The Republican contender who will be Obama II
THE DAILY BLADE: According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 53 percent disapprove of how President Barack Hussein Obama is handling his job as president and 74 percent think the country is “pretty seriously off on the wrong track.” Perhaps more troubling for the president’s re-election chances, fewer than half of Americans (48 percent) think he is a strong leader – that’s down 29 percentage points from April 24, 2009 – and 46 percent of registered voters do not think Obama has provided leadership on the economy.
In contrast to voters, liberal pundits made much of Obama’s deliberative, decision-making process. For instance, in his book, “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” Jonathan Alter(nate Universe) offers this sycophantic description of how Obama thinks things through:
“Obama [is] a deductive thinker with a vertical mind.” Obama thinks "deeply about a subject, [and] organiz[es] it lucidly into point-by-point arguments." Obama favors "decision memos that include options but contain clear policy recommendations." Obama places "more faith in logic than imagination," and insists "on a process that [is] tidy without being inflexible." Clinton constantly second-guessed his decisions; Obama makes a decision and moves on, unless new and compelling evidence arises.
A ditherer, Obama is the polar opposite of President George W. Bush, who liked to describe himself as “the decider.” The most glaring example of Obama’s inability to make a decision – which is a prerequisite of leadership – is needing three months to decide whether to agree to give Gen. Stanley McChrystal the 40,000 additional troops he wanted in Afghanistan. The New York Times chronicled Obama’s meetings on the question, fraught with Sturm und Drang:
The three-month review that led to the escalate-then-exit strategy is a case study in decision making in the Obama White House – intense, methodical, rigorous, earnest and at times deeply frustrating for nearly all involved. It was a virtual seminar in Afghanistan and Pakistan, led by a president described by one participant as something “between a college professor and a gentle cross-examiner.”
Mr. Obama peppered advisers with questions and showed an insatiable demand for information, taxing analysts who prepared three dozen intelligence reports for him and Pentagon staff members who churned out thousands of pages of documents.
Mr. Obama devoted so much time to the Afghan issue — nearly 11 hours on the day after Thanksgiving alone — that he joked, “I’ve got more deeply in the weeds than a president should, and now you guys need to solve this.” He invited competing voices to debate in front of him, while guarding his own thoughts. Even David Axelrod, arguably his closest adviser, did not know where Mr. Obama would come out until just before Thanksgiving.
The Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach noted “Obama's handling of the Afghanistan conundrum has been a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory.”
It is also an open secret in Washington, D.C. that then-CIA chief Leon Panetta – and not Obama, who was characteristically wracked with indecision – gave the order to kill Usama bin Laden: [T]here had been a push to invade the compound for several weeks if not months, primarily led by Leon Panetta, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, David Petraeus, and Jim Clapper. The primary opposition to this plan originated from Valerie Jarrett, and it was her opposition that was enough to create uncertainty within President Obama. Obama would meet with various components of the pro-invasion faction, almost always with Jarrett present, and then often fail to indicate his position. … Every time military and intelligence officials appeared to make progress in forming a position, Jarrett would intervene and the stalling would begin again. … What Valerie Jarrett, and the president, did not know is that Leon Panetta had already initiated a program that reported to him –and only him, involving a covert on the ground attack against the compound. … The operation was at this time effectively unknown to President Barack Obama or Valerie Jarrett and it remained that way until AFTER it had already been initiated. President Obama was literally pulled from a golf outing and escorted back to the White House to be informed of the mission. Upon his arrival there was a briefing held which included Bill Daley, John Brennan, and a high ranking member of the military. When Obama emerged from the briefing, he was described as looking “very confused and uncertain.” In marked contrast to Alter(nate Universe)’s book, in “Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President,” Ron Suskind observes that Obama could not make a move without consensus amongst his cabinet and advisors. His paralysis is not confined to foreign policy, but domestic policy as well. More from Yahoo! Blog, Daily Ticker: One of the recurring themes, as the title suggests, is confidence: advisers who were too confident in their own ability, overconfidence in the strength of the economic recovery, and the lack of confidence President Obama had in pursuing his own instincts on several economic issues. The problem for Obama on domestic and economic policy – as opposed to financial policy – was that it was extremely difficult to achieve consensus among the crowd of very smart, ambitious, and articulate economic policy team. The issues at hand were highly unusual and unorthodox and didn't break down on purely ideological lines. Should the government bail out Chrysler? Should the government force the nation's largest bank to shut down? What was the optimal size of the stimulus? Obama didn't have the answers himself, and when he turned to his advisers, the response was a cacophony. "It's indisputable that he was having trouble running up the various learning curves, and ultimately what he defaults to in meeting after meeting, is the need for consensus from his senior advisers," Suskind said. "He wasn't getting that. And what you find is a president in that first year, year and a half, in a state of paralysis on a lot of these issues. That's just the history of this presidency." New York magazine recently interviewed several people about their boss’s decision-making style and was told that he has a “mania for detail and for process”; is “a cautious executive”; is “always worried that things weren’t going to work out [and] never took big risks”; he had “a tremendous amount of insecurity and fear of failure”; he believed that “if there’s enough argument around an issue by bright people, ultimately the data will prevail”; and he is a “very case-by-case, reactive thinker.” And yes, one source also said that he “never viewed [Obama] as very decisive.” Oh … The Stiletto’s bad. That last graf is not about how Obama goes about making – rather, not making – a decision. The New York article is about former MA Gov. Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital as a venture capitalist. So you see, it’s not just healthcare “reform” that Obama and Romney have in common. There’s a very real possibility that should Romney win the White House, he would be Obama II.
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