Obama hasn’t come up with one original idea yet
By John Podhoretz
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Obama created a minor dustup when he wore a tan suit to speak to reporters about ISIS in late August.Photo: Reuters
Just before Labor Day, controversy erupted over President Obama’s garb at a presidential press conference — should he or should he not have worn a light tan summer suit when talking about ISIS? That was beside the point.
The issue isn’t the weight or color of his suit. The issue is that the suit is empty.
With almost six years of the Obama administration under our collective belts, the time has come to acknowledge a painful truth: This is an astoundingly idea-free presidency.
At that press conference, Obama stunned the world by saying, out loud and openly, that “we don’t have a strategy yet” on how to deal with ISIS. No president before him had ever said such a thing out loud, and for good reason: Having a strategy is the president’s job.
In the parlance of the universities where Obama spent so much of his time before 2004, when it came to a terror army running rampant through Iraq and beheading Americans, Obama was admitting he hadn’t done the reading, needed an extension on the paper, had to take an “incomplete.”
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At a press conference in August, Obama said, “We don’t have a strategy yet,” on dealing with ISIS.Photo: AP
Well, there was no one there to grant him his incomplete — which is why, two weeks later, he found it necessary to give a nationally televised address to inform the American people and the world that, hey, guess what, he’d come up with a strategy at last. It involved sending arms to the very same Syrian rebels, which just happened to be a policy he had derided only a month earlier as “a fantasy.”
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Secret Service Director Julia Pierson resigned a day after Obama’s press secretary said Pierson had the president’s full confidence.Photo: AP
This maddening directionlessness was also on display in the American response to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza in July — which would involve statements of support for Israel, followed by statements of anger about Israel’s conduct, which would be followed by more statements of support for Israel, and then word that the administration had delayed a standard-issue arms replenishment for Israel as punishment for its bad behavior.
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Obama’s administration was slow to inform the American people on the exact details of who Thomas Duncan, the first person in the US to be diagnosed with Ebola, had come in contact with.Photo: AP
This kind of policy and public-relations whiplash also characterizes the White House’s behavior when it comes to the failures of the Secret Service, with Obama press secretary one day saying the USSS’s director had the president’s full confidence and the next day announcing her resignation as though it had been what the president wished for all along.
And, of course, there’s the handling of the Ebola patient in Dallas, with the administration so desirous of not causing a panic that it spent several days misinforming Americans about whom the patient had come in contact with, how many people there had been, how many plane flights he’d been on, and so forth.
This inconstancy is the result of the administration’s elevation of cool and calm above all other qualities — leadership qualities like urgency, firmness, focus and determination.
The hard truth is that the Harvard Law Review editor and University of Chicago professor with two bestselling books to his name can’t formulate a policy to save his life, can’t oversee the implementation of the policies his administration has put in place and can’t adapt or rejigger them in a convincing way to take account of changing conditions.
This has become startlingly evident even to his friends in recent days, but it actually dates back to the beginning of his tenure.
Consider his two signature legislative accomplishments (one 5 ½ years old, the other 4 ½ years old): The post-meltdown stimulus and ObamaCare.
These, arguably the two most expensive domestic programs ever put on the books, weren’t carefully formulated and rigorously conceived.
They were jerry-rigged assemblages of ideas, policies pulled down off the shelves of congressional subcommittees.
Because the stimulus was so poorly designed, the stimulus was used in large measure by states to pay down their own debts rather than on “shovel-ready” projects intended to employ the unemployed. And ObamaCare’s manifold sloppinesses and disasters both in the drafting and in the execution have gone off like time bombs every few months ever since the law was passed.
Or consider one of the issues nearest and dearest to his heart and to his party’s base — immigration reform. In the most dramatic case of the law of unintended consequences in our time, the president’s decision to grant permanent-resident status to the children of illegal aliens led to the border crisis of 2013-14, with tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors flooding across the border under incredibly dangerous conditions.
Beyond our shores, we were told back in 2011 that this administration was redirecting American policy to take the full measure of the challenges of the 21st century.
The new approach was called “the pivot to Asia,” and would require a thorough revision of our military and foreign policies to deal with the rise of China and the destabilizing behavior of North Korea.
Well, guess what? By March of this year, assistant secretary of defense Katrina McFarland let slip that “right now, the pivot is being looked at again because, candidly, it can’t happen.” Why? It was just too expensive.
So much for the biggest foreign-policy idea of the Obama era. Poof.
We can all name the ideas of presidencies, from the New Deal to Reaganomics to the Bush Doctrine. Obama’s self-described strategy for world affairs is “don’t do stupid s – – -.”
His economic strategy is “print money.” These aren’t ideas. They aren’t even ideology. They’re voting “present.”
What matters most to this administration is surface. It’s why Obama made such a spectacular subject for a “HOPE” poster and why his choice of suit provoked so much discussion. As a two-dimensional object, he’s endlessly fascinating. Add the third dimension and he’s lost.
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