Barack Obama as the country’s new Herbert Hoover

Herbert Hoover, Wikipedia Commons

Walter Russell Mead, a Democrat who voted for Obama in 08 and was on board in 09 to claim the new president had earned the Nobel Peace Prize, asserts in The American Interest: “The Obama Administration’ is on the road to becoming the most anticlimactic expression known to man.”

But the real shocker in Mead’s post is a couple of paragraphs down when, after noting the euphoric media’s comparisons of Obama to predecessors Lincoln, FDR, Carter, Reagan, etc., the worthy foreign affairs professor suggests that what the country really wanted when they elected Obama was another Bill Clinton. Imagine that.

Read it for yourself:

President Obama swept into office on a tide of Lincoln and FDR comparisons.  A giddy press corps swooned every time he spoke; his cabinet was a ‘team of rivals’ like Lincoln’s.  His mandate, the press said, was to be a transformative president, like FDR.  The more sober said he would be a Democratic Reagan: just as the Californian led the country into a generation of conservative politics, so President Obama would lead Democrats into permanent majoritarian status.

This was the consensus of the mainstream press; it was also the opinion of the President’s inner circle.  Based on that consensus, the President made the decisions which, if he fails of re-election in 2012, history will likely regard as the fatal mistakes of his term: he went along with the flawed and failed stimulus program the Democratic Congress put forward, and he pushed forward on health care reform before economic recovery was assured.

In reality, President Obama’s mandate was not to be a transformer; he was elected to conserve.  In 2008 the independents who elected Obama by deserting the GOP were tired of the drama of the Bush administration and they were terrified by the financial panic that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers.  What they wanted was another Bill Clinton: a calm and soothing figure who would feel their pain and tweak the New Deal/Great Society state model to make it a little more user-friendly and a little less bankruptcy prone.

Mead concludes that Obama is most likely to be remembered as a second Hoover:

Midway through 2010, President Obama looked less like Lincoln redux and more like a Clinton manqué.  By the end of that year, the penultimate dissing of the President began; friends and foes began to ask whether President Obama might not be, gasp, the new Jimmy Carter.

Instapundit maestro Glenn Reynolds has been saying for some time that from where he sits, the Carter comparison looks like a best case scenario for this President.  For all our sakes, I hope Glenn is wrong, but increasingly there’s another specter frightening the Obama administration:  the ghost of Herbert Hoover.

Mead goes on to demonstrate the many commonalities between Obama and Hoover and in his concluding remarks almost incidentally mentions the five – the FIVE – shooting wars on the current president’s hands “in Afghanistan, tribal Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and now, apparently, Yemen.”

Read more.

About Afghanistan: Let’s Rebuild Our Own Country Rather than Ravage Another One

Commander-in-Chief Obama

When the extreme left first claimed Barack Obama as its own, it was mainly because he was able to deceive a large number of Americans into believing that he actually voted against the Iraq War Resolution. I’ve been repeatedly shocked by well-educated, upscale Democrats among my acquaintances who swallowed that story. Anyone who bothered to check Obama’s background at all is aware that he was not a member of the U.S. Senate when that vote was taken.

His bragging points came from bravely standing up as an Illinois state legislator to make an anti-war speech to a small crowd at a local peace rally.

Lefties continue to spew venom at anyone who voted for the above resolution for whatever reason, which means they hate a large number of U.S. Senators. In the Left's view only Obama is sacred, and he elevated himself in their opinion even higher when he opposed the surge that finally brought the Iraq War under control.

This week the anti-war presidential candidate (who very cleverly qualified his position as not being against all wars) has announced the deployment of 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

Heidi Li Feldman reminds readers of the occasional practice by previous presidents of using war to jumpstart the economy. But then the Obama Adminstration wouldn’t do that, would it?

Feldman asks:

“How will be know whether the build-up in Afghanistan addresses national security (we have the same Secretary of Defense we had under the George W. Bush administration) or whether it is serving as a locus of unquestionable spending, rather like Operation Desert Shield during the George H.W. Bush term or Grenada during the Reagan years?”

Read more:

Obama Delivers: “The Picture Counts. Staging Matters. Pretty Words Seduce”

Democrats began to notice during the last presidential campaign that the Republicans were better at such things as stagecraft than they were, although the knack for cleverly framing their leader backfired on the GOP with its infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner high above the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln when Dubya prematurely proclaimed victory in Iraq.

This time around the Repubs have struggled to compete with the Dems in staging events and theatrical performances. From Berlin’s Victory Column to Denver’s Invesco Field, Obama has proven his rock star status before hundreds of thousands of adoring fans.

In today’s Boston Globe, Joan Vennochi reaches back to the Reagan years to find a comparable political phenomenon:

“DENVER MORNING IN America. Destiny in Denver.

"The high point for Democrats was Reaganesque, as Barack Obama accepted his party's nomination to run for president. An inspirational video. American flags. Fireworks. Red, white, and blue glitter cascading through Denver's thin air. Obama, Joe Biden, and their families, audaciously framed against a set designed to look like the White House.

“Obama spoke about the promise of the future and wrapped up with the history that makes his quest so poignant. Referring to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the famous "I Have a Dream" speech delivered 45 years ago, Obama noted that King's listeners did not hear anger; instead, they heard "the preacher " say that "in America, our destiny is inextricably linked."

“It was a powerful message. Ronald Reagan would approve.”

Vennochi summed up Obama’s acceptance speech and predicted the Republican counter attack:

“Obama made many promises in his speech, including pledges to launch new programs to solve complex problems, as well as cut taxes for the middle class. Republicans will do their own math. They will conclude the Obama platform doesn't add up and write it off as more of the same expensive, foolish, and failed liberal idealism. Their problem will be voters who want to believe in it, because it feels so good, especially in tough economic times.
“But, how does McCain reclaim the all-important feel-good mantle the Obama campaign stole from Reagan?”

Vennochi concluded:

"He {McCain] can try to unwrap the gauzy story spun by Obama at Invesco Field. But if all McCain does is attack, he becomes the candidate of gloom and doom, a fateful designation Republicans pin on losing opponents.

“In Denver, the Democrats wrapped themselves in flags and admirals, and Obama delivered the poetry that got him to this improbable point.

‘"We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy,’he said.

"But Obama also flaunted an impressive understanding of the party of Reagan.

“The picture counts. The staging matters. Pretty words seduce.”

(What Vennochi failed to mention in this op-ed piece was McCain’s game-changing pick of Alaska Gov. Sara Palin as his running mate announced the morning after Obama’s performance in Denver.)

To read Vennochi’s op-ed column in its entirety, go here.

The Conservatives’ Veneration of Masochism

It’d been awhile since I last gave Margaret Thatcher a thought, although I may have caught a glimpse of her on TV at Reagan’s funeral (See her on YouTube from this site). Recently, her name has been popping up in the US presidential campaign in comparison to Hillary Clinton. In one of Giulani’s bizarre, convoluted attempts to ally himself with a conservative stalwart, he loudly asserted that “Clinton was no Iron Lady.”

Amplifying Giuliani’s sentiments, an article by Peggy Noonan appeared yesterday in the WSJ Opinion Journal titled: Things Are Tough All Over, But Mrs. Clinton is no Iron Lady.

According to Noonan’s detailed, rhapsodic description of Thatcher, we can hope that Clinton will never earn that designation. Here’s a sample of what Noonan considers meritorious about England’s one and only female PM:

In fact, she wasn't so much a woman as a lady. I remember a gentleman who worked with her speaking of her allure, how she'd relax after a late-night meeting and you'd walk by and catch just the faintest whiff of perfume, smoke and scotch. She worked hard and was tough. One always imagined her lightly smacking some incompetent on the head with her purse, for she carried a purse, as a lady would. She is still tough. A Reagan aide told me that after she was incapacitated by a stroke she flew to Reagan's funeral in Washington, went through the ceremony, flew with Mrs. Reagan to California for the burial, and never once on the plane removed her heels. That is tough.

Wow! Now that’s impressive: a woman in her old age so adapted to enduring the torture of high heels for the sake of appearance, that she won’t take them off and treat herself to a few minutes’ relief during a plane trip.

Makes you wonder if conservatives, along with sexists in general, consider masochism an admirable trait for women in leadership positions. That would explain their rabid defense of eight men (with the exception of Richardson) personally attacking Clinton in the October 30th debate and wondering why anyone would question their right to do so.

Aren't women supposed to suffer in silence?

Noonan did jog my memories of Thatcher’s tenure as PM and my impression of her at the time. I recall feeling sad and disappointed that one of the few world leaders of my gender would try so hard to outdo the most mindless, intemperate macho males in the universe: "Here I am ready for war at a moment's notice."

Recall that Newsweek’s headlines in the spring of 1982 declared, “The Empire Strikes Back” when Thatcher sent a naval task force to recapture the Falkland Islands that Argentina had claimed since the 1830s.

Thatcher, one of the longest serving PMs in England’s history, was eventually ousted by an internal party ballot over concerns including her tax policies, high interest rates, divisions within the Conservative Party, and European integration.

Wikipedia states:

Her {Thatcher’s} distaste for consensus politics and willingness to override colleagues' opinions, including that of Cabinet, emboldened the backlash against her when it did occur. Others cited her strong uncompromising personality. The dislike for Thatcher that had previously come primarily from her political opponents was now being expressed by some members of her own party.

The obvious differences between Thatcher and Clinton are even more reason to elect Clinton as president. Clinton’s judgment, ability to get things done, competence, leadership skills, wisdom, knowledge, and experience have all been well demonstrated over the years.

Thatcher may have had little in common with Hillary Clinton, but in reviewing the biography of England’s first woman PM, I was suddenly struck by how many traits she shared with our current president, also noted throughout his tenure for his disdain for consensus politics, his willingness to override colleagues’ opinions, and his uncompromising personality that many have described as his stubborn streak.

And about that Newseek headline, "The Empire Strikes Back," Dubya and cohorts have also emulated Thatcher’s leadership by attempting to build the empirical presidency — the US Constitution be damned.