Ineffectual, invisible, unable to honour pledges and now blamed for letting Gaddafi off the hook. Why Obama’s gone from ‘Yes we can’ to ‘Er, maybe we shouldn’t'...After laying out a litany of presidential fecklessness and detachment she summarizes with this observation:
All of which means that it is starting to look as if Obama and the Democratic Party have but one aim in mind for the rest of this presidential term: to get elected for a second. That means not doing anything that might upset any number of special interest or niche groups, which in effect means not doing very much at all.And closes with this:
Yes we can was a noble and powerful mantra which secured for Barack Obama the leadership of the free world. Those that can, do. It is time he started doing.Mr. Obama certainly does have a very diffident leadership style. He seems to want to stay out of every battle while encouraging his troops in Congress and the media to slug it out with the Republican opposition. It's a case of "Let's you and him fight". The strategy appears to be to stay out of the visible fray so that nothing bad that comes of it will cling to him, but I don't think it's working.
Even the AP, one of his biggest supporters in the media, is beginning to lob darts at the President for his failure to exert leadership.
Perhaps the strategy is not deliberate but rather a consequence of Mr. Obama's temperament. Perhaps he just doesn't like to get drawn into political street fights when he has others who'll do the fighting for him.
Or perhaps Shukas is right and the community organizer is just not cut out to do the job he sought in 2008.