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!!
Just out of curiosity: Do you really think Bill Clinton could’ve gotten comprehensive tax reform out of this Congress?
Yeah, he would have dialed up Dick Morris and come up with a plan in 2011. It would have sold liberals out, but he’d just take credit for reducing the size of government and take it to the bank.
Ahh I see. Yes, that seems quite likely.
And Republicans would have supported it (eventually) because Clinton is white.
Greenspan said once that Clinton was one of our best Republican Presidents.
Please tell me why so many liberals liked the Clinton administration. I don’t get it at all.
when you get the answer, please tell me
Put all of the horrible legislation (deregulation, NAFTA, etc) aside for the moment. Clinton
1) won the Presidency after 12 years of Republicans in the White House, at a time when the words “Jimmy Carter” would sink just about any Democrat’s candidacy.
2) he and Hillary were absolutely vilified by conservatives, accused of murder no less, and hounded from the first day of his Presidency (for Whitewater) to the last day (for stealing the White House cutlery). Wagons were circled.
3) when Democrats were urging Clinton to resign for the good of the party, he fought the Republicans, for the good of himself and the party. He’s the only Democrat in my memory who demonstrated how to stand up against Republicans, the media, and his own advisers, all of whom were pressuring him to surrender. And he left office with good ratings. Having created the scandal, he prevented it from becoming a liability. (Gore followed the advice of Lieberman, and his wounds were self-inflicted).
4) he protected vast amounts of land as National Monuments
5) he virtually ended one of the most effective charges against the Democratic party – that it gave endless and ineffective aid to the poor by taking money away from the hard-working middle class. This came at the cost of fraying the safety net and partially as a result of a booming economy, and I’m not defending the legislation, but this caricature of liberals was a huge liability electorally and it was pretty much neutered after Clinton.
6) he appointed Ginsburg and Breyer to the Supreme Court.
7) he gave us the most impressive First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, even though she had to bake cookies to soften her image.
8) he felt our pain. No, really. His policy speeches combined intelligence with empathy in a way that would rally people behind him.
This isn’t a defense of his administration. You asked why so many liberals liked him and these are the reasons that I can think of off the top of my head.
One has to wonder whether Mr. Rose is stupid or simply disingenuous.
I’m guessing disingenuous. There doesn’t seem to be much out there on Mr Rose beyond his career in KC as an op-ed columnist, but this reads like the typical right-wing play to drive a narrative in order to create a popular consensus while thumbing their noses at the reality-based community. Facts be damned.
He might’ve had half a point about the Obama admin discouraging whistle blowers if he hadn’t tried to tie it to the AP story, as you’ve noted.
Awww, Heritage-Romney-BaucusCare really chafed their butts, didn’t it?
The thing is the Republicans sold the outrage using their piece of the plan–the mandate but what they really hate, besides all the patient protections, is the Medical Loss Ratio and all of the accompanying regulations about what constitutes actual health care.
Interestingly, the people on the left who think ObamaCare is a handout to the insurance companies do not understand how significant this provision is either (if they even realize it exists).
I’m looking at the experience of CA and it is looking very good so far. Insurance companies are definitely feeling the pressure to lower prices and compete and they won’t want to play this game for long.
Interestingly, the people on the left who think ObamaCare is a handout to the insurance companies do not understand how significant this provision is either (if they even realize it exists).
Do you remember what happened to Aetna and other health care stocks when ObamaCare passed? They went up like 3% on the day. That’s not what happens when something bad for a company takes place. Even if it does lower costs, insurance companies still get millions of new customers. Not as many since red states refuse to take part in the Medicaid expansion, but plenty still.
Yes I do remember that but I also remember the insurance companies were spending 2 million a day to defeat it. If it is so good for them why?
I also remember the articles mentioning that they were closing up a significant portion of their lobby shops–because these costs would now have to come out of the 15% they can spend on things other than health care services.
And there are many other things we can point to including what is happening in CA now as they are lowering their premiums in order to be competitive.
But if you choose to believe that insurance companies prefer having to spend 85% of every dollar on actual health care services as opposed to 60% than woo hoo this is a big win for them.
Who is this person and why do we care?
Because he’s being aggressively wrong in a McClatchy newspaper with decent circulation.
McClatchy owns the KC Star? Oh that’s sad.
Many years ago I lived in KC briefly, and the Star was a wingnut joke. Oh, not as bad as the Colorado Springs Gazette (gazette.com, if you want to see extremism on display), but bad enough.
So, isn’t it better that Walt Disney doesn’t own them anymore?
Oh, wow, McClatchy? Wtf…
See when you said Kansas City I was thinking, “Who cares? It’s Kansas.”
That makes more sense. Still, never heard of him.
It’s Missouri, too.
… since only Fox News was beating the drums for the truth …
Look, this asshole is a nazi, simple. No one else would associate the word “truth” with “Fox News”.
What Barack Obama has lacked from the beginning is humility, and what he has displayed consistently is arrogance.
Shorter Steve Rose: He’s an uppity nigger!
Shorter Steve Rose:
Obama is an uppity Negro.
End of Op-Ed
Right.
The top-rated comment at this post is lovely. When did Conservatives decide to bring back Random Capitalization of certain Words a la the Revolutionary War Era?
There was this sharp blogger who recently wrote a piece titled “The GOP Has Stopped Making Sense”.
Why, then, would that same blogger expect that a columnist playing the GOP Mighty Wurlitzer would make sense? Yes, this column is particularly brazen in its nonsense, so perhaps it deserves this special mocking for its senselessness.
that truly is it…
you nailed it..
The Uppity Negro in the White House.
The typical laundry list of conservative grievances. Hits all their major sore points. I’m satisfied with it – sounds a bit sad and resigned to me.
BIG news on the DC Circuit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/us/politics/obama-plans-to-nominate-3-judges-for-key-court.html?hp
&_r=0
The Obama administration is playing to win on this one. This is gonna be one of the most important fights of the year.
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Current composition of court and former judges – a stepping stone to the US Supreme Court
Interesting – DC Circuit Review
“It’s déjà vu all over again” – Yogi Berra
Why, oh why, do conservatives always come up with a case of the vapours when they have nothing of substance to say? OH! THE HORROR! Is that the only thing they can come up with? That he’s just a big meanie!?
I’m not sure whether to have my intelligence insulted that Rose thinks his readers are that stupid, or be depressed to suspect maybe his readers ARE that stupid.
I guess he forgot to balance the piece with quotes and the like from Conservative leaders that would have demonstrated a better path. Of course that’s the hardship of writing an analysis, one needs to step up and compare Obama with Bush, or let’s add some years and go Biden to Quayle?
Learned when I was 2 that putting all the passengers on one side of the rowboat meant swimming back to shore.
That humility/arrogance thing
During the Cheney/Bush administration it was necessary to redefine those words. But lacking imagination, the pundit wordsmiths simple chose the opposite meanings for the new definitions.
Who is Steve Rose?