Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey – joined by bloggers Baseball Crank and Moe Lane – notes that Los Angeles public schools won’t be in session next Tuesday when President Obama delivers his speech to the nation’s children. Neither will those in the Boston schools. Or the New York City public schools. Or those in Seattle, Buffalo or Eugene (Oregon).
It’s the Obamatuerism of the day on this one, but it may be indicative of a new theme concerning the Obama administration’s managerial and strategic political competence. All presidential teams tend to get high marks during their honeymoons. But the Obama honeymoon has clearly been over since early summer.
Now, the school speech was poorly thought out, both in concept and execution. The same can be said of Obama’s recurring unsuccessful attempts over the summer to “reframe the health care reform debate,” and the multiple mis-steps in responding to his Town Hall critics, beginning with the spectacularly inept branding of them as an “angry mob.”
There will be many more such opportunities for political mis-steps and odds are the Obama team won’t miss many of them. A blitz of news stories about the massive waste and fraud attending the $787 billion stimulus program is probably headed Obama’s way in coming months, and who knows how many more Van Jones that he has appointed to influential jobs in the government will suddenly hit the front pages.
The lesson here is that the political ear that warns of potential mis-steps in a campaign is not the same one that works once you are elected and have to make the thousand decisions that come with daily governance of a central government that long ago become far too big and expansive to be effectively managed. This is why administration officials approach projects like the school speech without anticipating the explosion of negative public reaction.
So expect in coming months a growing theme in the media questioning the competence of those around the president. For liberals in Congress and the media, such a theme will provide a handy way of diverting blame from Obama’s shoulders for the succession of blunders, misteps and embarrassments that is surely coming.
