Leading by Example

During an Iowa Public Television presidential forum back on November 9, 2007-a full year before he was elected-Barack Obama was asked to list “some examples of what you will tell Americans that we don’t necessarily want to hear.”

“Number one,” he said, “We’re going to have to start doing a better job on conserving energy.” Americans have to stop driving their “big SUVs” and leaving the lights on in rooms throughout their houses.

He went further at an event in May. “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times,” Obama said.

Energy conservation is so important, in fact, that Obama wants to spend $6.2 billion on “weatherizing” 1 million American homes as part of his stimulus package. “We’re going to train people who are out of work, including young people, to do the weatherization,” he explained to Katie Couric last week. “As a consequence of weatherization, our energy bills go down and we reduce our dependence on foreign oil. What would be a more effective stimulus package than that?” (Well, payroll tax cuts, to suggest just one. But we digress.) It’s funny how quickly tough love can turn into a government handout.

President Obama’s commitment to your energy conservation cannot be doubted. But what about his own? In May, Obama promised to “lead by example” and when he touted energy conservation in Iowa, he declared: “We are going to have to change our habits.”

He’s using “we” figuratively.

After the shivering American public was exposed to several pictures of the new president working in the Oval Office without a jacket, his top adviser offered this as an explanation.

“He’s from Hawaii, okay?” top adviser David Axelrod, told the New York Times. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.”

CNN Washington bureau chief David Bohrman visited the White House last week. “The Oval Office is just as hot as they say it is,” he told Politico. “It was 80 degrees in there!”

So while Kentucky calls in the military to help save its human popsicles and the rest of the country huddles together for warmth because we listened to Obama on the campaign trail, our new president is melting polar ice caps and funding Saudi madrassas because the Oval Sauna best reminds him of home? Weren’t we told throughout the campaign that the guy is Chicago-tough?

Although the new president went to the Energy Department to speak last week, he is apparently unfamiliar with its “Tips on Saving Energy and Money at Home.”

We are going to have to change our habits.

What’s Bugging Bill Gates?

Apparently it is not enough for Bill Gates to allow bugs to plague our Microsoft Office Windows software (or, God forbid, Vista). No, he’s got to let us have the real thing. Last week at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference in Long Beach, California, the founder of Microsoft opened a jar filled with mosquitoes before his captive audience, saying, “Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. I brought some here. I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.”

Gates waited a moment before assuring everyone the mosquitoes he just unleashed did not, in fact, carry malaria. Of course the high profile crowd of technology and media elites still had to swat the pesky insects away but, at the very least, it made for a memorable presentation. (The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the fight against malaria.) We just hope Gates doesn’t start taking an interest in the fight against dysentery.

Zinni Under the Bus

General Anthony Zinni (U.S. Army, Ret.) was known to refer to the Bush administration’s prewar efforts at aiding the Iraqi opposition as a “Bay of Goats proposition.” The reference to the Bay of Pigs fiasco was a none-too-subtle dig at the competence of groups like the Iraqi National Congress that were making promises they couldn’t keep.

When the Obama administration promised Zinni the high-profile post of ambassador to Iraq only to revoke the offer days later and with no explanation, he was similarly unrestrained in his criticism.

The snub was first reported by the Washington Times on Wednesday morning, February 4, with Zinni telling the paper that National Security Adviser Jim Jones, like Zinni a retired four-star general, had offered him the job two weeks ago and that a subsequent conversation with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had confirmed it. Zinni started making arrangements, but all of a sudden he couldn’t get his calls returned by the Obama White House. When Zinni finally got through to Jones the night of February 2, he was told that the administration had instead decided to give the job to Christopher Hill, the career diplomat who spent the last four years heading up the U.S. delegation to the Six Party Talks with North Korea and has precisely nothing to show for his work.

Jones offered no explanation for the reversal. “That kind of bothered me,” Zinni told the paper. “I was told that I had it.” By Wednesday afternoon, Zinni was getting more specific, and more colorful, in his recounting of the story. He told a blogger at Foreign Policy that Clinton had summoned him to the State Department for a meeting to discuss his new posting and that Vice President Joe Biden had even called to congratulate him on his appointment.

When Zinni was finally told that he’d been passed over, Jones offered him a consolation prize-ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Zinni’s response, as quoted by the New York Times: “I told them to stick it where the sun don’t shine.” The confusion was a stark contrast to the Obama machine of 2008 and prompted one senior adviser to tell Politico, “I don’t know who’s doing what, who’s in charge.” Maybe the Bay of Goats is located on the Potomac.

Department of Obama Studies?

Over at National Review Online, John Derbyshire notes that if you go to a reputable university to study English literature you should “expect to encounter the great names” of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton. And “at Ohio State University, one of those great names will be Barack Obama.” He links to the OSU course catalogue for spring quarter 2009, which features a section of English 275: Thematic Approaches to Literature bearing the title, “Barack Obama and/as Literature.” The course raises the Big Questions of the day: “What do his words (his books and speeches) say about him as a writer? What do his literary interests say about the relevance of literature to contemporary American politics and culture? How does race affect this literary conversation?” Derbyshire predicts the imminent creation of “the first college Obama Studies Department.” THE SCRAPBOOK expects to see a Barack Obama University shortly thereafter.