The Amateur (26 page)

Authors: Edward Klein

Rather than provide the kind of American leadership that once created the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, he has watched as a helpless bystander as the European Union has disintegrated. After nearly ten years of war in Iraq, he has undertaken a strategic withdrawal from the Middle East, leaving a vacuum that is certain to be filled by our sworn enemies in Iran. He called Afghanistan “a war of necessity,” dispatched an additional 30,000 troops there, but foolishly set a date certain to bring America’s troops home, thus creating yet another vacuum in an explosive part of the world. He has done little or nothing to stem the rise of China as a military power in the Far East. His ambivalent policy toward the mullahs in Iran and their ambition to become a nuclear power could only be described as an uncertain trumpet.

The Obama Doctrine with its two corollaries—“leading from behind” and “Responsibility to Protect”—is naïve, simplistic, and superficial. If further proof of this were needed, it came in the early months of 2012, when Bashar al-Assad began slaughtering his civilian opponents in Syria, which unlike Libya is of vital strategic importance to the United States, because Syria’s regime is allied to both Russia and Iran.

“If the responsibility to protect civilians is a legitimate part of international law, why would it apply to Libya and not to Syria?” Steven Erlanger asked in the
New York Times
. “Why shouldn’t the world intervene in what is already a one-sided civil war? Without a robust intervention, what happens to the momentum and principles of the Arab Spring? Will Western calls for democracy and equal rights suffer and help radical Islamists rise to power?”

Several leading Republicans called on the Obama administration to act. But the voices of the “humanitarian Vulcans”—Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Hillary Clinton—were effectively silenced when Russia and China vetoed a Security Council resolution aimed at aiding the Syrian rebels and toppling the Assad regime. Without the fig leaf of international cooperation, which would allow the timorous Obama administration to lead from behind, Obama remained frozen in inaction. His refusal to take the lead in Syria to save civilian lives made a sham of “Responsibility to Protect,” the guiding moral principle behind the Obama Doctrine.

As in past crises, the one in Syria demonstrated that Obama and his foreign policy team were bound by a narrow, cramped worldview. They envision a world of declining American power and the emergence of a new world order that will contain a half dozen major powers—the United States, Europe, China, Japan, Russia, and India. However, such a highly competitive, dangerous multipolar world is not inevitable. It will only materialize if the United States lets it. Obama should be more careful what he wishes for.

PART V

A ONE-TERM PROPOSITION?

One nice thing about the situation I find
myself in is that I will be held accountable.
You know, I’ve got four years.... If I don’t
have this done in three years, then there’s
going to be a one-term proposition.

—Barack Obama

CHAPTER 20

THE “NEW OBAMA”

[Obama] needs to take a Valium before he comes in
and talks to Republicans. He’s pretty thin-skinned.

—Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas

T
here is an old saying that nothing prepares a person to be president. Nowadays, a lot of liberals resort to this cliché as a way of excusing Barack Obama for the serial failures of his nearly four years in office. After all, liberals argue, if no one ever arrives at the White House with the requisite skills and talents to carry out the duties of the modern presidency, how can Obama be faulted for a first term that has been characterized by false starts and failed experiments? At least he tried.

But presidents don’t get points for trying. What’s more, the hackneyed saying that
all
presidents are unsuited for office is simply not true. It certainly wasn’t true of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan. All of
them
were eminently suited for the presidency, because they had the temperament, management skills, and vision to tackle the job.

What
is
invariably true about our presidents is that the most successful ones grow in office. During the Civil War, Lincoln went through five commanders in the East before he settled on Ulysses S. Grant. In an assessment of John Kennedy, his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen noted: “If one extraordinary quality stood out among the many, it was the quality of continued growth. In November 1963, he had learned more about the uses and limitation of power, about the men on whom he could depend, about the adversaries and evils he faced, and about the tools and techniques of policy.” The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. seconded the motion. “Kennedy,” he said, “made his share of mistakes. But Kennedy never lost the capacity to learn from his mistakes. Each year he became a better president.”

Can the same be said of Barack Obama?

Has he learned from his mistakes?

Has he become a better president?

The answer to these questions will strike many readers of this book as all too clear. I can just hear them chanting in unison: “No!
No
! NO!”

Nonetheless, the subject cannot be so easily dismissed. It is one thing for conservatives to view Obama as an irremediable political delinquent and bungling amateur who is hopelessly out of his depth. It is quite another thing to say of Obama, as Talleyrand was supposed to have said of the Bourbons, that he has “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Indeed, the outcome of the 2012 presidential election may well be decided in Obama’s favor if independent swing voters can be convinced that he has grown in office and deserves a second chance.

To shed light on the subject of Obama’s “growth,” I interviewed dozens of people in government, media, academia, and business. More than a few of them had worked in the Obama White House or in previous administrations. Others had studied Obama and his predecessors as reporters, writers, and historians.

My first round of interviews was with members of the White House press corps. It will come as no surprise to readers that there aren’t many avowed conservatives in this group. Nor will readers be shocked to learn that most of the men and women who cover Obama on a day-to-day basis are, to put it charitably, partial toward Obama and are inclined to believe that he has demonstrated a real ability to grow and adapt.

This may be a classic case of the wish being father to the thought. But there is no denying the fact that most members of the White House press corps agree with James Fallows, a liberal analyst of the presidency who writes for the
Atlantic
. “Not even FDR was FDR at the start,” Fallows wrote in a recent issue of the monthly magazine. “The evidence is that Obama is learning fast to use the tools of office.”

Mainstream journalists contend that in the wake of the shellacking the Democrats took in the 2010 midterm elections, Obama & Co. were forced to go back to the drawing board. According to this version of events, Obama and his political advisers concluded after the midterms that the president would lose in 2012 if the election were a referendum on the economy.
⁶The election had to be a “choice election” between Obama and a “worse” Republican alternative in order for Obama to win, and he had to start beating up on his potential Republican opponent right away.

At this point, I can hear some readers interrupting. “We know where the liberal mainstream media stand,” they might say. “Why should we care what they think?”

The answer is quite simple: the presidential nominee of the Republican Party will not only have to run against Barack Obama in 2012; he will also have to run against the full force and power of the liberal mainstream media and the cultural establishment. For all their carping about Obama’s coldness, detachment, isolation, and grandiosity, and for all their disappointment over his failure to become a “transformative” president, mainstream journalists and their allies in the liberal establishment have never fallen out of love with Obama. They want to see Obama win in 2012. And their newest mantra is “Obama has grown in office.”

Listen to what they have to say:

From the Washington bureau chief of a major city newspaper, who asked to remain anonymous
: “Obama and his staff have learned a lot. They never saw the Tea Party thing coming. They were not nimble. They thought that Hillary Clinton had made a terrible mistake on the healthcare bill by sending a White House-created bill to Congress with a thousand-plus pages. So the Obama people decided not to send up a bill of their own. What’s more, Obama was in favor of the public option. They knew it wasn’t going to pass. The thought was he should have tried anyway. It would demonstrate to his base that he tried and that the votes weren’t there. And the same people who didn’t see the Tea Party coming, didn’t see that a very complex proposal like ObamaCare needed to be explained in simple terms.

“Now, with a Republican-dominated House of Representatives, Obama and his staff have changed both strategy and tactics,” this journalist continued. “They have a plan to put the onus on the Republicans. Rather than compromising from the start, as they did before, the president comes out and says, ‘You want a definite deficit plan? Well, I’ve got one. And what are you going to do about it?’ That is a big difference from the way they acted early on. They had to go through all of this to understand that the strategy of compromise wouldn’t work.”

And this from a White House correspondent
: “There is plenty of evidence that Obama has grown in the job. The sharper the political knocks have become, the more he seems aware of his opponents. He’s tried to be a nice guy. Now, he’s picking a fight because the situation demands it and he has no choice. It’s a Harry Truman strategy. His strategy is that he’s the last sane man in Washington.”

The notion that Obama has changed his stripes, that through trial and error he has become a better president, is now accepted as conventional wisdom inside the Washington Beltway. Indeed, Obama himself subscribes to this view; he even admits he’s seen the error of his ways.

“While proud of his record, Obama has already begun thinking about what went wrong—and what he needs to do to change course ...,” Peter Baker wrote in the
New York Times
.

He has spent what one aide called “a lot of time talking about Obama 2.0,” with his new interim chief of staff, Pete Rouse, and his deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina. During our hour together, Obama told me he had no regrets about the broad direction of his presidency. But he did identify what he called “tactical lessons.” He let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat.” He realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” when it comes to public works. Perhaps he should not have proposed tax breaks as part of his stimulus and instead “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” so it could be seen as a bipartisan compromise. Most of all, he has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington.

All this talk about a “New Obama” reminds me of the effort on the part of Richard Nixon’s PR people in the 1960s to repackage him as the “New Nixon.” During the presidential election of 1968, voters were treated to TV commercials and carefully planted stories claiming that the old, mean-spirited Nixon had matured, and that a more tolerant, magnanimous “New Nixon” had taken his place. It was a brilliantly orchestrated campaign, but as we learned during Watergate and the subsequent release of Nixon’s Oval Office tapes, there never was a “New Nixon.”

The example of Richard Nixon’s
non-makeover
makeover should tell us something about the efforts of the Obama political team to reframe his image and resell him to voters. The comparison between Nixon, the saturnine gutter fighter, and the No-Drama-Obama may strike some people as a stretch, but consider the following: