Now that Barack Obama has been president for seven weeks, we’ve learned a few more things about him. Like every president, Obama has quirks. Or maybe we should call them characteristics or tendencies that we hadn’t expected. Here are a five of them:
1. Delegate and duck. Who’d have thought the fellow famous for his brains and tough-minded leadership would hand over much of his agenda to Democrats in Congress? Not I. This practice began with Obama’s first piece of legislation, the economic “stimulus” package. It was mostly put together by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who touted it as an economic game-changer. The actual result? A wave of fear it won’t work. Even economists friendly to Democrats told Pelosi this week that the measure won’t come close to meeting Obama’s goal of saving or creating up to 4 million jobs. Pelosi is now talking up a second stimulus package.
Given that experience, you might think Obama would be leery of giving congressional Democrats the more important job of drafting a massive health care reform bill. Not so. He’s given them exactly that assignment. True, there may be a clever strategy behind his habit of delegating. If Democrats draft a bill, they’re likely to pass it. Or perhaps Obama is just afraid of crossing Pelosi.
They’ll have trouble, however, with a touchy moral issue Obama ducked when he lifted the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. That issue: cloning of embryos for research, so-called therapeutic cloning. Obama also ducked the matter of where to stash unrepentant terrorists once the prison at Guantanamo is shut down on his orders next year. And he’s letting a task force determine what’s proper in interrogating terrorists.
2. Doing the opposite. Obama insists he’s not in favor of big government, then proposes a 10-year budget with vast amounts of new spending and a vastly expanded role for government. He denounces distractions that keep everyone from focusing on significant issues, but his White House aides cause a huge controversy by calling Rush Limbaugh the leader of the Republican party. He promises bipartisanship but doesn’t practice it. He’s against earmarks but refuses to call on Congress to strip them from the “omnibus” spending bill. He’s the enemy of “business as usual” in Washington, but the way he conducts his presidency is business as usual. He’s for making “tough choices,” but doesn’t make many. He’s for “fiscal responsibility” but . . . well, you get the drift.
3. Loose ship. Obama ran the most spectacularly well organized and brilliantly managed presidential campaign I’ve ever seen. And his transition was rightly praised for its orderliness. I don’t offer that praise lightly. But once he arrived in the White House, Obama has operated anything but a tight ship. He hasn’t filled major posts at the Treasury Department, allowing Secretary Tim Geithner to be cast by the media as a lonely and forlorn figure. He inadvertently treated British prime minister Gordon Brown as if he’s the leader of Sri Lanka or Surinam, causing Brown deep embarrassment at home and damaging the “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and America. His high-level nominees–some of them–continue to be folks with unpaid taxes. His vice president, Joe Biden, can’t stop uttering dubious statements, the latest being his claim that 70 percent of Taliban forces are in it for the money. Did Gallup poll them?
4. Blame game. This is one of the rituals of Washington that Obama was going to halt. Instead, he’s indulged. After an interview with the New York Times last week, he called back to respond further to a question about whether he’s a socialist. “It was hard for me to believe that you were serious about that socialist question,” he said, then went on to lay the blame for expanding government on President Bush. “It wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks,” Obama noted. “And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement, the prescription drug plan without a source of funding.” Obama didn’t mention that he supports the bank bailout and his party backed a more expensive version of the drug plan.
5. Straw man. Obama has been criticized for using this rhetorical device. But he can’t stop himself. He’s often declared he won’t deal with those, presumably congressional Republicans, who would do nothing at all to boost the economy. But Republicans would do something, just not what he has. When he made his stem cell announcement, Obama said he was protecting scientists from “manipulation or coercion,” listening to them “even when it’s inconvenient,” making sure “scientific data is never distorted or concealed,” and basing “scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.” Whew! But who was doing all those things? Nobody, though Obama seemed to be suggesting the Bush administration had.
Okay, these quirks are nothing to brag about. And Obama has some admirable characteristics as well. But I don’t need to cite them. The mainstream media has beaten me to the punch, spreading word of Obama’s fine points to the far ends of the globe.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
