I have a theory about President Obama’s governing style. By “governing style”, I mean his unwillingness or inability to negotiate or even relate to anybody in Congress, including Democrats, regarding the shutdown, the debt ceiling, or anything else. This week, on top of that we saw ObamaCare registration crash and burn with people being required to sign up at a $600 million website that barely worked.
The sympathetic “main stream” press, who so obviously are rooting for Obama, will never tell us, but I think there has to be a great deal of frustration and outright resentment of Obama among politicians in his own party, whom he has thrown under the bus on many occasions. They continue to support him because they, at all costs, must defeat Republicans, but I don’t think there’s a lot of love lost between those on the Democrat side of the aisle and the president.
As for the Republicans, Obama has shown over and over again that, if it was their idea, he’s against it, even if it makes him look petty, callous, and capricious. Again, most people, who are barely paying attention, will never realize he’s petty, callous and capricious because the media won’t portray him that way like they would if he were a Republican.
Many people have postulated that he is following Alinsky’s “Rules For Radicals”, and that may very well be, but I have another theory: that his refusal to get into the trenches and broker deals is directly related to the fact that he’s never had a real job.
I almost added “until now”, but I don’t think he’s really doing anything as president either. He’s still voting “present” like he did in the Illinois legislature. Then he goes and plays golf.
So my theory is that the president is basically spoiled. He always had everything handed to him on a silver platter. Everyone around him always thought he was wonderful and did everything he wanted when he expressed the slightest whim. Since being president he once lamented that, in order to get anything done, he had to relate to Congressmen from podunk towns, and states, presumably. Don’t they know who he is? They should just accede to his wishes!
The president really believed his inaugural speech in which he claimed, merely because it was him, the seas would stop rising and all the people of the world would love us.
It’s hard to overstate his narcissism, but it does help to explain why he can’t get anything done with Congress. Two very different presidents, Reagan and Clinton, both had difficult Congresses, yet they sat down with political enemies and friends alike, forged agreements and got things done. Obama has neither the skill nor the aptitude to do so.
If, in his life, like most Americans, he had had to start in a menial job in order to have spending money, work hard to pay for college (who DID pay for his university degrees?), start at the bottom in his first job and compete for promotions, he might have learned the skills required to actually accomplish something. Even better, if he had started a business and spent sleepless nights thinking about how to meet payroll and pay taxes, he might have some clue about how to begin and administer a large project.
But instead, he, or someone telling him so, believed he was always destined for greatness and that every stage of his life was just a platform for the next, to be discarded as quickly as the next elevation was moved into his reach by the hand of destiny.
In other words, Obama has never done anything, he’s never been anything and so he doesn’t know how to make anything happen. Instead, everything seems to happen TO him, which he resents, and so he makes speeches about how put-upon he is. And those who love him, sympathize, because that’s how they view themselves and their lives.
But the numbers of people sympathizing are shrinking even as the number of people frustrated with his inability to govern grows.
