Of the many possible interpretations of President Obama’s erratic behavior of the past two weeks, the most benign is that he is simply and thoroughly overwhelmed by the office he holds. The other is that he is reaping what he sowed.
Author Malcolm Gladwell introduced many of us to the theory of cumulative advantage in his 2008 book “Outliers.” According to Gladwell, small advantages early in life, such as late enrollment in kindergarten, produce tiny advantages which grow with time into significant advantages. Advantage leads to success, which in turn leads to more and more success. Momentum grows, built upon small advantages accumulated long ago.
Obama, on the other hand, is providing us a slow motion example of cumulative failure leading to an epic fail.
Whether the first cause of this unfolding disastrous presidency was the president’s complete lack of preparation for executive office or his early and consistent rejection of bipartisan overtures — “I won” — the accumulated mistakes, pratfalls, stubbornness, arrogance and willful blindness is now combining to define his collapsed presidency.
Whether the prime mover of the president’s failure is incompetence or the consequence of a blinkered ideology, the past two weeks have been catastrophic for his re-election chances. In this space of time, every negative argument made against him was reinforced and additional evidence piled up of his certain inability to cope with his job.
Though the damage done is mostly ignored by the Obamalytes of the Manhattan-Beltway media elite, still obsessed with Mitt Romney’s occasional verbal twitch (think “two Cadilacs” and the $10,000 bet), the events of the past two weeks will return again and again in the months ahead to frame the campaign.
Obama easily sees and raises Romney on the minor gaffe front — telling women executives this week, for example, that he waited to address them until they “settled down” from “creating havoc.” But such small stumbles are nothing compared to this sequence of enormous blunders.
The first was chilling and sinister: a whispered assurance to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev of Obama’s post-election “flexibility.” The president has twice now attempted to laugh off this stunning admission of deception directed at the American electorate with lame jokes. The jokes fell flat even among favorable crowds, and even the kowtowing MSM know an eye-popping admission of duplicity towards the electorate when they hear it.
Then came the president’s constitutionally illiterate description of the Supreme Court’s powers and authority. That, in turn, came after a very public three-day beatdown of the premises and workability of the “central achievement” of his tenure, Obamacare.
Then followed a speech bordering on hysteria to the Associated Press and a jobs report so tepid as to throw even the Chicago cheerleading squad into confused and contradictory messaging. Slow Joe Biden contributed an 11-minute-long answer to a ten-second question on why gas prices were so high, and suddenly, “He is risen indeed” seemed less a celebration of the Easter miracle than an assessment of what it would take for Obama to win back the shattered confidence of a country.
We like to say “o-double-i-o-double-h” on my radio program. It is shorthand for “Obama is in over his head.”
After the past two weeks, we have to wonder whether he hasn’t dragged the country so far down into the sea with him as to prevent a necessary return to surface for some desperately needed gasps of air.
It will take an Olympian effort to turn things around. Luckily…
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
