Dem pollster Pat Caddell wonders if Obama has any idea what he's doing

Pat Caddell was Jimmy Carter’s pollster, but since those days he has kind of seen the light. He’s still a Democrat, but an honest one. After Monday’s Obama presser, Caddell appeared on Fox and mused on the president’s ability to function in his job.

“I’m sorry, but there’s an elephant in the room and it’s time to say it. This guy…from watching him Friday, with the unemployment numbers…he spent a year on passing healthcare instead of dealing with jobs and the economy. He has an agenda that seems totally focused politically. And the problem is, there is a whiff of this guy now, I saw it Friday…I lived through this with President Carter, when you start asking ‘Does this guy have any idea what he’s doing?'”

Video at the link. As to the question, I’m of two minds about it. Barack Obama clearly does know what he’s doing when it comes to using the executive branch bureaucracy to push his agenda. He came in promising to carry Big Labor’s agenda and he has fulfilled that through the NLRB. He has pushed a far left green agenda via the EPA, and pushed the left’s agenda on curtailing free speech via the FCC and net neutrality. He knows what he’s doing when it comes to making appointments who will carry his agenda deep into the bureaucracy. He also knows how to short circuit the Senate’s advise and consent role on appointments — that’s what all the czars were hired to do. But when it comes to actual leadership, getting people who don’t agree with you to work with you because you have made the effort to build credibility with them, Barack Obama clearly has no idea what he’s doing. He lacks the ability to see other points of view and bring people around to his own. He’s a great pitch man as long as someone else is writing his lines, but leadership cannot be done via teleprompter. You have to be able to read people, read situations, and move to bend things your way while knowing when and where you should bend. Leadership isn’t easy, as this president shows just about every day.

Barack Obama is not a leader. He is an agitator and an instigator, and sometimes a manipulator. He can talk a good game but has lousy instincts and tends to read from a narcissistic point of view. He hasn’t grown into the job of president at all, and all signs indicate that he never will. Real leadership just isn’t in him.