results.