Which past leader does Barack Obama most closely resemble? His admirers, not all of them liberals, used to compare him to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
Well, Obama announced his candidacy in Lincoln’s hometown two days before Abe’s birthday, and he did expand the size and scope of government. But no one seriously compares him with Lincoln or FDR anymore.
Conservative critics have taken to comparing him, as you might imagine, to Jimmy Carter. The more cruel among them, like The Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost, say the comparison is not to Obama’s advantage.
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But there is another comparison I think more appropriate for a president who, according to one of his foreign-policy staffers, prefers to “lead from behind.” The man I have in mind is Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 movie Being There.
As you may remember, Gardiner is a clueless gardener who is mistaken for a Washington eminence and becomes a presidential adviser. Asked if you can stimulate growth through temporary incentives, Gardiner says, “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well, and all will be well in the garden.”
“First comes the spring and summer,” he explains, “but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.” The president is awed as Gardiner sums up, “There will be growth in the spring.”
Kind of reminds you of Barack Obama’s approach to the federal budget, doesn’t it?
In preparing his February budget, Obama totally ignored the recommendations of his own fiscal commission, headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Others noticed: The Senate rejected the initial budget by a vote of 97–0.
Then, speaking in April at George Washington University, Obama said he was presenting a new budget with $4 trillion in long-term spending cuts. But there were no specifics.
Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf was asked last week if the CBO had prepared estimates of this budget. “We don’t estimate speeches,” Elmendorf, a Democrat, explained. “We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis.”
Evidently “first we have the spring and summer” was not enough.
Then Obama deputed Vice President Joe Biden and congressional leaders to handle negotiations over raising the debt ceiling. Biden apparently did a good job of letting everyone set out their positions and interact.
But last Thursday two influential Republicans, Rep. Eric Cantor and Sen. Jon Kyl, left the bargaining table and said that they wouldn’t return until Democrats dropped demands for tax increases. After all, if the Democrats hadn’t been able to raise taxes on high earners when they had large majorities in December’s lame-duck session, what makes anyone think this more Republican Congress will raise them now?
Cantor said it was impossible to make progress unless Obama got personally involved. Top Senate Democrat Harry Reid said the same thing. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, fresh from making a bipartisan compromise on public-employee benefits, offered succinct advice: “First, the president can show up.”
Well, Obama has agreed to do that Monday. But while Chauncey Gardiner, in his befuddlement, tried to answer questions squarely, Obama has seemed less interested in the substance of public policy than in framing issues for the next presidential campaign.
That was plainly the case in the decisions on Afghanistan he announced Wednesday night. Regardless of conditions on the ground, the president promised that the last of the surge troops will be removed by September 2012, the month Democrats hold their national convention.
As for Libya, Obama pretends we’re not involved in “hostilities” and has been content to “lead from behind.” Another sop to the antiwar Left.
Sometimes it seems he’s president of the AFL-CIO, not the U.S.A. The man who said he wanted to double exports in five years has nothing to say about his National Labor Relations Board appointee’s attempt to shut down a $1 billion plant being built by the nation’s No. 1 exporter.
And don’t forget the enviro types. Obama is releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but his appointees are barring drilling in the Gulf and Alaska and refusing approval for a natural-gas pipeline from Canada.
On all these issues, Obama seems oddly disengaged, aloof from the hard work of government, hesitant about making choices.
That doesn’t sound like Lincoln. Or Roosevelt. Or even Jimmy Carter. More like “then we have fall and winter.”
Barack Obama, unlike Chauncey Gardiner, knows exactly what he is doing -- destroying the country in order to install a new regime. The truly clueless are those don't see it.
I agree that Obama is "destroying the country", but don't believe that he "knows exactly what he is doing".
Many NRO articles have described Obama as a Narcissist with a messianic complex. That makes him easily manipulable by those willing to stroke his ego while getting him, unwittingly, to do their bidding.
That could be, but from way back Obama planned to be president. He, not any crony or string-puller, is President of the United States. He could do the right thing at any time, and doesn't.
The Chauncey Gardner metaphor only applies to the way in which Obama's sycophants react to the utterances of Obama. That is the Blank Screen phenomenon.
Obama himself bears no resemblance whatsoever to Gardiner.
Gardiner was a simpleton who had been sequestered from society until the Old Man had died. When forced from his residence into the big wide world, he responed to that world using analogies to horticulture.
Not unlike myself. Except I am not funny and no one would ever suggest that I lead the nation.
Obama, on the other hand, was not sequestered in an Old Man's house but rather he was raised in an environment steeped in Marxism. He was educated at the "world's finest" universities. He was elected to office repeatedly based upon nothing other than his "clean, articulate" appearance; he was never elected based upon past results, rather upon the promise of future performance.
The ascent to the Presidency that was not qualified to hold (based upon demonstrable past performance, not the BC stuff) was rapidly followed by winning the Nobel Peace Prize (to a man who has continued two wars started by his predecessor and starting two new ones after campaigning that he would end the war that shouldn't have started (he didn't) and prosecute the one that should have been in the first place (which he has done badly)).
"Aloof" is not the word that I would choose to describe Obama. There is no connotation in the word aloof that suggests malice. Obama is not disinterested, it is just that those who hold fast to the Constitution, to freedom, to liberty find a president that is not interested in those time honored and cherished ideals.
If you were to ask how I would have written Mr. Barone's piece, I would have titled it "Like Benedict Arnold, Obama is Profoundly Traitorous"
Barack Obama, unlike Chauncey Gardiner, knows exactly what he is doing -- destroying the country in order to install a new regime. The truly clueless are those don't see it.
Either The One is, as Mr. Barone says, naive and a simplton or he and his cunning band of scholarly elites have a plan so stealthly promoted and troubling that the US as we know it will be so radically changed by 2012.
Fortunately, there are enough voters that have had enough. Will the GOP candidates, if elected, operate any different. God help us and them if they don't.
Pretty darn funny. Not sure it was meant to be, or that it's entirely correct -- but funny nonetheless. BO is part bumbling fool and part ideologue. I'd be a lot more concerned if he were a smart ideologue capable of managing and governing. But he isn't.
Mr Zak has it exactly right. Mr Obama is doing all that he can to destroy American greatness. There is nothing bumbling about it except the facade.
A decade from now we conservatives will look at the fruits of BHO's appointments, executive orders, and those laws which are not overturned and we will ask, "how could we have been so clueless?"
Thank you. The article permanently atop my Grand Old Partisan blog is "Obama the Destroyer". As a student of history, I understood immediately who and what Barack Obama was even before he finished his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
One could argue that the Chauncy Gardiners in the current arrangement are the Obama supporters. Obama himself revealed few specifics during his campaign, but the generalities he offered were sufficient warning that he was radically different than what America had previously experienced. He has not acted "cluelessly", but deliberately as a doctrinaire left-wing politician and as a demagogue, simply applying the precepts taught at the elite universities of his time. Get used to it, because you will have him around until 2016. Actually, Obama has established a test case for Keynesianism--which has failed miserably.
While you are crying, ask this: would Hillary Clinton have been any different? I say yes, because she is a more shameless and artless liar, a demagogue, a corporate statist, and a left-wing idelogue also.
But, as Chauncey told Eve Rand (played by Shirley MacLaine), speaking of television, and Obama told Nancy Pelosi when it came to spending bills, "I like to watch."
Don't insult Jimmy Carter. Mr. Obama reminds me more of Franklin Pierce, who spent most of his sorry presidential term in a drunken stupor. He never really wanted to be president, anyway. Mr. Obama is only there because he is being used as a stage prop by the radical, Marxist left. Without his teleprompter, he's nothing but a small-time lawyer, bereft of ideas.
The obamanation is a Chicago Alinsky mobster that never had an honest day job in his life. Of course he's moslty incapable of making decisions unless it appeals to his narcissism. I'll never figure out how Michelle got pregnant to Mr. Narcissist, how he ever got time away from the mirror.
I remember this analogy from back in 2008 when he won the nomination. Back then the question was, "is Obama The Manchurian Candidate or Chauncey Gardiner?"
Sounds like there's still a lot of debate on that question!
I think he's Chauncey, but liberal Dems hope and conservatives fear that he's a Manchurian Candidate. Ideological mischief is done in his name, but I really don't think he cares or knows about anything other than getting reelected -- he's more of a naked partisan than a person who has "core values", otherwise why so many broken promises to the left?
The left's inability to rally against Obama's betrayals (single payer mandate-free healthcare, troops out of Iraq, close Gitmo, Libya is "not hostilities", etc.) is more than a little Chauncey-like. But I think they still support him because they believe Obama is "Manchurian" and there is a cunning plan behind everything he does. (See, you have to "hope" the "change" will work out! And anyway, everyone on TV keeps saying Obama is Smarter Than You -- you can't expect to be able to understand what the Smartest Guy is up to. So you just put your faith in the Ultimate Technocrat.)
But I think the left is eventually going to be disappointed when they realize he's just been making it up as he goes along and his "plan" amounts to flailing for votes.
He's good at showing up and delivering a speech. He keeps some office hours and hangs out at the faculty lounge.
But just as Adjunct Prof doesn't do the heavy lifting like a real professor (No research. No grant proposals. No defending a dissertation). BHO doesn't do the heavy lifting of being leader of the free world.
