Friday, May 28, 2010

Noonan does Obama

He Was Supposed to Be Competent
What continues to fascinate me is Mr. Obama's standing with Democrats. They don't love him. Half the party voted for Hillary Clinton, and her people have never fully reconciled themselves to him. But he is what they have. They are invested in him. In time—after the 2010 elections go badly—they are going to start to peel off. The political operative James Carville, the most vocal and influential of the president's Gulf critics, signaled to Democrats this week that they can start to peel off. He did it through the passion of his denunciations.

Peggy Noonan

While I no longer produce adequate insulin to fully appreciate Peggy Noonan's gifted writing style (The disaster in the Gulf may well spell the political end of the president and his administration, and that is no cause for joy), there's good  nutritional eats if I remove some of the meringue.
  • The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen.
  • ... he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another.
  • In his news conference Thursday, President Obama made his position no better. He attempted to act out passionate engagement through the use of heightened language—"catastrophe," etc.—but repeatedly took refuge in factual minutiae. His staff probably thought this demonstrated his command of even the most obscure facts. Instead it made him seem like someone who won't see the big picture. The unspoken mantra in his head must have been, "I will not be defensive, I will not give them a resentful soundbite."
  • ... liberals and progressives ...  thought Katrina was the result only of George W. Bush's incompetence and conservatives' failure to "believe in government." But Mr. Obama was supposed to be competent.
  • I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. ... "Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust." [Full]

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Soros didn't want competence. He knew that he could cause tremendous damage either way, but an incompetent idealistic word merchant would be better.
The real incompetence now is found with the U.S. taxpayer. How long will they put up with this crap? Every day they continue to allow this is another day they prove their incompetence.

Anonymous said...

Remember Joe "3-letter-word: JOBS" Biden's speech about how Obama would be tested an we'd see he's got "steel in his spine". Well, the floods in TN that got no press because the victims were White and the oil well blowout are tests of his ability to react quickly and decisively and convince those teetering that he really had what it took. By doing nothing helpful in either case other than try like Hell to avoid any accountability, he's proven to many what we already knew: he's incompetent while still trying to take credit to anything good that does happen. That will be remembered in November.

AWM

DougM said...

He wasn't supposed to win the nomination.
He was supposed to lose by a nose, then drive Hillary's agenda into commiedom.
They didn't count on the press' full scope of America-hating gullibility.
Yeah, they screwed up ... big time.
Their sock puppet got elected.
Oops.

(Turing word: fishin. Obama hasn't gone, yet.)

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