The one-time constitutional lawyer fails to grasp the fact that the president of the United States does not obtain results by giving orders.
By Ed Klein
“I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they
ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them,” Harry
Truman once lamented. “That’s all the powers of the President amount
to.”
As usual, the plain-speaking Truman got it right: presidential power
is the power to persuade. Too bad the current occupant of the White
House has never learned this basic lesson.
Barack Obama’s refusal to negotiate with the Republicans in Congress
on the government shutdown is proof once again that he doesn’t
understand the first thing about presidential leadership.
Strangely enough, this one-time constitutional lawyer fails to grasp
the fact that the president of the United States does not obtain results
by giving orders.
Thanks to our Constitution’s separation of powers, he can’t get
action without bargaining with Congress. The presidency and Congress are
inextricably linked; one can’t govern without the other.
Obama has ignored this simple truth since he became president. With
ObamaCare, he allowed Nancy Pelosi and her liberal Democratic cohort to
ram through the most sweeping—and flawed—piece of social legislation in
more than four decades without a single Republican vote, guaranteeing
that the unpopular law will be challenged for years to come.
Compounding this mistake, he then handed out waivers and exemptions
to the law to politically connected businesses, including restaurants
and nightclubs in Nancy Pelosi’s district.
Despite his public posturing , he
wasn’t at all unhappy about the partial government shutdown, because it
allows him to demonize the Republicans in the run-up to the 2014-midterm
elections.
But now, faced with a prolonged shutdown and a debt-ceiling crisis to
boot, he finds that he can’t politic his way out of the mess, so he’s
trying to campaign his way out, calling the Republicans every name in
the book.
But his job is to govern, to lead, to find common ground, to persuade.
Unfortunately, Barack Obama is not wired to do that.
As I pointed out in my book, "The Amateur,"
Obama is inept in the arts of management and governance. He doesn’t
learn from his mistakes, but repeats policies that make our economy less
robust and our nation less safe.
He is, in short, a strange kind of politician, one who derives no joy
from the cut and thrust of politics, but who clings to the narcissistic
life of the presidency.
According to Lawrence Summers, who served as secretary of the
treasury under Bill Clinton and director of the National Economic
Council under Barack Obama, “Obama really doesn’t have the joy of the
game. Clinton basically loved negotiating with a bunch of other pols,
about anything. If you told him, God, we’ve got a problem. We’ve got to
allocate all the office space in the Senate. If you could come spend
some time talking to the majority leader in figuring out how to allocate
office space in the Senate, Clinton would think that was pretty
interesting and kind of fun. Whereas, Obama, he really didn’t like these
guys.”
Vernon Jordan, a longtime Democratic Party wise man, agrees.
“Consultation is not in the DNA of the Obama administration,” Jordan
told me.
“Some time ago, while Obama was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, he
invited me to join a foursome and play a round of golf at the Vineyard
Golf Club in Edgartown. I was paired with the president’s assistant,
Marvin Nicholson, and the president played with Mayor [Michael]
Bloomberg, who at the time was being considered as a possible
replacement for [Timothy] Geithner as secretary of the treasury. When
the round of golf was over, the president immediately left. And
Bloomberg turned to me and said, ‘I played four hours of golf with the
president and he didn’t ask me a goddam thing.’"
“The Obama administration resembles the [Jimmy] Carter administration
in being closed like that,” Vernon Jordan went on. “No matter how
obstructive the Republicans may be, Obama has the responsibility of
leadership. I’m worried that he’s overplaying his hand in saying that
it’s all the Republicans’ fault. That may be true, but what are you, Mr.
President, going to do to bring them around?”
At some level, Obama is aware of his own shortcomings.
For instance, shortly before he was scheduled to address the Business
Roundtable, Jack Lew, then the director of the Office of Management and
Budget, was asked if there was any subject the business leaders should
not raise with the president. “Yes,” said Lew. “Don’t ask about
leadership. He’s sensitive about the criticism that he hasn’t provided
strong leadership.”
“The presidency is no place for amateurs,” Richard Neustadt pointed
out in his landmark study, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents. “[The
office of the president needs] experienced politicians of extraordinary
temperament. … That sort of expertise can hardly be acquired without
deep experience in political office. The presidency is a place for men
of politics. But by no means is it a place for every politician.”
It is no place for Barack Obama.
http://tinyurl.com/m9yml4l
No comments:
Post a Comment