Roverron
11-01-2013, 09:57 PM
11/01/2013
America functioning without a president
By Victor Davis Hanson
We are learning whether the United States really needs a president. Barack Obama has become a mere figurehead, who gives speeches few listen to anymore, issues threats that scare fewer and makes promises almost no one believes he will keep. Yet America continues on, despite the fact that the foreign and domestic policies of Obama are unraveling, in a manner unusual even for star-crossed presidential terms.
Abroad, American policy in the Middle East is leaderless and in shambles after the Arab Spring – we’ve had the Syrian fiasco and bloodbath, leading from behind in Libya all the way to Benghazi, and the non-coup, non-junta in Egypt. This administration has managed to unite existential Shiite and Sunni enemies in a shared dislike of the United States. While Iran follows the Putin script from Syria, Israel seems ready to pre-empt its nuclear program, and Obama still mumbles empty “game changers” and “red line” threats of years past.
We’ve gone from reset with Russia to Putin as the playmaker of the Middle East. The Persian Gulf sheikdoms are now mostly anti-American. The leaders of Germany and the people of France resent having their private communications tapped by Obama. – the constitutional lawyer and champion of universal human rights. Angela Merkel long ago grasped that Obama would rather fly across the Atlantic to lobby for a Chicago Olympic Games – or tap her phone – than sit through a 20th anniversary commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
At home, the signature Affordable Care Act is proving its sternest critics prescient. The mess can best be summed up by Republicans’ being demonized for trying to delay or defund Obamacare – after the president chose not to implement elements of his own law – followed immediately by congressional Democrats seeking to parrot the Republicans. So are the democrats followers of Ted Cruz or Obama? Is Obama following Cruz?
The problem is not just that all the president’s serial assurances about Obamacare proved untrue – premiums and deductibles will go up, many will lose their coverage and their doctors, new taxes will be needed, care will be curtailed, sign-ups are nearly impossible and businesses will be less, not more, competitive – but that no one should ever have believed they could possibly be true unless in our daily lives we usually get more and better stuff at lower cost.
Three considerations are keeping the U.S. afloat without an active president. First, many working Americans have tuned the president out and simply go on about their business. If gas and oil leases have been curtailed on Federal lands, there is record production on private land. Farmers are producing huge harvests and receiving historically high prices. There is as yet no French or Chinese Silicon Valley. In other words, after five years of stagnation, half the public more or less ignores the Obama administration and plods on.
Second, the other half of Americans gladly accept that Obama is an Iconic rather than a serious president. Given his emblematic status as the nation’s first African-American president and his efforts to craft a vast coalition of those with supposed grievances against the majority, he will always have a strong base of supporters. With huge increases in federal redistributive support programs, and about half the population not paying federal income taxes, Obama is seen as the protector of the noble deserving.
In other words, the presidency has become a virtual office. Almost half the people do not mind, and those that do just plod onward.
America functioning without a president
By Victor Davis Hanson
We are learning whether the United States really needs a president. Barack Obama has become a mere figurehead, who gives speeches few listen to anymore, issues threats that scare fewer and makes promises almost no one believes he will keep. Yet America continues on, despite the fact that the foreign and domestic policies of Obama are unraveling, in a manner unusual even for star-crossed presidential terms.
Abroad, American policy in the Middle East is leaderless and in shambles after the Arab Spring – we’ve had the Syrian fiasco and bloodbath, leading from behind in Libya all the way to Benghazi, and the non-coup, non-junta in Egypt. This administration has managed to unite existential Shiite and Sunni enemies in a shared dislike of the United States. While Iran follows the Putin script from Syria, Israel seems ready to pre-empt its nuclear program, and Obama still mumbles empty “game changers” and “red line” threats of years past.
We’ve gone from reset with Russia to Putin as the playmaker of the Middle East. The Persian Gulf sheikdoms are now mostly anti-American. The leaders of Germany and the people of France resent having their private communications tapped by Obama. – the constitutional lawyer and champion of universal human rights. Angela Merkel long ago grasped that Obama would rather fly across the Atlantic to lobby for a Chicago Olympic Games – or tap her phone – than sit through a 20th anniversary commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
At home, the signature Affordable Care Act is proving its sternest critics prescient. The mess can best be summed up by Republicans’ being demonized for trying to delay or defund Obamacare – after the president chose not to implement elements of his own law – followed immediately by congressional Democrats seeking to parrot the Republicans. So are the democrats followers of Ted Cruz or Obama? Is Obama following Cruz?
The problem is not just that all the president’s serial assurances about Obamacare proved untrue – premiums and deductibles will go up, many will lose their coverage and their doctors, new taxes will be needed, care will be curtailed, sign-ups are nearly impossible and businesses will be less, not more, competitive – but that no one should ever have believed they could possibly be true unless in our daily lives we usually get more and better stuff at lower cost.
Three considerations are keeping the U.S. afloat without an active president. First, many working Americans have tuned the president out and simply go on about their business. If gas and oil leases have been curtailed on Federal lands, there is record production on private land. Farmers are producing huge harvests and receiving historically high prices. There is as yet no French or Chinese Silicon Valley. In other words, after five years of stagnation, half the public more or less ignores the Obama administration and plods on.
Second, the other half of Americans gladly accept that Obama is an Iconic rather than a serious president. Given his emblematic status as the nation’s first African-American president and his efforts to craft a vast coalition of those with supposed grievances against the majority, he will always have a strong base of supporters. With huge increases in federal redistributive support programs, and about half the population not paying federal income taxes, Obama is seen as the protector of the noble deserving.
In other words, the presidency has become a virtual office. Almost half the people do not mind, and those that do just plod onward.