Terrific! The men who have President Obama’s ear are reassuring him and themselves that their current dire circumstances are merely a matter of bad luck.
“Considering the debacle that he came in with, the tough choices he’s made and how there have been few, if any breaks, he says it himself all the time,” Daley says. “He doesn’t know why he’s as high as 44 percent.”
“Few if any breaks.”
Yes, it wasn’t lucky that Osama bin Laden was in the compound that the CIA believed he was in, that he was there during the raid, and that there were no major casualties as an American helicopter crashed very close to a Pakistani military academy.
It’s not lucky that when Iran reached out to Mexican cartel gangs for assistance in committing a terror attack on U.S. soil, they revealed their plans to a confidential DEA informant.
It’s not lucky that the underwear bomber didn’t successfully blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. It’s not lucky that Times Square didn’t get blown up in May 2010.
It’s not lucky that Iraq has not devolved into warring factions again as our troops have withdrawn.
It’s not lucky that the cap on the BP wellhead worked and stopped the leak, ending a continuing crisis that made Obama look weak and ineffectual and hapless, to the point where dedicated fans like Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews were blasting his Oval Office address.
It’s not lucky that a half-dozen more Republicans, with potentially broader bases of appeal, ranging from Chris Christie to Paul Ryan to Sarah Palin to Mike Pence to Mitch Daniels, haven’t chosen to take him on.
Obama has been using the “run of bad luck” line on the stump, too. He cites the Arab Spring as an economic headwind, but let’s face it, Egypt or Libya or Syria or one of the Gulf states could have completely collapsed from internal uprisings. He mentions the tsunami in Japan, which as we all recall was so traumatic to the president he could only cope by going over his March Madness picks with ESPN. Yet obviously that could have been much worse, spreading much more serious radioactivity over more densely populated areas of Japan. He cites the European debt crises, and again, it’s not hard to imagine that circumstance turning out much worse — such as a collapse of the euro or serious social unrest in Greece and elsewhere.
Nothing is ever the fault of Obama and the team around him. It’s just that the universe seems to enjoy disappointing him, I guess.
Iowahawk said it best:
"Bad luck often affects economies. For example, we're unlucky that we elected an idiot."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJim, whenever I hear the President or those around him talk about 'bad luck,' I think about the Robert Heinlein quote.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis is known as "bad luck."