Our presidential report card graders were poles apart this week, with John Zogby crediting the president for building on his agenda and legacy and Jed Babbin scrambling to even find President Obama.
First up, John Zogby who found Obama working hard to secure his agenda.
“Just as Jimmy Carter redefined the role of former president, Barack Obama seems to be rewriting the rules of presidents in their last year in office. He is moving quickly and non-stop to get in as much of his agenda as he possibly can — and leaving it to the courts and historians to judge his value. His week started with the release of Americans held in Iran and with a Democratic debate where the front-runner embraced him and his policies.
“It moved along with a Russian announcement that peace talks with the U.S. and other powers over a resolution to the Syrian crisis will move forward. The week ended with a new Zogby Poll showing the President with a 47 percent job approval rating, with 49 percent opposed. A very bad week for the stock market but I spent the past two weeks conducting focus groups in Upstate New York among social service providers and found wide acclaim for the impact of the Affordable Care Act.”
Grade: B+
Next, new contributor Jed Babbin, who felt like Obama was in a Where’s Waldo drawing, having been so quiet all week:
“This week, you’d had to look far and wide to find Mr. Obama saying or doing anything. In earlier presidencies, it wasn’t unusual for a president to decline to inject himself into every day’s events, but it is for Obama. For the past seven years, it seemed — through his daily speeches, informal statements press releases and more — that there was nothing so small that it didn’t demand his immediate attention. Sometimes his pace of passions required more than one statement a day.
“For most of this week it seemed as if he were AWOL, and then he was pushed out of the news by the coming snowstorm. When his administration announced that Iranian “business travelers” would be exempted from visa restrictions aimed at keeping people with terrorist ties out of America, he was silent. (Almost all Iranian businesses are owned and operated by the Iranian military, including the terrorist Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.) When an American student was taken prisoner by the North Koreans, and when one of the “Fast and Furious” guns — a .50 caliber rifle — was found in “El Chapo’s” arsenal, there was nothing from the president. He didn’t rise to defend his Syria policy when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joe Dunford, said that Putin had succeeded in “stabilizing” the Assad regime in Syria, meaning Assad had essentially won the civil war. Obama did say something about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Otherwise, nothing seemed to wake the presidential groundhog.
“Sometimes, a lot less at least seems to be a whole bunch better.”
Grade: C-
John Zogby is the senior analyst for Zogby Analytics and author (with Joan Snyder Kuhl) of “The First Globals: Understanding, Managing, and Unleashing our Millennial Generation.” Follow him at @TheJohnZogby.
Jed Babbin is an Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in administration of former President George H.W. Bush. Follow him @jedbabbin.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
