UPDATE: Seems Ace was on this well before I was.
FROM THE COMMENTS: Mary nicely, succinctly sums up the new conventional wisdom: “In my household, we say Obama likes the job — he’s just not much interested in the work.” Mary, I don’t think yours is the only household where they’re saying that now. 🙂
I believe if it was Jonah Goldberg (UPDATE: or was it Clarice Feldman?**) who first caused me to question whether Barack Obama even liked the job of President of the United States. Sure, the Democrat liked the title and the perks, but he didn’t relish the responsibilities that came with those privileges.
In the past few months, particularly with the release of Bob Woodward’s book, The Price of Politics, numerous conservative pundits and bloggers have been asking a similar question. Two weeks ago, Michael Barone observed that Obama “is a president who is much more comfortable campaigning than governing.”
Yesterday, it became apparent to me that it wasn’t just conservatives asking that question. In the New York Times Caucus blog, Matt Bai wrote:
Watching the president grimace his way through the restrained back-and-forth reminded me of a conversation I recently had with a friend in Democratic politics, who posited that Mr. Obama simply doesn’t love being president. Not that he doesn’t want the job or believe he should have it, or that its challenges don’t give him plenty of cause for stress or solemnity — just that he doesn’t appear to actually enjoy the daily business of running the country.
(Read the whole thing.*) Shortly after reading Bai’s thoughtful piece, I (via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit) discovered a similar reflection in the Washington Post where Melinda Henneberger asked, “Does Barack Obama really want to be president?”
Two pieces, both questioning a Democrat’s love for the top political job in the country in two left-of-center newspapers. Something is going on here.
In yet another Insta-post, in a similar vein, Driscoll referencing this New Yorker cover depicted below, linked (among other things) Rick Wilson’s post where he referenced to “the dozens of snarky articles, brutal editorial cartoons, late night comedy shows taking new and unaccustomed shots at Obama“.
Ed offers some insight of his own in his piece on his own page.
Yes, something is definitely going on here, something that we’re not accustomed to seeing in the mainstream media, particularly this close to a presidential election. Not quite sure what to make of it yet. But, maybe Peggy was onto something when she wrote this week, “The impact of the first debate is going to be bigger than we know.”
—
*I say this even though I don’t agree with his every point; just believe he offers some insightful observations.
**Could be.
RELATED: Liberals fret: Is Obama bored? Does he want a second term? Maybe not.
Obama said somewhere a day after the debate that it was not the real Mitt Romney he debated with; or a Mitt Romney who underwent a makeover. I thought it was a pathetic day after rejoinder but made me think nonetheless… that Obama underwent a chemical peel and some in the MSM finally awakened. That their innocence was breached in Denver and are now seeing the real Obama. I seriously doubt whether Obama can effectively debate or even argue with anyone. He can give lectures and soaring speeches just fine. But argue a point? I think he should plead a national security emergency, illness or another anniversary to skip the next debate. All Romney has to do is to bring up 2 or 3 facts per sentence and Obama will flounder.
I think it’s worse than you say. Not only does Barack not want to be President, the Democrats don’t want to be President. They didn’t want to primary Obama because the Democrats do not want to own the White House through what is coming over the next four years. So they are going to have Obama make a half-heated run at it, hand it to the Republicans and have the Republicans holding the bag for the 2014 or so collapse that is coming and have Hillary make a run for it in 2016.
But things have worked out a little worse than they have planned. I think Hillary’s political career is over:
“Lt. Col. Wood has told CBS News and congressional investigators that his 16-member team and a six-member State Department elite force called a Mobile Security Deployment team left Libya in August, just one month before the Benghazi assault. Wood says that’s despite the fact that US officials in Libya wanted security increased, not decreased.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57527150/congress-to-probe-security-flaws-for-libya-diplomats/
When I saw the adulation and fawning that surrounded Obama in the days just before the 2008 election, I thought something wasn’t right – that he didn’t understand the US presidency is a cross you nail yourself to, not a cup that runneth over, so to speak. McCain DID understand that, which was why I think he was the more fitted to be President.
From what you’re asserting, Obama is now paying the price for that realisation.
More like we are paying the price for that realization.
The Obamas don’t pay for anything.
It was bad – enough when Bill Clinton was accused of being in perpetual “campaign-mode” through much of his Presidency, but that was just for fund-raising purposes for himeslf, Hillary and the Party. He did govern.
Obama has his pension, the Presidency has made him a millionaire many times over, he will have SS protection for the rest of his life. The rich doners will buy him an mansion in Hawaii, what more will he need?
He simply does not have the skills or passion lead the country.
4 more years will doom this great country.
I have always thought that Obama doesn’t understand work. He seemed to believe that he could make pronouncements once he was president and that would make things happen without any further effort on his part. Example: “we will close Gitmo within one year from today.” he has operated this way from day one; on assumption that speeches translate into results. This is not how our president does his job. It explains why he doesn’t even bother to meet with congressional members of his OWN party much less the republicans. His belief system is obvious when you reflect on his behavior and his statement that the biggest failure of his first term was not telling a “story” to the American people. That is all he has done!
I agree with TexasMom2012.
Obama has been handed everything on a platter since he attended Occidental College at eighteen- he has never actually “worked” for or at anything. Everything has just been given to him.
The country has suffered because this is a man who just likes the title, the perks and the gifts from being President.
If he loses, Michelle and Valerie Jarrett will make his life miserable for a short time and he’ll have to tune them out, but he’ll get to live in a $300 million plus estate in Hawaii thanks to Penny Pritzker, play golf whenever he wants, give the occasional speech for hundreds of thousands of dollars and have synchophants kissing up to him daily. He’d like the life much better.
Liberals mocked and ridiculed Clint Eastwood’s empty chair monologue at the convention, but it seems to have resonated with the public much more than they thought possible. Kudos, Mr. Eastwood.
That New Yorker cover will really burn Mr. Obama’s soul if his handlers ever allow him to see it. Michael Ramirez does him one better though:
http://media.townhall.com/Townhall/Car/b/mrz100612dAPR20121005014512.jpg
Then, there’s this from one of the hacks at the Atlantic. Obama’s gentle, lightworker soul is torn because being the president involves killing people.
Ace responds, “Yes, when Obama came bounding out to the podium to brag he’d ordered the killing of Osama bin Ladin, I could see from his visibly bulging erection that he was a deeply empathetic man who cannot abide taking human life.”
He thought it would be easier.
The job BHO really wants is Jimmy Carter’s: a feeble old statesman to whom time will be sympathetic. In this way, BHO will have a soapbox for life from which he can pontificate and campaign ’till the cows come home and never be responsible for the consequences of the things he says.
I have thought this for a long time. He loves campaigning, loves the adulation of the crowds, loves traveling overseas, all that other stuff. But I really don’t think he likes being president….the actual daily work required in governing.
That’s what I’ve been afraid of, this whole time. I don’t think it can be averted. I think that the best r-R can do is have a ‘come to Jesus’ with the country about just how bad things really are, and proceed with the necessary painful reforms (budget cuts, entitlement cuts, return to free enterprise including business and bank failures, etc.) on that basis.
And I am by no means certain, that r-R will do that. I just think we have a slightly better chance of it with them, than with Obama – who deserves to inherit the collapse.
So for me, this election is a big lose-lose proposition because I see a crisis coming either way… and a *slight* win-win proposition because either I will get the guys who might do a better job with it, or the guys who fully deserve to have the crisis come crashing down on them.
ILC, the Demonrats see the collapse coming and they WANT to be in charge so they can declare a crisis, suspend the Constitution, and rule by executive fiat, as Obama has already shown a propensity for doing. It’s why Obama has spent the last four years throwing gasoline on our fiscal fire.
It was apparent in ’08 that Obama was not ready, or willing to do the job.
The time he left the podium and handed it off to Bill Clinton a coupe years
back should have clued the media in, but they had blinders on, willingly.
Here’s something provocative to consider. It’s probably wrong, but fun to think about.
What if Obama is self aware enough that he has the capacity to experience an epiphany and now realizes that his ideology is actually wrong? And that imposing it will make the country worse off financially and in terms of a loss of liberty. Or maybe he’s not ready to jettison the entire ideology, but his number crunchers are telling him that the true costs of Obamacare have been grossly understated, and he knows that if it survives his legacy will be destroyed?
All I know is that an empty chair would have put up a stronger defense to Romney’s brilliant and masterful attacks. Obama sure gave the impression that he was not willing to fight for his “accomplishments” and is ready to throw in the towel.
That is fun to think about Scott, but only in the same way it’s fun to daydream about winning the Powerball. This guy is a TRUE BELIEVER who thinks if we just try really, really hard and put the RIGHT people into the right offices we can actually make socialism work this time.
Just my $.02.
I think it’s simpler than that.
Obama is a narcissistic lazy ass who wants the trappings and perks of power, but none of the work.
The man is the ultimate Vice Chancellor of Diversity Programs. Or UN President. Or back-bench Senator. Any position with a title where he can sit back, enjoy the sinecure, pontificate, and never once have to dirty his hands with work.
I think it really is that simple. To ILC and V the K, I would say that it is indeed hard to even comprehend the fact, but yes, the Obama Party really IS stupid enough to believe that insane government spending, massive tax increases, and money-printing are the key to economic growth. They are incapable of learning from history because they believe that everyone who came before them was an idiot — including their fellow socialists.
There is a great line in Lake Wobegon Days that I think captures Obama beautifully:
In short, Obama is not intelligent. He simply has sat back and taken advantage of the willingness of other people to create the illusion that he is out of their own needs — and the fear of others who would disagree of being called racists. I do not think it too much of a stretch to say that the debate was the first time Obama has ever come up against someone who was both able to call him on his bullsh*t AND not cowering before his skin color.
So does Obama want the job? Absolutely he does. He’s a power-hungry little narcissist who wants to be in a position where he gets what he wants and makes everyone else miserable. The Presidency is perfect for that. But what we must also remember is that Obama is incapable of hiring anyone who is more intelligent or better at anything than he is — and that would include his Cabinet, his entire executive branch, AND his debate coach.
That is why Obama is so incompetent, and why his administration is so incompetent. It’s not as much a diabolical plan as it is the Peter Principle written large — an entire organization of people who have risen to the level of their incompetence, being led around by King Incompetent.
Romney, to put it bluntly, is the luckiest bastard around. ANYTHING he does in office will be better than Obama because Obama has been so darn bad at it. He has shown he is capable of hiring people who are better at things than he is, which will be a quantum leap in improvement for the executive branch versus Obama’s incompetent cronies. Best of all, by the end of this campaign, the mainstream media’s credibility will be in ruins, their status as Obama operatives with bylines laid out for everyone to see. In short, he has the chance to establish dominance in a way that no Republican ever has before, and I am warming more to the idea that he may actually take advantage of it.
But He seems to want like I want, say, to eat better, or to earn more money. Yes, I want those things… but I dislike the work involved.
So maybe both are true, that Obama does and doesn’t want the job. We’ll find out which side is stronger, from His next debate performance.
Obama wants the job, as long as he can keep on doing what he has been doing. He thinks he has to put out the same amount of effort that he did as a community organizer. IL t didn´t take much to walk into a bank and threaten a loan office to grant a home loan to an unqualified applicant, or face being picketed and accused of racial bias. That done he could go off and shoot a round of golf with his buddy, Rezko. golf is too bourgeois for Bill Ayers. Then at 4:00P.M. it´s caviar and champagne with Michelle and Valerie Jarrett.
Did Obama’s debate performance remind one of any number of lefty commenters here at GP? All he did was spout talking points, the way our lefty commenters do. And he got spanked when Mittens came at him with facts, which is what happens to lefties who do nothing but spout talking points on this forum.
At some point, Mittens could have said to Obama, “Now, Hush, adults are talking.”
In my household, we say Obama likes the job — he’s just not much interested in the work.
Funniest line from Eastwood’s speech: he says to the chair, “You can keep the plane…”
I see two things. One, Obama is not really much, if any, smarter than average, he has just been told most of his life [since he left Indonesia and a useful step-father] how wonderful he is just for being. I have seen zero evidence of him being more than ordinary. He is the usual end result of telling children that they’re all ‘winners’ and above average and building their self-esteem without requiring that they earn it.
Two, he has been surrounded by political bubble since at least his late undergrad years and has pretty much zero skills in practical politics.
So, he’s never had to work for anything, much. His “typical white” [i.e. racist] grandmother paid for him to go to private school. Who knows what scam he used at occidental? He glided through Columbia and Harvard Law as an affirmative action legacy. His political campaigns had the dirty work [removal of tough candidates] by others. His IL legislative record was built by a racist IL Senator who put Obama’s name on bills he had nothing to do with. And so on.
He couldn’t possibly have been expected by anyone who knew all this to be able to be a decent President. I presume, therefore, that those around him [Valerie Jarrett? others?] expected to prop him up long enough to rule through him.
I hope Mitt Romney does not get cocky. President Obama is virtually certain to prepare more for his next debate, on foreign policy IIRC.
It’s over.
out
ACTUALLY, I THINK I WAS THE FIRST TO REPORT THAT OBAMA DID NOT WANT THE JOB. http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/09/free_barack_elect_romney.html
You say he wants to lecture people without the responsibility of getting anything done? The perfect job for him is UN Secretary General. That way he can be the cosmopolitan he always wanted to be without actually knowing anything about other countries. He can make tons of money as a ‘public servant’ with all the perks he currently has as president and criticize the U.S. to his heart’s content because that’s expected of an international bureaucrat.
I get the sense Obama thought being President was similar to being Prom King, nothing more.
The thing that especially galls me now is his complete lack of accepting responsibility for his debate performance…. and it was his, alone – he’s the one who needed to be sure he was prepared and engaged in it. This is not the way to be a role model for the kids…
…What if Obama is self aware enough that he has the capacity to experience an epiphany and now realizes that his ideology is actually wrong? And that imposing it will make the country worse off financially and in terms of a loss of liberty. Or maybe he’s not ready to jettison the entire ideology, but his number crunchers are telling him that the true costs of Obamacare have been grossly understated, and he knows that if it survives his legacy will be destroyed? …
Comment by Scott — October 6, 2012 @ 12:41 pm – October 6, 2012
I actually think Obama is to some extent self-aware of his situation. But he is also a beta-male who realizes that he’s in this position because others around him for a quarter century have been willing to do the hard work and then give him the credit, because they saw Obama as the vessel to make their liberal dreams a reality. He couldn’t change his ideology, because that would also mean abandoning all those same people and having to (at least at the outset) do all the heavy lifting to craft a revised ideology and new support staff who would follow him. That’s alpha-male territory and Obama’s not doing that, ever.
Remember, the deal Obama signed up for when he ran and was elected was he wasn’t going to have to work in the White House. Through the use of Alisnky tactics, anyone opposing what Obama proclaimed he wanted would be branded a racist and written out of the political conversation, while Harry and Nancy got the legislation passed, they and the media then gave all the credit to Obama to further enhance his reputation as a demigod, and the cycle would then start anew.
What the president, Axelrod, Jarrett and the other never counted on was the Tea Party. The Alinsky strategy requires the target be personalized, but the Tea Party movement was leaderless. There was no one period to demonize and write out of the political conversation as a racist, so you ended up with Team Obama and the media attempting to brand millions of people as racists. A swing voter might fall for the claim if it’s some pol or pundit a thousand miles away they’ve never met who is being demonized by the Democrats and the big media; it’s quite another when they see their neighbors being branded as neo-Klansmen in print and on TV.
The Tea Party’s success, even as it was pilloried and its reputation tarnished, was to blow up Team Obama’s Plan A, and they had no Plan B, because any Plan B (or C, D and down the line) would require the guy in the Oval Office to actually work to get his legislation passed. That wasn’t the job description he got from David and Val on the presidential application form, and in Obama’s mind it’s still up to them and the president’s backers in the media to fix the situation, because he’s not changing his lifestyle.
I have thought for years, since the last election that Obama nor the people he listens to understand economics. That they assume its cyclical and that the economy would come roaring back no matter what they did, so they wanted to get as many perks out of it before the recovery that they could. And that wasa the reason to ram thru the stimulus package before the recovery started. That way when it happened they could show it was the stimulus that did it and then raise taxes. And now they are baffled that it just will not cooperate and go back to strong growth.
Obama reminds me of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones.
When Obama’s people turn on him, it will be ugly.
“I’m not a doctor, but I play one on T.V.”
For so very many liberals, everything begins and ends with the West Wing.
In 2004, John F’n Kerry had a mini-summit of the party intelligentsia come his Teresa Heinz mansion and they all played “let’s be a cabinet.” The whole cast was laughable in that everyone in the room was playing the role of actually having some sort of credentials.
So, we switch to Obambi and his not-quite-housebroken lap dog Biden and his inner circle of Emmanuel, Jarrett, Jones, Trumpka, Plouffe, Gibbs, Ayres and the Rolodex of Hollywood ultra-chic, radical nit-wits.
The result is “Let’s Pretend” on steroids. An iPod for the Queen of England featuring speeches by The Won. Magnificent. A world apology tour to put America in perspective with The Won’s view of the universe. The “how-low- should-I-go?” bows to just about anybody. Obama played his role to the hilt and then went golfing for relaxation and to escape the distraction of having to actually commit and decide and be President.
Andrea Mitchell snarkily asked John Sununu about how much more preparation Obama would do for the next debate.
Sununu replied: “When you’re not that bright you can’t get better prepared.”
So, it turns out that in Obama, what you see is what he’s got and there ain’t no more. Love him or leave him, the emperor has no clothes.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Obama doesn’t want to be re-elected. Maybe he has a REASON. Maybe he knows things are going to get REALLY bad and he doesn’t want to be around to get blamed.
No, Obama doesn’t like the responsiblities of being President; nor did he have any idea of what all would be involved – Am I the only one who remembers his complaint within the first month of living within the “bubble”? As if he thought that the President could just go out for a midnight stroll about town. Jeez, what a loser Obama is!
The answer has arrived.
I thought of eight years of the media and the Obama Party going after George W. Bush every waking moment and about passed out from laughing over that line about “deference”.
Recall when Obama had a surrogate fly the trial balloon that we ought to have TWO ”presidents?
One was to be the ”front man.”
He (Obama) would give speeches, meet the supporters, raise the cash.
The other one would be an administrator.
LOL!
Obama gets his four years without impeachment and all the celebrity and golf and jet-setting he could ever want. Clinton and Carter have been consumed with their legacy, but Obama just doesn’t care. He is a legend in his own mind and doesn’t have to worry about anything. If he is defeated, he can always hang around white liberal money and get lauded and applauded and acclaimed and proclaimed.
Name another four-year-wonder President in our history who got more for himself. Obama is a shooting star and we will be bathed in the glow of his tail-end for many years to come. The joke is on us and Obama can dance away without a care in the world. Everything negative was caused Bush and racism.
Mike F. @5: Obama will not get lifelong protection. Congress changed the law back n ’97, and Clinton was the last president to enjoy that perk. After that, it’s only 10 years. Not to mention Barry and his wife made quite a bit of money before the election.
I’d like to disagree with those here who claimed that Barry isn’t that intelligent. He is, but it’s all “book smarts” as we said when I was a lad. More specifically, he’s all “book smarts” and no “street smarts.”
Also, I think he believes he’s the right guy with the right plan, and he hates being lectured or contradicted. Look at the face he made when Romney pushed back during the debate. Then go back and watch the video when Ryan schooled Barry on the budget. Same damn look.
… I keep hearing Jon Lovitz (as Michael Dukakis) saying “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy!” 🙂