Barack Obama Isn’t the President, but He Plays One on TV

posted at 9:16 am on November 30, 2009 by Howard Portnoy
[ National Defense ]    printer-friendly

I frankly can’t remember at this point whether this ever happened to me personally, but one of the supposed quintessential moments of an American childhood education is having a report due at school and creating a terrific cover to compensate for the absence of serious content. I know Barack Obama was reputedly a whiz in school — according at least to the fragments of his educational past he has been willing to share — but I’ll bet you he made plenty of snazzy covers. My hunch is based on the fact he is still doing it.

Obama has a really big report due on Tuesday. In it, he will tell the class (the nation as a whole) and his teacher (those of us who will determine his fate in 2012 by voting our conscience) how he intends to prosecute the war in Afghanistan going forward — whether he will accede to his general’s demands for more troops or to his party’s to get out of Dodge. It has taken him a ridiculous amount of time to research his topic; he’s gotten extension on top of extension. I’m guessing his report will earn him a C- at best. All his reports seem to.

But he’s designed a swell cover for it. It’ll be decorated with a backdrop of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Maybe, if he can borrow a uniform, he can even be in costume when he delivers the report.

Obama’s abiding concern with the covers of his reports, rather than the information contained within them, is one of the reasons he continues to fail as a leader. He is never content to speak to the American people one-on-one, sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office. He always needs to be before a crowd (a joint session of Congress will generally do nicely) and with plenty of atmosphere to show he is for real.

But the simple fact is that he is not for real. If he were, he wouldn’t need the pomp and circumstance, the artifice to sell his ideas. The plain truth is he has no ideas. He does what he does — everything he does — for precisely two reasons: (1) to get people to like him (to be the most popular kid in class); (2) to get reelected (to be promoted to the next grade).

Ask any C student, and they’ll tell you that this is a recipe for failure. The only way for Obama to get ahead at this point is to start doing his homework. I just don’t think he has it in him.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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