Clive Crook on the weakness of Obama
Clive Crook in an FT article takes Obama to task for being weak.
On healthcare and climate change he says Obama has ducked the issues and accepted bills that are long on rhetoric and short on any substance.
As Adam has suspected for a while this president says a lot, but does very little. He lets Congress drive the legislation, which is what he should be doing.
To Adam’s mind we are seeing the fundemental flaws of Obama emerge.
Crook notes:-
A White House that is more interested in promotion than in product development has another great drawback: it squanders talent. Mr Obama has impeccable taste in advisers: he has scooped up many of the country’s pre-eminent experts in almost every area of public policy. One wonders why. On the main domestic issues, they are not designing policy; they are working the phones, drumming up support for bills they would be deploring if they were not in the administration. Apart from anything else, this seems cruel. Mr President, examine your conscience and set your experts free.
Although Adam did not rate Obama, he had hoped that he would be proved wrong. On this showing, it appears that his fears will be realized all too quickly.
Various political commentators have been rating Obama’s capacity as a potential President long before the Obamanian voters –voters infected with Obamnia derangement syndrome, a condition that had obviously had destroyed their capacity for reason – elevated him to Presidential level. Those earlier ratings on him – insightful as they were – based on Obama’s inexperience combined with his dubious background and the unsavory characters surrounding him are now proving to be more correct than incorrect.
Putting to one side the domestic policies that he now thrusts onto the US public and with the US public too concerned with these policies to scrutinize his foreign policy failures, his inexperience in foreign policy matters and previously noted by those same political commentators that have now been highlighted and exposed especially over the last few weeks, has proved to be based on hard nosed ideology rather than on pragmatic historical facts, points to Obama very quickly painting himself and those personally picked advisers into the proverbial corner.
With the first six months in office, Obama’s behavior has now dispelled all thoughts of him being motivated by a pragmatic approach to foreign policy but rather moved by a radical anti-American ideology that motivates him to dismiss the importance of democracy and bow to those anti-American dictators against US allies with Iran being a prime example. His belated and impotent criticism of the Iranian theocratic totalitarians after their barbaric repression of the democracy seeking dissidents has proved to be short lived. Within days after his criticism, it has been noted that Obama sent his presidential adviser David Axelrod and UN Ambassador Susan Rice to confront the nation on morning talk shows making clear that he has not allowed the mere events of an Iranian brutal put-down of its own citizens to influence his policies of appeasing the mullahs into an agreement concerning their nuclear ambitions. Yet despite this display of blind ideological misadventure, Obama and his associates believe that they can alter the Iranian regime to reach an agreement in spite of this regime calling for the mass murder of its own citizens and blaming both the US and Britain for the Iranian people’s decision to rise up against the mullahs.