The Skeletons In Barry's Closet

I'll save the Chamber of Commerce witchhunt blowback for later in the post. Instead I want to start with something equivalently as lighthearted, yet leavened by the healthy cynicism all Americans should have developed about The One by now.

Call it his "sadder but no wiser" pre-post-midterm interview:

While proud of his record, Obama has already begun thinking about what went wrong — and what he needs to do to change course for the next two years. He has spent what one aide called “a lot of time talking about Obama 2.0” with his new interim chief of staff, Pete Rouse, and his deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina. During our hour together, Obama told me he had no regrets about the broad direction of his presidency. But he did identify what he called “tactical lessons.” He let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat.” He realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” when it comes to public works. Perhaps he should not have proposed tax breaks as part of his stimulus and instead “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” so it could be seen as a bipartisan compromise.

Most of all, he has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington. It is not enough to be supremely sure that he is right if no one else agrees with him. “Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told me, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”

Boy, I can't wait to see what "Obama 2.0" will be like, can you? Here's a hint: He'll be just like v. 1.0, only more dishonest. What other conclusion can you draw from his repeated insistences that the policies were "right" but they just didn't sell them well enough? The public sees how "right" Hogzilla and ObamaCare and the trillions in additional debt and FinReg and cap & tax were, which is why King Hussein is going to be without a Congressional rubber stamp for the next two years minimum. His unpopularity is a direct consquence of the wrongness of what they've done, but that's a reality no True Believer can accept.

So Obama 2.0 will be all about blaming Bush even more than he already has ("all the stuff that was coming at [him]"), trying to outmaneuver the restored GOP majority ("We shoulda snookered Republicans into being our human stimulus shields"), and....

Well, admitting, as he does here, his dumbassery of not "realizing" the bureaucratic fantasy of "shovel-ready" stimulus projects would qualify as a novelty. But again, he won't learn anything from it, because the lesson - that we can't "spend ourselves rich," even with a "god" calling the shots - would be intolerable.

Even the "pride in his administration" that he candidly concedes as being "perverse...from the top" isn't repented of, by him or his disciples:

Some White House aides who were ready to carve a new spot on Mount Rushmore for their boss two years ago privately concede now that he cannot be another Abraham Lincoln after all. In this environment, they have increasingly concluded, it may be that every modern president is going to be, at best, average.

“We’re all a lot more cynical now,” one aide told me. The easy answer is to blame the Republicans, and White House aides do that with exuberance. But they are also looking at their own misjudgments, the hubris that led them to think they really could defy the laws of politics. “It’s not that we believed our own press or press releases, but there was definitely a sense at the beginning that we could really change Washington,” another White House official told me. “ ‘Arrogance’ isn’t the right word, but we were overconfident.”

Translation: If God can't be a great president, NOBODY can. And they'll make damned sure of it, too.

Sixty-three years from now, Zephram Cochrane will say: "Don't try to be a great man; just be a man, and let history make its own judgments." Those presidents that history judges to be great leaders weren't obsessed with their own personal legacies. They didn't think it was all about them. They psyches weren't consumed with their own delusions of godhood. They were humble men thrust into daunting situations that demanded sacrificial leadership, talents, and abilities that they found within themselves. George Washington took over a rag-tag quasi-guerrilla army and led it against the global superpower of his day in a seven-year war of attrition characterized by multiple trials and setbacks, in which he lost most of its battles but won in the end through what might be termed strategic perseverence. Abraham Lincoln took office after the Civil War had already begun, and died barely a week after its conclusion; without it he might have gone down in as much obscurity as any of his four immediate predecessors (Taylor, Filmore, Pierce, Buchanan), but Providence placed him at that moment in history and utilized the greatness it placed within him. And, again, part of that greatness was the humility and character that understood he was a servant giving himself to his country, not a ruler entitled to aggrandizement from it.

Lucifer tries to glom that very heroic aura with his "we were doing the right thing even if it was unpopular" spiel as though it was some sort of noble sacrifice, thus nullifying the very effect he was solipsistically seeking. I can't help but remember, though, that he sure as hell didn't think it would be unpopular at the time - remember "I won"? Republicans being cut out of the behind-closed-doors writing of Hogzilla because Democrats didn't want to "share the credit" for "saving the economy" from "another Great Depression"? This is thin-gruel CYA for a policy that failed miserably and was always going to, from which he's hiding behind the "good intentions" dodge. Rather akin to attempting to make lemonade from policy lemons and getting antifreeze instead.

Probably the biggest irony of the whole piece is the underlying premise that many Americans will even pay attention to it. And that's what Barack Obama arguably fears the most: irrelevancy. Bill Clinton spent the spring of 1995 plaintively insisting he was relevant, which only underscored his irrelevancy. What he had to do to regain that relevancy - tack right and piggyback on Republican accomplishments - is something of which the Chicago Cherubim simply isn't capable. We'll know if that's at all likely to change if/when Sick Willie replaces Uncle Jeremiah as Red Barry's politicoideological/spiritual guru.

Either way, the Regime's McCarthyist politics of personal destruction won't diminish, but will ratchet beyond the stratosphere. But one would think Mr. Bill's counsel would be desperately needed to expunge their bungling hypocrisies - not the ones of the past, but the even more egregious ones of the present:

Now, President Obama was complicit in an effort to enlist (according to his own smear campaign) foreign money to lobby for the cap-and-trade energy rationing bill that was clearly against America's interests...that would be the same Chamber, incidentally. So, in what should be a surprise to no one, it turns out that his more regular political dance partner the windmill industry are indeed largely a bunch of foreigners! (like the solar guys...as we learned the hard and expensive way with the stimulus boodle sent overseas).

And just as surely, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) is giving 86% of their money to Democrats this cycle. Again, many of their member companies, you will see via that Open Secrets link, are foreign companies, which can donate through employees of US subsidiaries. I know, I know, that's distinct from US companies with foreign subsidiaries paying dues to their parent organization which uses different funds for its advocacy. It is much more nefarious. Or something.

As well as weeding out the hamfistedness that always leads to such easily predictable blowbacks:

American Crossroads, a Republican organization founded by Karl Rove and former RNC chief Ed Gillespie, is reaping the benefits that come with receiving criticism from an administration polling below 50%. Since the White House began attacking the conservative group last week for not disclosing their donors, the organization has raised $13.3 million — destroying their original fundraising goals and allowing them to target traditionally “low-risk” Democrat House seats…

Many of these donations came as a positive response to the administration’s targeted vitriol. A $250 donation from an unnamed physician, for example, came with the comment, “President Obama made me aware of you and I’m sure I’m not alone. Good luck and get the GOP as many as they can win.”…

In the wake of such a large influx of money, American Crossroads, its affiliate Crossroads GPS and two other conservative groups will be collectively dedicating $50 million to defeat Democrats in a “House surge.”

This week the group is laying down $2 million in eight house districts including NY-20, NY-22, NY-25, OH-18, HI 1, CA 3, IN-2, FL-22. “These are seats where Democrats until now thought they were safe. One of them, for example, NY-22, has not had a competitive campaign since 1992,” Collegio said.

That's the conundrum for B.O.: He won't be relevant as long as his approval numbers suck ditchwater; but to rebuild his approval numbers, he has to stop doing what he thinks is "right" and start doing what he thinks is "wrong," which he has passionately contended was Bill Clinton's biggest mistake.

If geneology means anything, Barry definitely has "right" in him:

The latest discovery from Ancestry.com shows that President Obama is related to conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, one of his most vocal critics, as well as to frequent political opponent Sarah Palin.

Obama and Palin are 10th cousins, connected through their common ancestor John Smith. Obama and Limbaugh are 10th cousins, once removed, through common ancestor Richard Terrell....

And a leadership gene clearly runs through Samuel Hinckley’s family, because Obama, Palin, and former president George W. Bush are all related through common ancestor Hinckley, who was among the first wave of settlers in America in the 1600s. Obama and Bush are 11th cousins; Palin and Bush are 11th cousins as well.

I can't honestly say who should be more mortified by this revelation. Talk about "Family Feud".

In the end, however, it all comes back to leadership. What leaders do and don't do. Or, as Batman put it to Rachel Dawes, "It's not who I am underneath, but what I do, that defines me". Investor's Business Daily draws the contrast timely and thusly:

By sad contrast, Obama stayed far away from the Gulf during the BP spill, as if to deny it, and made only a few brief appearances later.

Sadder still is what happens in China, where miners are routinely left for dead after mines collapse — a big reason more than 2,000 parish in such accidents each year.

"Lucky people who were born in Chile. ... If it was us, we would definitely have been buried alive and died," a Chinese wrote on the Internet, as quoted by the Christian Science Monitor.

[Chilean President Sebastian] Pinera is different. He focused on avoiding conflict and laying blame while the rescue was still on. He took accountability himself by firing incompetent inspectors on his own side, but didn't condemn business or shut down an entire industry, as Obama did with his Gulf moratorium, only now being lifted.

Pinera worked with local officials instead of bickering with them or throwing up bureaucratic obstacles because they belonged to the wrong party. Sadly, that's what Obama did [to] Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who had to take matters into his own hands in building berms when Louisiana's coast was threatened by the April spill.

Chileans, by contrast, said the crisis united them as never before. That takes leadership, and it comes about only because Pinera believes in openness, free markets, transparency and putting himself last.

That, along with the bravery of the miners, the effectiveness of the tools and the remarkable organizational skills that were brought to bear, turned a horrible tragedy into perhaps the greatest rescue operation in history.