This page was started later than it
should have been. It should have been initiated the day that "Big
Sis" said, "the system worked..."
He's Going To Be A One Termer
Michael Goodwin says, first I did a double
take. He said what? I read it again and the shock waves
followed. A beleaguered Barack Obama had told aides it would be so
much easier to be the president of China, The New York Times reports.
There are two ways to read the remark, which is attributed to
anonymous aides. One is that Obama resents the burden of global
leadership that comes with the American presidency. The other is
that he longs for an authoritarian system, where he need tolerate no
dissent.
Under either or both interpretations, his confession
carries a dose of self-pity that means Obama has hit a wall.
He
is in over his head, and he knows it.
Even before the horror in
Japan, Obama faced a litany of nightmares. From Libya to Iran to
Afghanistan to gas prices, unemployment and rising debt, Obama is
surrounded by serious trouble.
His responses range from
halfhearted to wrongheaded. Nothing is working. Unhappy
voters already repudiated his first two years and might fire him when
they get the chance. It is a moment that brings home the truth of
the sign on Harry Truman's desk: "The buck stops here."
Yet my
suspicion is that it's not the problems per se that have Obama envying a
lower rung on the global ladder. It's that he regards them as
endless distractions that keep getting in the way of his transformative
agenda.
He is a man of the faculty lounge who wants a blank
slate so he can remake the nation into a more perfect place, as he sees
it. Remember, he greeted his election with the messiah-like claim
that future generations would say, "This was the moment when the rise of
the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."
But damn
it, the country and the world won't cooperate. Because he has no
significant experience that would give him a framework for any other
response, he is reduced to vaporous platitudes that dispirit allies and
embolden adversaries.
He wants America to be less exceptional
and more like every other nation. He's uncomfortable with our
status as the No. 1 superpower, as he made clear with his apology tours
and by submitting to the lowest common denominator in the United
Nations.
He talks about wanting Moammar Khadafy to go but takes
no action to make it happen and even signed on to an arms embargo that
the State Department says bars our supplying the rebels.
As The
Wall Street Journal wrote, the rising slaughter reveals "what the world
without US leadership looks like."
Meanwhile, he punts on the
budget mess, as if details are beneath him. On soaring gas prices,
the purpose of his dreary Friday press conference, his policy seems to
be peevishness that he must be bothered.
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