Politico casts the new e-book by Glenn Thrush as showing that Obama team fights among themselves. But there’s another theme in the bits that Politico has selected that reveals something more interesting, about the president himself.
Obama’s trash-talking competitiveness, a trait that has defined him since his days on the court as a basketball-obsessed teenager in Hawaii, was on display one night last February, when the president spotted a woman he knew was close to Sen. Marco Rubio in a Florida hotel lobby. “Is your boy going to go for [vice president]?” the president asked her. Maybe, she replied.
“Well,” he said, chuckling, according to a person who witnessed the encounter. “Tell your boy to watch it. He might get his ass kicked.”
Hyper competitive, a bit of a jerk, the kind of guy who yells at his kid for missing a play that he, the jerk, couldn’t have pulled off on his best day. We all know that guy. Most of us don’t like that guy very much.
For almost any other politician in America, calling Sen. Rubio “your boy” would generate a week of dangerously negative headlines and pundit hand-wringing. But Obama knows that he can get away with saying jerky things that would cost others their careers.
Obama personally dispatched senior West Wing aides to Chicago — led by David Plouffe and Pete Rouse — to better coordinate operations between the White House and Chicago. He was especially irritated by what he viewed as self-promotion by subordinates — and fumed that ad consultant Jim Margolis had appeared in a New York Times profile on Obama’s negative ad operation. Margolis sent a mea culpa to Obama and the staff, but Obama remained miffed.
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In late May, what was intended as a clever campaign stunt — dispatching Axelrod to Boston to personally make the case against Romney on the steps of the State House — went awry.
As Axelrod was greeted by pro-Romney hecklers chanting “Axel-Fraud,” Obama was in the West Wing watching with growing disgust as the event unfolded on cable news. The scene, he scoffed to a nearby aide, was an ill-conceived “spectacle.”
It was ill-conceived, both because Axelrod doesn’t have the gravitas to be an effective presidential spokesman in a setting like that, and because it was too easy for the other side to foil. Recall that on the same day Ax flopped, Romney turned up at Solyndra to highlight Obama’s green flop there. Obama never saw that coming, just as he ever anticipated this his own event could fail. In terms of campaign generalship, Romney clearly outfoxed Obama badly that day.
Thrush’s book shows that Barack Obama is a bad leader who can’t keep his own team from destructive infighting. He can’t chess-game the other side’s moves. And he blames others when things go badly, while giving off an air of bravado that crosses into arrogance. If he loses in November, the blame and finger-pointing that will follow won’t be an e-book. It will rival War and Peace in scope and length.
– fiddle, Nero.
Never is it Dear Liar’s own fault. He must have been so coddled as a kid.
In other words, Obama is a pissy little boy, an egotistical punk.
This is a surprise?
well, the guy’s entire life has been delivered on a silver platter. At every step, every single step, he was promoted based on two thing: he wasn’t 100% white, and he had mastered the art of deceipt.
So one of the few things I don’t blame him for is his “i’m a god and can do no wrong” attitude. That is just one of the things that was delivered to him.
There are a couple of other articles on PJ today about the preference cascade. You have to wonder whether the Con Man is having a preference cascade of his own. Will th overwhelming evidence of his failures ever get to the point where he realizes that he is a total fraud. If that unlikely event ever occurs, we better pray that he isn’t president when it does, because his entire personality could crumble.
The next few months are going to be the most dangerous period for our country since some of the confrontations with the USSR during the Cold War.
This guy is capable of anything, and there isn’t an adult in his gang, or even a person who doesn’t hate the country.
“your boy” – and yet if someone were refer to the precious as “your boy” the tears of rage we would see!
Conceited, supercilious jerk. But consistent in his arrogance.
Hmm, I have some doubts about the article, which claims that Obama is concerned with ideology. I think he’s all barenaked personal ambition and anti-Americanism. In my view, the reason he dreads a Romney-appointed Supreme Court is that he knows Romney will appoint Constitutional conservatives, which is the last thing Obama wants to see for this country.
I always thought Obama would bail the country if he loses and soak up love in various European and Asian capitals. But who knows? Maybe he is an ideologue, and maybe he’ll stick around and head up some doofus initiative or project or foundation. Maybe he’ll even run for president again, and maybe Michelle will become the U.S. Senator from Illinois.