Michael Barone looks at President Obama’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, and… well, I’ll just give you the bullet point version of events “spinning out of control”:
• The Second Boston Massacre was a “reminder that this free and open country remains a soft target. There is no way we can be entirely safe.
• The Senate voted down gun control proposals, with the closest vote coming on the background check provision sponsored by Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin.
• In the Rose Garden, Obama spoke angrily and called the votes “pretty shameful.”
• This was a test of Organizing for America, the offspring of the Obama presidential campaign.
• In the Senate Finance Committee’s hearings on Obamacare, as committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, “I just see a train wreck coming down.”
• Similar disarray was apparent on foreign policy in hearings Thursday, as noted by the American Interest’s Walter Russell Mead.
Barone concludes, “George W. Bush and his party suffered at the polls in his second term after things seemed to be spinning out of control in New Orleans and Iraq.”
Being President is hard. Being a lame duck — especially one with still-immodest ambitions — is harder.
What Barone didn’t mention is the likely effect of the Boston bombing on Obama’s next big push, for the Gang of Eight immigration reform. Poll after poll shows that Americans want increased border security first. And what we had in Boston was a case where we couldn’t keep terrorists out, even when the FBI gets a tip from the Russians.
But the Democrats have got to keep making Democrats out of “victims” groups, so Obama can’t afford to let immigration go. That’s unlike his big gun control fail, which was strictly optional. Entertaining, but optional.
Pass the popcorn?
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