The Oval Office, I always thought I was going to have really cool phones and stuff. . . . I’m like, “C’mon guys, I’m the president of the United States. Where’s the fancy buttons and stuff and the big screen comes up?” It doesn’t happen.
— Pres. Barack H. Obama
The list of people I feel sorry for is long. It includes not just all of the people I know personally who are suffering from one misfortune or another, but the billions around the world who’re having a rougher time than they ought: Japanese earthquake victims, targets of ethnic cleansing, etc. Then there’s the supplemental list, which includes everyone from fans of Lost who were ripped off by the series finale to the guy in the middle seat on a long flight.
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But one guy who doesn’t make the list is Barack Obama.
And yet the president seems eager for people to know he feels aggrieved. All of a sudden, he’s had a few “hot mic” incidents in which he “accidentally” vented his displeasure about various alleged insults. His staff let it be known that the president feels the head of China’s one-party authoritarian regime has it better than him, because no one second-guesses Hu Jintao.
“I just miss — I miss being anonymous,” he told some magazine executives recently. “I miss Saturday morning, rolling out of bed, not shaving, getting into my car with my girls . . . taking walks. I can’t take a walk.” He says the reason he plays so much golf is that it’s the only way he can get away from the “bubble” he’s in.
None of this is entirely new. The president has always had a gift for self-pity. And blame-shifting. “It’s Bush’s fault” could be the subtitle of his presidency.
And from the outset, the president has had little patience with critics. Serious critiques are always illegitimate “talking points.” In the summer of ’09 he started insisting that he didn’t want to hear “a lot of talking” from Republicans. The time for debate always seems to be over when it’s clear to everyone that he’s losing the argument. When abroad, he loves to whine about the impertinence of the press.
I can’t prove it, but I’m also hardly alone (on the right or the left) in thinking the president really just doesn’t like the job anymore. He’s testier. His response to the Republican budget plan was not merely dishonest, hypocritical, and partisan, it was bitterly personal.
One can understand his frustration. The guy who once said to a reporter during the 2008 campaign, “You know, I actually believe my own bulls***” about fundamentally transforming America, is now forced to run as a reactionary, defending “Medicare as we know it” from “radicals” who — gasp! — want to change America. The overrated and inexperienced politician, accustomed to nothing but adulation, who was swept into office thanks to discontent with the incumbent, is now himself the incumbent desperately trying to explain how he’s done nothing wrong.
He demonized George W. Bush as an evil fool, but Obama has been forced to adopt many of the very policies he derided as evil and foolish. The “change” candidate is now the “more of the same” guy.
That’d put anybody in a funk.
But I don’t care. The presidency is not like his Nobel Prize — an award for just being you. If you hate the job, don’t run.
Moreover, I don’t think that’s the whole story. Many of his seemingly self-pitying jokes and asides just don’t seem that innocent to me, never mind endearing.
He may sincerely have wished his awesome job came with a cooler phone (or a Bat Signal perhaps?), and he may honestly feel trapped in a bubble. But he’s also determined to pretend that he is running “against Washington” in 2012. And that is outrageous nonsense for a president who effectively owned the government for two years.
Already his campaign’s messaging is all about recapturing the feeling of insurgency from the first time around. Finish the mission. Complete the work. Remember the feeling. That’s why he’s running his reelection campaign out of Chicago, as if people won’t notice he’s the incumbent.
Obama has never run on a record. He’s always run almost literally on a hope and a prayer. Now he must defend what he has done — and what he has failed to do.
Does Obama appreciate that the same bureaucracy that can't give the President cool, bat-cave style telecommunications gear is the same bureaucracy he's put in charge of health care?
Do you get the sense the POUTUS (misspelling intended) channels his cynicism from the Comedy Channel? Trying to be irreverent, but revealing himself up as irrelevant...
I believe his crankiness is contagious! I'm certainly (at least) cranky with his presidency. Please, do yourself a favor, President O, give yourself and the rest of us a well-deserved rest. Don't run! I'd breathe a huge sigh of relief for our future, but I think I'll have to remain cranky (and worried, and sleepless, and determined, and outraged) for another couple of years.
Ah, Jonah, but he wants to be on the other end of the Bat Signal! Anonymously eating ice cream with his kids at the mall when his "cool phone" rings and he becomes Batman, saves the world, and then resumes his wealthy anonymous life without the boring tedium of the world's daily, mundane crises.
The only one who has pity on Obama is himself. For an adult man to whine about the lack of fancy gadgets in the Oval Office is pathetic. He got a tour of the White House before he was sworn in - could have quit then when seeing the Oval Office.
These are some of the few times we're seeing the real Obama. Behind all the soaring teleprompter speeches and absurdly sycophantic media coverage is a man who is fundamentally lazy.
It is a laziness and sense of self-importance born as a logical consequence of his self-admitted "affirmative action baby" path to the presidency. He is a man who has never been seriously challenged intellectually, who has always had advisers, mentors, and sundry other benefactors to protect him and feed his innate narcissism. Obama has therefore never been required to encounter intellectual or political adversity, nor counter legitimate criticism. Now that he has been forced to confront both as president, he predictably reacts like a spoiled, entitled, thin-skinned child. None of this should be surprising in the least.
So right about never having run on his record. What makes it interesting is that up till now, all Obama has ever done successfully is campaign. I think this is the longest he's been in a job before campaigning for the next, and so for the first time, he actually has a record to look at, and it's dismal.
He's like a corporate middle manager who doesn't like the work, or want to work, but rather invests all his energy in looking good enough to get promoted to another level before anyone figures out he's accomplished nothing in his current role - or worse, he's screwed up everything in his current role.
Ah, Jonah, but he wants to be on the other end of the Bat Signal! Anonymously eating ice cream with his kids at the mall when his "cool phone" rings and he becomes Batman, saves the world, and then resumes his wealthy anonymous life without the boring tedium of the world's daily, mundane crises.
A "more real" President is not what the country needs. It isn't inspiring any hope to know that the President wishes he could skip shaving and go for a walk. It just makes it sound like he isn't mature enough for the job. He isn't rising to the occasion, and that is disappointing.
He should confine airing his complaints to his wife. Even that won't guarantee that his petulant attitude won't get out. Cool phones, indeed. Apparently what he knew about being President was based on movies, possibly sci-fi movies. As Jonah said, hope and a prayer were all he brought to the table and people were disappointed in Bush's performance and wanted to be part of an historic moment in political history.
I don't want the President to be cool, sarcastic, petulant, or scratch himself in public to show he's real. I want him to be a level-headed, well-mannered, adult human being who rises above the fray and persuades people of the value of what he wants the country to do. I am not saying any President does this or ever has, but that's what I want. Not "real".
I don't understand why I still hear "soaring" blank, be it rhetoric, teleprompter speeches, or anything. I listened to a lot of his speeches during the campaign. He has a robotic delivery (basically phoning it in), he whistles the final s when there is one on a word, and I honestly can't say he's ever convinced me he really understands or believes what he's saying, polemically, that is.
Given his usually graceless manner in public, is anyone surprised at these comments/attitudes?
Then there’s the supplemental list, which includes everyone from fans of Lost who were ripped off by the series finale to the guy in the middle seat on a long flight.
You know, alot of us are still smarting from the letdowns of the X-Files and 24. Why don't we rate?
Barack Obama is not sufficiently appreciated; he has demonstrated conclusively the old saw that "anyone can be president". More vacuous than Chauncey Gardiner, more light of being than any other president in American history, he makes the duties of the presidency seem trivial. Lionized for high--but totally undemonstrated--intellectual brilliance, smarter than even Hillary Clinton, his mendacity and pettiness shine a light on politicians of all nations, causing at least some of us to realize that perhaps other "leaders" both here and abroad may be equally empty vessels, and that we must look to ourselves, not to self-styled saviors. He is merely incompetent. We have lived through truly bad presidents and survived it. He shows us that the Republic can function with no president. Our real problem is not Barack Obama; our real problem is an inept, excessively ideological Congress.
He absolutely hates the job. The perks are cool. But the job sucks. Too bad. Now that he is there, how does he gracefully quit? He cannot. His re-election campaign will be like Jimmy Carter's. Uninspired.
And he will be running on a 'hope and a prayer'. Hoping that people will not realize that he's in way over his head and that his sort of 'change' is nothing more than more of the same, which will change America into the largest banana republic in history. As such, he'll be 'praying' like heck that his 'hopes' will come true.
The moniker 'President Present' does not fit Obama as well as 'President Pathetic'. He's a reactionary, running dog, toiling for a minority that has no problem with bankrupting America.
You're not the only one who believes that Obama doesn't like the job. I've always thought that he preferred the campaigning to the actual job (and if you want verification of his "Oh,***t what have I've gotten myself into" moment, look at his body language when he walked on the stage to accept the electoral victory on Nov 4, 2008). Roger Simon of Pajamas Media also doesn't think Obama likes being President. No one should be surprised that the quintessential big mouth who thinks all of his ideas are the best would not like to be held accountable for his record.
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