This week’s White House report card finds our pollster grader, John Zogby, seeing a Teflon president where problems don’t stick, and our national security expert, Jed Babbin, criticizing continued concerns with Obama’s handling of Iran.
John Zogby
As with all cliches, there is some truth to the old maxim that ‘We get too soon old and too late smart.’ President Obama is having a good year in the polls and seems to have settled into the job very well.
The problems are still there — slow growth, worried voters, a sense among many that America’s best days are gone forever, and a pervasive fear of the next big terrorist act. And as my Utica, N.Y. buddy Dick Benedetto wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week, none of it seems to stick on Mr. Obama. Whether or not it is a slick PR machine in the White House or the fact that everyone else looks so much worse, the president is enjoying his better polling days and seems finally comfortable either in his job or in the fact that he is leaving it soon enough.
Most Americans do not say they are doing better than they were four years ago, but Mr. Obama certainly is.
Grade B
Jed Babbin
President Obama had a quiet week, thanks in part to presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
For the second week straight, Trump ignored the controversy stirred up by Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, who bragged about lying to the press and public to sell Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. Trump must understand that he’s not just running against Hillary Clinton but also Obama and his media cohorts.
Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va) said that the American people would be shocked at how the Iranians treated American sailors captured off Kharg Island in the incident that occurred last January. Forbes said that Americans would be taken aback by how Iran and Obama handled the incident. He couldn’t reveal more because the Obama administration had classified the information, apparently to avoid being embarrassed by the facts. Obama has, again, taken Iran’s side against America.
Another name was deleted from Obama’s BFF list when his first defense secretary, Bob Gates, criticized Obama of ‘semantic backflips’ in his insistence that American troops weren’t in combat against ISIS. When men are killing and getting killed, that sure sounds like combat.
Grade D
John Zogby is the senior analyst for Zogby Analytics and author of the upcoming, “We Are Many, We Are One.” 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]
