Our presidential report card graders Jed Babbin and John Zogby had different takes on the tumultuous week that saw the Islamic State attack Belgium, killing two Americans, and President Obama’s historic trip to Cuba and first — and last — tango in Argentina.
John Zogby
In a week dominated by another Islamic State attack in Europe, the president stayed focused on his diplomatic journey to Havana and his overture to Argentina. GOP critics faulted him for being at a baseball game in Cuba and doing the tango in Buenos Aires, but they would have screamed if he let terrorists disrupt his job and cultural diplomacy.
Secretary of State John Kerry was on the scene in Brussels and intelligence and law enforcement made their connections. The president made history and the GOP could not even pass a budget. And the Melania Trump-Heidi Cruz primary plunged our politics to a low point previously unimaginable.
Grade A
Jed Babbin
Former President Bill Clinton called on America to put “the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us,” just as last week began. President Obama spent it proving that need.
Obama waded in a sea of moral equivalency in Havana, remarking that it was legitimate for strongman leader Raul Castro to point out America’s shortcomings and later making a short (by Fidel Castro standards) speech in which he paraded a long list of those shortcomings to an appreciative assembly of Cuban communist apparatchicks. In the lead-in to that speech, he gave all of 51 seconds to the Brussels terror attacks that had occurred only hours earlier.
Obama posed with Castro and others in front of a mural of anti-American terrorist Che Guevara’s face. In another scene, Castro tried to raise both their hands in mutual celebration, Obama’s limp wrist flopped around, an image that should forever be the symbol of his presidency. Obama ended the week by saying he had nothing to be “ashamed of.” Not even his last tango in Argentina?
Grade F
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]
