Opinion The silence of Obama
Three years on,the campaigns great speaker is a too-quiet president
Three years ago,Barack Obamas unlikely presidential dream was given wings by rapturous Iowans - young,old and in-between who saw in the fresh-faced,silky-voiced black senator a chance to leap past the bellicose,rancourous Bush years into a modern,competitive future where we once more had lustre in the world. We are choosing hope over fear, Senator Obama told a delirious crowd of 3,000 the night he won the Iowa caucuses.
But fear has garroted hope,as America reels from the latest humiliating blows on the economy and in Afghanistan. The politician who came across as a redeemer in 2008 is now in need of redemption himself.
Many of his Democratic supporters here in Des Moines,Iowa,who once waited hours in line just to catch a glimpse of The One,are disillusioned. We wish hed be more of a fighter, said one influential Democrat with a grimace. Another agreed: You cant blame him for everything. I just wish he would come across more forceful at times,but that is not the dudes style. Detached hurts you when things are sour. You need some of Clintons I feel your pain compassion.
Obamas response on Monday to Fridays Standard & Poors downgrade and to the 22 Navy Seal commandos and eight other soldiers killed by a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan was once more too little,too late. It was just like his belated,ineffectual response on the BP oil spill and his reaction to the would-be Christmas Day bomber; it took him three days on vacation in Hawaii to speak about the terrorist incident when the country was scared about national security,and then he spent the next week callously shuttling from the podium to the golf course.
His inability to grab a microphone and spontaneously assuage Americans fears is strange. If the American servicemen had died on a Monday,he wouldnt have waited until Wednesday to talk about it. He doesnt like the bully pulpit,just the professors lectern. After failing to interrupt his Camp David weekend to buck up the country on one of its worst days in history,he tacked on his condolences for the soldiers families to his economic pep talk,in what had to be the most inept oratorical segue of his presidency.
He long ago should have gone out into the country to talk to Americans in person and come up with a concrete plan that people could print out from the White House website and study. Hasnt he learned how dangerous it is to delegate to Congress? His withholding and reactive nature has made him seem strangely irrelevant in Washington,trapped by his own temperament. He doesnt lead,and he doesnt understand why we dont feel led.
Speaking from the State Dining Room of the White House,he advised America it was still a triple-A country like some cerebral soccer coach urging the kids to win one for the London Interbank Offered Rate. With traders hearing nothing new,just boilerplate about common sense and compromise on deficit reduction,the Dow Jones industrial average,which had already fallen 410 points,fell 20 more points while the president was talking around 2 Oclock. By the 4 pm close,the Dow was 634 points lower.
Obama has spent a lifetime creating his persona superior,wise,above all parties and interests,all-seeing,calm,unflappable. But Obamas assumption that you can rise above ascribing villainous motives has caused him to waste huge chunks of his first term seeking bipartisanship from Republicans who were playing him for a dupe. And it has led to Americans regarding the nations capital as a place of all villains and no heroes.Maureen Dowd
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