I won’t speculate as to our President’s motives. In fact, I’ll grant that he believes in the programs he’s pushing.
However, I’m thinking that we are seeing the Peter Principle at work here. Barack Obama has soared through and past his level of incompetence.
Obama was a pretty good community organizer. He also has some pretty shrewd political infighting skills. From that base, he leveraged himself into the Senate. And before he could build any kind of record in Congress he managed to leverage himself into the top elected office.
The problem is that he just has terrible leadership skills. He won’t take on programs as “his own,” but instead lets the House of Representatives dream up the pork-infested bills that he deems urgent. He says he has a plan for health care reform, but then again abdicates to Congress to create the details. He wants to get credit for everything done that seems positive, but insulates himself from the programs so that he, personally, cannot be blamed if things go wrong.
He is nothing but a community organizer in over his head. You see, what community organizers are really good at is gathering together a whole bunch of folks who are pushing a particular agenda. The community organizer then facilitates the group so that they can put their plan into a specific proposal that is pushed up to the community leaders for action. Because the community group is large and politically powerful, the proposal is likely to be implemented. The community organizer takes credit for making the change happen, even though all he did was to get his already powerful group to put together a specific program of action, and have the group leaders (note: NOT the organizer) take that plan forward.
Now that Obama is our President, he can no longer depend on the skills he used so well in Chicago. He can’t easily go out and cozy up to the left-wing, to help them craft the plan that becomes, eventually, law. His community is now the entire United States of America, and there are diverse opinions on what should be done about (say) health care reform. He’s use his minions to try and intimidate, he’s used crisis-talk to evade thoughtful debate, and he has tried to skirt constitutional checks and balances through the appointment of various czars. And all to little success.
Our President has yet to exhibit real leadership. He has broken promises of openness and bipartisanship. He keeps trying to blame others because they have pointed out the weaknesses in the programs he is promoting. And he has shown shown virtually no loyalty to those who helped promote him to the position he has achieved (yes, he has granted favors to some, but he is all to quick to throw former supporters “under the bus” when their presence becomes inconvenient). And finally, he has yet to push forth a plan that he is willing to call his own, with specific details of what he hopes to achieve, what has to be done to achieve those goals, and how much it will cost us to implement those plans. Our President’s words sound pretty nice when they’re coming at us off his teleprompter, but rhetoric doesn’t get things done.
And where is all of this taking us? As the world emerges from a severe global recession, it is beginning to look like the USA, instead of leading the world out of that crisis, will be the laggard. I don’t see it likely that we will become a third-world economy, but the likelihood of a decade of anemic economic growth coupled with persistent high unemployment is a real possibility.
