“The presidency has changed Barack Obama,” Richard Cohen informs us. “His hair has gone gray, which is to be expected, and he looks older, which is also to be expected, but his eloquence has been replaced by petulance, and he has lost the power to persuade.”
This is true, but the deeper truth is that on the inside Obama has changed very little, which has caused the change in his looks and his demeanor, but not in his views. Since 2013 his world has been crumbling, but the world view that caused this has not been adjusted. He believes in foreign retreat and state regulation, and the results of these theories have been catastrophic. The petulance comes from his irritation that this has happened, and his eloquence has left him at the same moment, as every word he now says is a lie. They are lies because everything he thought of as true has been proven wrong by events which he cannot believe, so he tries to say otherwise. He spent his first term sowing the seeds of disaster and the second denying that anything happened. And the pretense is now wearing thin.
How did he go from being the silver-tongued savior who ran the perfect campaign to being a gaunt, gray-haired ghost, babbling about the Islamic State being “junior varsity” before it killed and enslaved tens of thousands of people, about it being “contained” the day before it killed more than 100 people in Paris; and about the U.S. being “safe” days before it killed and wounded 35 people enjoying a holiday fete at a California center that helped disabled people?
He took two classic plays from the liberal playbook. He tried to nationalize the country’s vast complex health care system (because government does these things so well and a crisis should never be left unattended) and pulled all our troops out of Iraq prematurely (as American power is a threat to world order, as progressives know well).
As to the first, there’s a thing known as “markets,” which he failed to consider, and his plan, having survived one election and two Supreme Court cases, seems about to succumb to the “death spiral” that its opponents foresaw. “We cannot sustain these losses,” said one large insurer. “We can’t really sustain a marketplace that doesn’t appear at the moment to be sustaining itself.”
As for the second, it turned out he couldn’t end wars by declaring them over, if the other side didn’t agree. Into the void left by American forces flowed a rip tide of epic barbarity. “The President’s string of misjudgments … is one of the most striking examples of serial failure in the annals of American foreign policy,” Walter Russell Mead has stated. “President Obama is in danger of achieving the least successful record in foreign policy of any American president, BAR NONE.”
For years, bloggers have mused that Obama might be a mole who WANTS to wreak havoc, but this is disproved by his face and demeanor, which show him appearing distraught. He cannot believe that the world has behaved in ways that weren’t predicted by his creed. He tries to align the world that exists with the one in his mind, and the effort exhausts him.
We’ve had presidents who failed and changed their approaches (George W. Bush and John Kennedy), presidents who were overwhelmed (Buchanan and Carter) and presidents who were paralyzed by events (Herbert Hoover). But never before have we had a president like Obama, who is trying so hard not to learn from experience. The marks of the struggle are written upon him. Is he reaching the breaking point now?
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
