In what may be the most insightful analysis of the Obama Presidency, the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan captures the essence of Obama's psyche in a brilliant portrait of a fatally flawed administration.

The piece is summarized within this excerpt:

Quote:Barack Obama doesn't seem to care about his unpopularity, or the decisions he's made that have not turned out well. He doesn't seem concerned. A guess at the reason: He thinks he is right about his essential policies..... He is creating a more federally controlled, Washington-centric nation that is run and organized by progressives. He thinks he's done his work, set America on a leftward course, and though his poll numbers are down now, history will look back on him and see him as heroic, realistic.... He is Lincoln, scorned in his time but loved by history.

Noonan's full column

As time goes on, I become more and more convinced that the leader of whom Obama most reminds me is not Lincoln or Stalin or Mao or Hitler or Castro or Chavez--to all of whom I have seen him compared--but rather Juan Peron.

The Noonan comments quoted in the OP would describe Peron pretty accurately. Like Obama, Peron was idolized by his fawning, slobbering admirers, and hated by the rest, and the country was pretty evenly divided between the two to this day (my Buenos Aires tour guide, who let us know that she was in the anti-Peron group, took us to the cemetery where Evita was buried--it was part of the tour--but failed to point out Evita's tomb or to mention that seeing it was one reason for going there).

So what was the lasting impact of Peron's policies? A century ago, Argentina had the seventh most prosperous economy in the world. But some of that was more fabricated than real, and Peron's policies spooked investors enough to dry up capital and destroy the rest. Today, Credit Suisse ranks it outside the top 30 (http://www.international-adviser.com/ia/...2013.pdf). Today the US economy has more substance than Argentina's did then, but with much of our manufacturing base gone overseas to be replaced by a retail/service economy, there are some big holes. Could we experience the same kind of fall that Argentina did? I think it's entirely within the range of possible outcomes. If Obama is followed by one or two more presidents who continue to drive us down the same path, I think such a result becomes inevitable.

BHO may be like Peron with his policies....but as a physical force of nature not so much. Peron was as boxer and athletic, BHO is a girl at best! I would love to see BHO in a boxing (slapping contest) ring.

I didn't sign up to read the full article, but there's another for Obama's failures - he's incompetent. And now that his poll numbers are getting worse and he's about to lose the Senate, which will be an embarrassing and undeniable statement about the country's feelings towards him, he's going to act like a child and make us all suffer. He'll show us.

Sorry but I thought that Noonan's columns were available without a subscription. Therefore, here's the entire column.

Quote:I don't know if we sufficiently understand how weird and strange, how historically unparalleled, this presidency has become. We've got a sitting president who was just judged in a major poll to be the worst since World War II. The worst president in 70 years! Quinnipiac University's respondents also said, by 54% to 44%, that the Obama administration is not competent to run the government. A Zogby Analytics survey asked if respondents are proud or ashamed of the president. Those under 50 were proud, while those over 50, who have of course the longest experienced sense of American history, were ashamed.

We all know the reasons behind the numbers. The scandals that suggest poor stewardship and, in the case of the IRS, destructive political mischief. The president's signature legislation, which popularly bears his name and contains within it the heart of his political meaning, continues to wreak havoc in marketplaces and to be unpopular with the public. He is incapable of working with Congress, the worst at this crucial aspect of the job since Jimmy Carter, though Mr. Carter at least could work with the Mideast and produced the Camp David Accords. Mr. Obama has no regard for Republicans and doesn't like to be with Democrats. Internationally, small states that have traditionally been the locus of trouble (the Mideast) are producing more of it, while large states that have been more stable in their actions (Russia, China) are newly, starkly aggressive.

That's a long way of saying nothing's working.

Which I'm sure you've noticed.

But I'm not sure people are noticing the sheer strangeness of how the president is responding to the lack of success around him. He once seemed a serious man. He wrote books, lectured on the Constitution. Now he seems unserious, frivolous, shallow. He hangs with celebrities, plays golf. His references to Congress are merely sarcastic: "So sue me." "They don't do anything except block me. And call me names. It can't be that much fun."
In a truly stunning piece in early June, Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein interviewed many around the president and reported a general feeling that events have left him—well, changed. He is "taking fuller advantage of the perquisites of office," such as hosting "star-studded dinners that sometimes go on well past midnight." He travels, leaving the White House more in the first half of 2014 than any other time of his presidency except his re-election year. He enjoys talking to athletes and celebrities, not grubby politicians, even members of his own party. He is above it all.

On his state trip to Italy in the spring, he asked to spend time with "interesting Italians." They were wealthy, famous. The dinner went for four hours. The next morning his staff were briefing him for a "60 Minutes" interview about Ukraine and health care. "One aide paraphrased Obama's response: 'Just last night I was talking about life and art, big interesting things, and now we're back to the minuscule things on politics.' ''

Minuscule? Politics is his job.

When the crisis in Ukraine escalated in March, White House aides wondered if Mr. Obama should cancel a planned weekend golf getaway in Florida. He went. At the "lush Ocean Reef Club," he reportedly told his dinner companions: "I needed this. I needed the golf. I needed to laugh. I needed to spend time with friends."

You get the impression his needs are pretty important in his hierarchy of concerns.

***
This is a president with 2½ years to go who shows every sign of running out the clock. Normally in a game you run out the clock when you're winning. He's running it out when he's losing.

All this is weird, unprecedented. The president shows no sign—none—of being overwhelmingly concerned and anxious at his predicaments or challenges. Every president before him would have been. They'd be questioning what they're doing wrong, changing tack. They'd be ordering frantic aides to meet and come up with what to change, how to change it, how to find common ground not only with Congress but with the electorate.

Instead he seems disinterested, disengaged almost to the point of disembodied. He is fatalistic, passive, minimalist. He talks about hitting "singles" and "doubles" in foreign policy.

"The world seems to disappoint him," says the New Yorker's liberal and sympathetic editor, David Remnick.

What kind of illusions do you have to have about the world to be disappointed when it, and its players, act aggressively or foolishly? Presidents aren't supposed to have those illusions, and they're not supposed to check out psychologically when their illusions are shattered.

***
Barack Obama doesn't seem to care about his unpopularity, or the decisions he's made that have not turned out well. He doesn't seem concerned. A guess at the reason: He thinks he is right about his essential policies. He is steering the world toward not relying on America. He is steering America toward greater dependence on and allegiance to government. He is creating a more federally controlled, Washington-centric nation that is run and organized by progressives. He thinks he's done his work, set America on a leftward course, and though his poll numbers are down now, history will look back on him and see him as heroic, realistic, using his phone and pen each day in spite of unprecedented resistance. He is Lincoln, scorned in his time but loved by history.

He thinks he is in line with the arc of history, that America, for all its stops and starts, for all the recent Supreme Court rulings, has embarked in the long term on governmental and cultural progressivism. Thus in time history will have the wisdom to look back and see him for what he really was: the great one who took every sling and arrow, who endured rising unpopularity, the first black president and the only one made to suffer like this.

That's what he's doing by running out the clock: He's waiting for history to get its act together and see his true size.

He's like someone who's constantly running the movie "Lincoln" in his head. It made a great impression on him, that movie. He told Time magazine, and Mr. Remnick, how much it struck him. President Lincoln of course had been badly abused in his time. Now his greatness is universally acknowledged. But if Mr. Obama read more of Lincoln, he might notice Lincoln's modesty, his plain ways, his willingness every day to work and negotiate with all who opposed him, from radical abolitionists who thought him too slow to supporters of a negotiated peace who thought him too martial. Lincoln showed respect for others. Those who loved him and worked for him thought he showed too much. He was witty and comical but not frivolous and never shallow. He didn't say, "So sue me." He never gave up trying to reach agreement and resolution.

It is weird to have a president who has given up. So many young journalists diligently covering this White House, especially those for whom it is their first, think what they're seeing is normal.

It is not. It is unprecedented and deeply strange. And, because the world is watching and calculating, unbelievably dangerous.

The saddest aspect is how intelligent conservatives knew in 2008 that this would be the outcome. It takes 2 years into his second term before the rest of the nation pulls their head out.

The man had every intention of taking a hard left turn regardless of whether the American public approved. I am so mad at the morons that bitched about Romney, yet called themselves conservative. Nice strategy, dingbats.

You want to see spin? I'll show you spin...

Quote:The walls seem to be closing in on the Obama presidency.

Iraq and Syria are overrun with terrorists. Violence is flaring in Ukraine and on Israel’s borders. A humanitarian crisis is developing on our own southern border, but immigration legislation, like most all legislation, is moribund. Probes of the veterans’ health-care system, the IRS and Benghazi are sucking up attention and the administration’s time.

As President Obama fails to get any credit for the millions who have found jobs or gained health-care coverage on his watch, a nonpartisan Quinnipiac poll this week found that 33 percent of Americans consider him to be the worst president since World War II, besting (or worsting, as it were) George W. Bush and leaving Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon in the dust.

No wonder this bear wants to break loose. And maybe he will — if Republicans take control of the Senate.

Crazy talk, you say? Maybe so. The prevailing view is that a Republican Senate would only compound Obama’s woes by bottling up confirmations, doubling the number of investigations and chipping away at Obamacare and other legislative achievements.


Yet there’s a chance that having an all-Republican Congress would help Obama — and even some White House officials have wondered privately whether a unified Republican Congress would be better than the current environment. Republicans, without Harry Reid to blame, would own Congress — a body that inspires a high level of confidence in just 7 percent of Americans, according to a Gallup survey last month finding Congress at a new low and at the bottom of all institutions tested.

There would be no more excuses for Republicans’ failure to put forward their own health-care plan, immigration proposals, specific cuts to popular government programs, and pet causes involving abortion, birth control and gay rights. This would set up real clashes with Obama — who could employ the veto pen he hasn’t used a single time since Republicans gained control of the House in 2010 — and sharp contrasts that would put him on the winning side of public opinion.

It is not hard to imagine a Republican takeover of the Senate causing conservatives in both chambers to overreach. House Republicans would get more pressure from their base to take a swing at impeachment, because the odds of convicting Obama in the Senate would be better (if still prohibitive). Alternatively, Republican leaders, recognizing that the public will hold them responsible now that they have complete control of Congress, might try to compromise with Obama.

In the first scenario, marauding conservatives drive Republicans to oblivion in 2016 and beyond, putting Hillary Clinton in the White House. In the second scenario, Obama actually accomplishes something in his last two years.

Of course, there is a third scenario, in which a Republican Senate majority only makes Obama miserable. Norm Ornstein , Congress watcher nonpareil, predicts Republicans would halt executive-branch confirmations, leaving the administration weak and understaffed. Remaining staffers would be hamstrung as they try to comply with a new wave of congressional subpoenas. And Republicans may content themselves simply to keep the legislative process shut. “Luring them into a further layer of craziness has advantages,” Ornstein said, but “the danger for Obama is what resonates with the public is he’s the president: Why the hell can’t he get it done?”

A unified Republican Congress could also force Obama to accept rollbacks of Obamacare and other Democratic achievements by attaching the rollbacks to must-pass legislation. Michael Tomasky argued in the Daily Beast that a Republican majority would “take as many bites as it can out of what Obama has accomplished in the last six years.”

Such concerns are all valid, but they may not give enough weight to conservatives’ tendency to overplay their hand, as Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) did by provoking last year’s government shutdown or as Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.) has done with a stream of wild accusations that discredited his investigations.


I hold out hope that a Congress under unified Republican control might react the way it did during Bill Clinton’s presidency, producing a balanced budget and welfare reform. But if Republicans don’t take seriously their responsibility to govern, they’ll find the Senate even less governable than it is today. Democrats would still have more than enough votes to block legislation with filibusters — as the Republican minority did in the last two years of Bush’s presidency.

But hopefully Democrats would let some of the more egregious proposals reach Obama’s desk. Of the 2,564 presidential vetoes since 1789, this president has issued only two, both over obscure issues. More exercise of the veto pen could strengthen Obama’s weak hand.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/d...story.html

Obama's dream job would be Dictator of the United States. I have zero doubt in my mind of that.

(07-05-2014 12:07 PM)EagleRockCafe Wrote:  Obama's dream job would be Dictator of the United States. I have zero doubt in my mind of that.

When I see another person in the WH then I'll breathe a sigh of relief. It "ain't over til it's over". He's gone against the Constitution so many times and nothing has be done about it that it's conceivable to me that he won't try something ala 9/11 NY mayor thingy they did. I. still. don't. trust. him. or his minions.

(07-05-2014 08:57 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  As time goes on, I become more and more convinced that the leader of whom Obama most reminds me is not Lincoln or Stalin or Mao or Hitler or Castro or Chavez--to all of whom I have seen him compared--but rather Juan Peron.

The Noonan comments quoted in the OP would describe Peron pretty accurately. Like Obama, Peron was idolized by his fawning, slobbering admirers, and hated by the rest, and the country was pretty evenly divided between the two to this day (my Buenos Aires tour guide, who let us know that she was in the anti-Peron group, took us to the cemetery where Evita was buried--it was part of the tour--but failed to point out Evita's tomb or to mention that seeing it was one reason for going there).

So what was the lasting impact of Peron's policies? A century ago, Argentina had the seventh most prosperous economy in the world. But some of that was more fabricated than real, and Peron's policies spooked investors enough to dry up capital and destroy the rest. Today, Credit Suisse ranks it outside the top 30 (http://www.international-adviser.com/ia/...2013.pdf). Today the US economy has more substance than Argentina's did then, but with much of our manufacturing base gone overseas to be replaced by a retail/service economy, there are some big holes. Could we experience the same kind of fall that Argentina did? I think it's entirely within the range of possible outcomes. If Obama is followed by one or two more presidents who continue to drive us down the same path, I think such a result becomes inevitable.

Obama spent his first three years in office channelling various presidents; one month he was lincoln, the next FDR, another time it was reagan.

I've always thought he was woodrow wilson reincarnated.