Ezra Levant of Canada’s Sun News makes an observation on presidential time management that dovetails perfectly with my post last night:
Hold on a second. This is what the president of the United States — the leader of the free world, the commander-in-chief of the world’s greatest military, the man responsible for lowering America’s staggering unemployment rate, reducing its record debt, handling the Arab Spring, the civil war in Syria, the Iranian nuclear threat, China’s ascendance — this is what the president was doing?
Lurking on the Internet after midnight and sparring with an 82-year-old actor?
Now, maybe the Obama tweet was written by a staffer in his name. Which is just as troubling — that, after nearly four years of working with Obama, they know him well enough to know that he is small and petty and partisan and that this is the image he wants to project.
But it was actually quite likely that it was the president himself. Earlier in the Republican convention, Obama made a publicity stunt of sitting down at a laptop and engaging in an hour-long chit-chat on the Internet website Reddit.
It’s not that he’s nerdy. It’s that he’s a time-waster, a childish man, given to stunts and not substance. It was really him at the keyboard for the Reddit stunt.
It’s not unlikely that it was really him, staying up past midnight, obsessing about his greatest enemy — Mitt Romney. Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or a possible Eurozone economic meltdown. But Clint Eastwood. And tweeting.
But Obama has always been unserious. No great accomplishments in life – but two lovingly written autobiographies. No business experience; no military experience; no leadership experience at all, really. Just being wafted ever upward in a series of preparations.
He won the job — that big chair — in 2008. And it was as if he didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t master events or cause them — they happened to him. He took over at the beginning of a recession — and deepened it. He took over a debt-burdened government, and further indebted it.
Meanwhile, with an economy that’s flat-lined and hemorrhaging jobs, what is Mrs. Obama focused on?
Asked by Parade magazine, “What do you hope to accomplish in your second term?” First Lady Michelle Obama said she wants to “impact the nature of food in grocery stores” with the aim of cutting sugar, fat and salt.
And if that doesn’t work, as Bryan Preston asks at the Tatler, “Hey, How About Some More Solyndras?”
Obama has quoted from FDR’s mantra about “bold persistent experimentation”* — but the playbook sounds awfully limited these days.
No wonder one particularly beleaguered party official is reduced this week to calling Republicans Nazis (Forward!) and asking, as Paul Mirengoff of Power Line puts it, “Root canal or the DNC, which is the lesser of two evils?”
* Yeah, that worked out really well the first time, too.
(H/T: 5’F)
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