From almost the first year of Obama’s tenure in office, conservative pundits have been wondering speculating that Barack Obama doesn’t really like being president. Sure, he likes the perks, but he doesn’t seem to care about the responsibilities of the office he worked so hard in 2007 & 2008 to attain.
With the release last month of Bob Woodward’s book, The Price of Politics, a non-conservative added his voice to this conservative consensus, with the one-time Washington Post reporter noting the incumbent’s virtual indifference to his executive obligations. Today, yet another liberal who cut his teeth at the Post scores Obama for his absence of passion and empathy. Richard Cohen does see in Obama’s face the “shock and indignation,” the “sorrow and sympathy” he saw in Robert F. Kennedy when that idealist Democrat toured Appalachia and Mississippi:
Instead, I see a failure to embrace all sorts of people, even members of Congress and the business community. I see diffidence, a reluctance to close. I see a president for whom Afghanistan is not just a war but a metaphor for his approach to politics: He approved a surge but also an exit date. Heads I win, tails you lose.
. . . .The crowd adored Obama, although not as much as I think he adored himself.
. . . .
Obama never espoused a cause bigger than his own political survival. This is the gravamen of the indictment from the left, particularly certain African Americans. They are right. Young black men fill the jails and the morgues, yet Obama says nothing. Bobby Kennedy showed his anger, his impatience, his stunned incredulity at the state of black America. Obama shows nothing.
Read the whole thing. And yet all too often, Mr. Cohen’s colleagues in the media have been billing Mr. Obama as more empathetic than Mitt Romney. Cohen still plans on voting for Mr. Obama, but “with regret.” If a liberal pundit is less than lukewarm in his support for Mr. Obama, how must centrist voters feel about the man they decided to back in 2008 because of his “post-partisan” appeal?
This is why I’m glad I grew up in a constitutional monarchy (Australia). Sensible, rational Prime Ministers know there is (nominally at least) an earthly authority above them to which they owe a moral and philosophical allegiance and which cannot be bribed or swayed, a fact which drives the current miserable failures (who lack any sense of morality or higher philosophy beyond their selfish political creed) to desire a Republic in place of what we have.
Now this is not in itself a bad thing, especially when that Republic is built on a sound moral and philosophical base (as the US has hitherto been), but for the last twelve years and more it has been sought (in Australia) by the wrong people for the wrong reasons, either because they imagine themselves choosing a powerless ceremonial President or because they imagine themselves BEING a powerful executive President, with conveniently uncodified if not actually unfettered powers (possibly with no term restrictions), selected by a Parliament which they would by various artifices seek to dominate or by a populace which had been thoroughly seduced by bread and circuses.
I wish your nation luck, and the collective wisdom not to re-elect a man who quite possibly sees himself in the latter role for another four years. To put it in religious terms, the Presidency should be a cross you take up, not a bottomless gilded cup from which you endlessly and rapaciously drink. I suspect even Mitt Romney, Mormon though he is, would agree with the principle behind that metaphor.