In their public lives, presidents have to hone their skills at facing disaster — see “midterm elections, 1994, 2006” — but the coping skills developed by President Obama are, one may say, unique.
Piqued by the results of the midterm elections, he denies that they happened, as the feelings of the millions who voted against him and his party matter much less than those who skipped voting completely. He believes (or assumes) that they all prefer him. He may be unaware he is opening a large can of worms for future elections, as every loser can now add the numbers of stay-at-homes to his own totals and then make the claim that he won. (On these lines, Mr. President, Mitt Romney has added the stay-at-homes to his 2012 numbers, and would like you to vacate his house.)
“Obama’s Forging His Own Reality,” the National Journal said of this theory, adding that he has projected this “win” into a mandate to unilaterally rewrite the immigration codes of the country in a way that he himself once had said was unconstitutional as well as unwise. In his defense, his press secretary said that “the president is leader of a coalition of people who voted when he was on the ballot” — not mentioning that he was last on the ballot before Obamacare went into effect and the Islamic State exploded, leading many members of this coalition to throw down their rifles and run.
Obama’s coalition exists only in memory. The glory days of 2008 and mass adoration are gone, and he seems unable to face this development. His main tactic now is to appear before small crowds of loyal supporters who roar when he unloads upon his tormentors. He seems now to believe those voting against him have let him down in his own expectations, and he seems determined to make them all pay.
Needless to say, this is not what was promised in those brave days of 2008. In October that year, there was a stream of defections from those connected by blood or by service to the Republican Party who threw in their lot with the bright new aspirant, using the idea of “temperament” to explain it away.
“Having a first class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama … has in him the potential to be a good, perhaps even a great leader,” said Christopher Buckley.
“What struck me is how incredibly even … and how reassuring he is,” David Brooks told us. “Obama is just the mountain. He’s there. He’s always the same. … His steadiness, his temperament has been the dramatic theme of this … campaign.”
Reagan appointee Kenneth Adelman slammed John McCain (and Sarah Palin) while praising the Democrat’s judgment and temperament.
Former Reagan chief of Staff Kenneth Duberstein followed suit, saying the Palin pick (like Obama, she had served only a part of her first term in state office) “had very much undermined the whole question of John McCain’s judgment.” His endorsement came a few days after those of his friend Colin Powell, whose career had been made by the Reagans and Bushes.
What these brains helped to give us was the worst presidential temperament since Richard M. Nixon, an under-experienced brittle narcissist, lacking in all the political skills save those of campaigning, whose main legacies will be an unworkable healthcare “reform” and a wholly avoidable Middle Eastern crisis. Obama’s lack of political sense has gotten him into many disasters, which his lack of political temperament only makes worse.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
