Democrats should be realizing now that Obama’s dearth of experience, especially executive political experience, was probably not as big an issue in the campaign as it should have been. I’m sure, at the time, everyone who voted for him assured themselves that he was going to be fine, he’d just appoint old Clinton people to drive the bus while he got his sea legs. The president is, after all, a manager more than anything else.
Problem is, the guy sucks as a manager.
Just look at all his personnel problems. The administration is pulling political stupidity after political stupidity, and Obama still has people convinced he’s the smartest person in the room. You know what? If the president is the smartest one in the room, it means he’s hiring stupid people. Carter was pretty damn smart, and had an epic turd of a presidency. He was a punchline before his term was half over.
Now the the smartest guy in the room flew over himself, his wife, and a boatload of press to make an unprecedented pitch to the IOC to get the Olympics for Chicago. He placed his and the country’s international prestige on the line, WITHOUT KNOWING THE OUTCOME. WTF? He went out of his way to make himself look weak to the entire world. In pure politics, that has got to be the stupidest hail Mary play done by a president in the last fifty years. It’s even worse if he did it because some Chicago cronies told him the bid was in trouble and needed his help. If you KNOW failure is likely, that’s the one time the President should never go. Send Oprah, send the first lady, send Biden, he’s free. Don’t go yourself just so you can personally own the disaster, because even when your friends try to make it look better, they just draw attention to the fail.
Then again, as all good liberals know, it’s always Bush’s fault. (Or maybe Glen Beck.)
UPDATE: That conservative rag the Washington Post weighs in on Obama’s Olympic trip. Seems I’m not the only one a little disturbed at the thought processes that led to that decision, and what they may imply for far more serious matters like, say, running a war.
10 Comments
Evyn Gutierrez · October 6, 2009 at 12:14 pm
I’m not sure what you are getting on about with this.
Are you complaining because your Brand isn’t in the Whitehouse?
All administrations are inept. And the current environment of vitriol is just a smoke-screen, keeping the sheeple angry and focused on fluff is just the current way of keeping them from noticing how badly they are being shorn.
Or in direct instruction Follow the Money, not the politics.
S Andrew Swann · October 6, 2009 at 12:53 pm
I thought I was clear what I was getting on about: The Obama Administration is completely inept. They’ve managed to misplay almost every ball that’s been thrown at them. The Olympic bid is just the latest. That’s a critique of their competence, not their ideology.
As for my “brand,” I’ve long ago accepted that my particular ideology will never find a home in the White House, which is why I think the power of the federal government needs to be constrained as much as possible so as to do the least damage to the Republic.
S Andrew Swann · October 6, 2009 at 12:58 pm
BTW- administrations are not all inept, they’re all corrupt, but they aren’t all inept. Reagan, Bush II, and Clinton weathered a lot scandal-wise and somehow managed to have coherent presidency. Hell the liberals portray Karl Rove as some evil political genius for how Bush actually managed to conduct policy in the face of his own unpopularity.
Conservatives accuse the Obama administration of a lot, but political genius is not prominent on the list.
Geoffrey A. Landis · October 7, 2009 at 10:09 am
Actually, I don’t give a damn about the Olympics one way or another. The fact that nobody thinks it’s unusual that the president is involved in at all is, to me, a sign of how sports-obsessed our society; but I don’t buy the argument “don’t ever do anything unless you know you’re going to succeed,” either.
So, what do you think about Paul Krugman’s commentary on the issue?
S Andrew Swann · October 7, 2009 at 10:59 am
Geoff, I wasn’t saying don’t do anything if you don’t know how it will play out. However, if the president weighs in on something, there should be some political cost benefit analysis. It’s one thing to go there to try and take credit. It’s quite another to go there and risk taking the blame. Someone in the administration needed to ask, is the benefit of having the president involved (not the benefit of winning the Olympic bid, which is a different question all around) so great that it counterbalances the damage if the effort fails. There are plenty of issues of uncertain outcome where the weight IMO is in favor of involving the White House. This ain’t one.
The president should have only gone and involved himself if it was already a done deal. It’s one thing to have a foreign policy embarrassment over nukes in Iran, or Mideast peace talks, at least there the gravitas of the situation is in line with the presidency. But this?
Geoffrey A. Landis · October 7, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Odd. I have pretty much exactly the opposite view.
I don’t think it was worth doing at all. However, once it’s decided that it’s worth doing, I would applaud Obama for doing it without calculating the “political risk benefit analysis.” Frankly, I wish more politicians would quit doing “political risk benefit analyses.”
On the other hand, the importance of this issue ranks approximately zero on a scale of zero to ten.
S Andrew Swann · October 7, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Actually I wasn’t talking risk/benefit solely in terms of political partisan hackery (which still goes to the point of Obama’s undeserved rep as some sort of political genius) but in terms of the cachet of the presidency itself. A senator screws up like this, oh well. the president does it and there are serious repercussions beyond the president’s personal political ambition. Allowing the presidency (and by extension the United States) to look so weak in the face of something so trivial is, at the very least, demoralizing to our allies and a propaganda victory for our enemies, and has diminished our ability to conduct diplomacy where the resolve and or effectiveness of the administration is an issue.
michelle · October 7, 2009 at 10:13 pm
That’s why presidents don’t meet with IOC, until Obama. And getting the olympics is so damn trivial it doesn’t warrant the weight of the president. The millions spent on jet fuel, secret service, planning, etc., especially since his wife and Opra couldn’t wait a few more hours and take the same plane as him over such a trivial thing as the olympics is a disgusting waste of money. And lots of cities end up losing money on the olympics when all is said and done, so why put the presidential show-pony out there for something that even if he wins, we might still lose.
Geoffrey A. Landis · October 7, 2009 at 10:56 pm
I suppose that, since I don’t actually care where the Olympics are in the first place, the magnitude of the political error, if any, seems rather underwhelming. I suppose if that’s the worst screw up in his presidency, I’ll be happy.
But he has 3.5 years to go. Fifty to one odds that this will not even be in the top hundred list.
S Andrew Swann · October 8, 2009 at 7:07 am
I am not taking that bet.
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