Let’s take a look at this Steve Rose piece in the Kansas City Star. Here’s how he begins:
Barack Obama just had his worst week in a deeply flawed presidency.
It’s not as bad as Jimmy Carter’s presidency, but it’s still one that can make even the most right-wing conservative long for Democrat Bill Clinton.
Okay, so we know where this guy stands. Obama is better than Jimmy Carter but way worse than Bill Clinton. As long as we’re bringing Carter into this, here’s what Time was writing about him on March 24, 1980.
As Jimmy Carter stepped before the television cameras in the East Room of the White House last Friday, his task was not just to proclaim another new anti-inflation program but to calm a national alarm that had begun to border on panic. Inflation and interest rates, both topping 18%, are so far beyond anything that Americans have experienced in peacetime—and so far beyond anything that U.S. financial markets are set up to handle—as to inspire a contagion of fear.
The current 15-year fixed mortgage rate is 2.97%. The current inflation rate is 1.1%. I don’t even know why Jimmy Carter is part of this conversation.
So, why is Obama such a lousy president? More Steve Rose:
What Barack Obama has lacked from the beginning is humility, and what he has displayed consistently is arrogance.
Oh, that, again.
How does the president display this lack of humility and arrogance?
Let us count the ways.
He could have nipped the Benghazi fiasco in the bud, but Obama apparently decided that since only Fox News was beating the drums for the truth, he could finesse the ugly matter. Instead of coming clean from the get-go, that this was an act of terrorism, Obama stone-walled. Now, he has a bonafide scandal on his hands.
Right. Benghazi. The nothingburger.
What else does Rose have?
This same arrogance bled into an Internal Revenue Service politically motivated witch hunt on Obama’s watch.
That the IRS would be targeting conservative groups could only germinate in an atmosphere where those conservatives were seen as bitter rivals, sure, but not co-participants in a democratic process. Rather, those opposition voices were seen worthy of being silenced.
Vice President Joe Biden even acknowledged such disregard publicly, asserting that, the tea party Republicans “acted like terrorists,” without even a shred of self-awareness as to what this charge really means.
Mr. Rose seems to be an expert on terrorism. He’s utterly convinced that Barack Obama and Joe Biden don’t know what the word means. But what I want to know is how did Obama convince Douglas Shulman, the Bush-appointed IRS commissioner, to see conservatives as bitter rivals with no right to participate in the democratic process? How did Shulman germinate this culture? Cuz, from where I stand, Bush’s appointee somehow managed a bureaucracy that failed to reject tax-exempt status from even one Tea Party group, despite the fact that all of them are undeserving of 501(c)(4) status. That’s the real scandal.
So, what else does Rose have?
The Obama administration has had a chilling zeal for investigating leaks and punishing leakers and now perfectly in character has failed to offer any credible justification for the Justice Department secretly combing through the phone records of reporters and editors at The Associated Press. This looks like the Justice Department was on a fishing expedition for sources in an effort to frighten off whistle-blowers.
If the administration wanted to discourage whistle-blowers, they would have gone after a whistle-blower instead of someone who made no allegations of wrongdoing. Last I checked, penetrating an al-Qaeda cell and killing their leader isn’t something that needs to be leaked to the press because it isn’t a crime.
Which leads us to the ultimate example of Obama’s arrogance: ObamaCare.
But as bad as these examples look, the poster child for arrogance is, appropriately enough, Obamacare.
It was obvious almost from day one, when Obama rammed through Obamacare — a 2,000-page law with now 20,000 pages of regulations — that he would ignore anyone who disagreed with him, whether non-partisan experts or partisan critics. Only he knew the truth, and everyone else was either on board or misguided.
Of course, five separate Congressional committees were responsible for writing the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act. The Republicans introduced and passed amendments to the bill in each those committees’ markups. A majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate thought they knew the truth well enough to vote for the bill. So, how is the president alone responsible for ObamaCare? How did he fail to listen to anyone’s input but his own?
Wait, it gets better.
Had Bill Clinton been president (never mind his total lack of character) and succeeded in passing “Hillarycare,” we might have had broad-based health care reform but never would have ended up with the Obamacare monster. I’ll bet it even makes Bill shiver a little in private.
One has to wonder whether Mr. Rose is stupid or simply disingenuous. HillaryCare was a much more liberal proposal than ObamaCare. In fact, when HillaryCare was being discussed in Congress, the Heritage Foundation came up with a counterproposal that involved a mandate that people buy private insurance. That proposal become the model for Mitt Romney’s health care plan in Massachusetts which, in turn, became the model for ObamaCare. So, had Bill Clinton succeeded in passing HillaryCare we would have something far more monstrous to conservatives than the present bill which was basically the Republicans’ answer to HillaryCare. If Bill Clinton is shivering, it’s because he’s cold.
What’s the final piece of evidence that President Obama is arrogant and lacking in humility?
Obama bashes heads with Republicans. Clinton would negotiate and compromise and, in the end, usually find common ground with Republicans. We probably would have ended up with comprehensive tax reform, not the meat-ax cuts from the sequestion, had Clinton been president.
Finally, something we can agree about!!
