It is becoming apparent for all to see that a man who made his
name as a community organizer does not have the skills to be
president of these United States. Maybe he could develop the
requisite skills as a governor. Possibly, he could develop such
skills were he to sit in the Senate for a couple of terms. Yet
there are delicate sensitivities: the ability to listen, to learn
from mistakes, to stick by your guns, occasionally to remain
reticent. These are the fundamentals of a leader, and President
Barack Obama has demonstrated that he lacks all of them, most
notably reticence. I now think it is clear even to Official
Washington that President Obama is the worst president of modern
times. President Jimmy Carter is redeemed.
Prof. Alvin Stephen Felzenberg, the author of The Leaders We
Deserved (and a Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Rating
Game (reviewed in this issue by John R. Coyne, Jr.) had ranked
Jimmy Carter near the bottom of American presidents, along with the
likes of James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, and Franklin Pierce.
Certainly, Carter ranked at the bottom among modern presidents, but
that was until the Prophet Obama rose up among us. Now Professor
Felzenberg has good news for Carterites everywhere: at Emory
University’s famous Carter Center, in Plains, Georgia, where that
13-foot Styrofoam peanut still stands shabby and forlorn before
Davis E-Z Shop, at the few remaining Carter fan clubs across the
land frequented by eccentrics and university professors. Jimmy was
dreadful, as this intellectual review made clear at the time, but
Obama is the worst.
Jimmy relied on stimulus policies and other Keynesian mysteries
made complicated in a way that only he could make complicated. Yet
that was before Ronald Reagan showed us the way through the
economic Gobi Desert of stagflation. There is reason to believe
that Jimmy might have learned from Reagan. Certainly Bill Clinton
did, with Newt Gingrich’s Congress to keep him honest. Jimmy’s
Federal Reserve brought us inflation, high interest rates, and a
recession. Nonetheless, Jimmy recognized that something was not
working. He installed Paul Volcker, and half the problem was on its
way to resolution. He lectured us against our “inordinate fear of
communism” but when he noticed Communists engaged in proxy wars all
over Africa and Soviet troops in Afghanistan, he “done woke up.” He
forsook appeasement. He auspicated what was to become Reagan’s arms
race, the race Reagan won that ended the Cold War without firing a
shot in anger. Even Carter’s treatment of Iran became for him a
teachable moment, as we now say. He began deregulation.
Obama is as incompetent as Carter but he shows no capacity to
learn. Carter became the first ex-president to speak ill of a
sitting president from foreign soil. Obama became the first
president to speak ill of America from foreign soil, and he has
done so repeatedly. For him America is a failed state. He has come
up with no new policies, but he has tried many that failed for
Carter and for Lyndon Johnson. He has pronounced them a success.
Even as the economy weakens he calls them a success, and meanwhile
the nation faces a budget overhang of colossal proportions and an
entitlement catastrophe.
PEOPLE EXPLAIN OBAMA by saying he is a Marxist, a socialist, or
a Muslim. Or perhaps he is a Muslim Marxist socialist. It really
does not matter. I shall accept his word that he is a Christian of
modest statist disposition. What matters is that, unlike Carter, he
has not learned from his mistakes. In fact, he is a world apart
from former presidents. Consider Franklin Roosevelt. He read his
bills before signing them. The Social Security Act was fewer than
40 pages. He read it, and Congress read it. Today’s financial bill
and the health care bill both weigh in at more than 2,000 pages. It
is inconceivable that more than a handful in Congress read it, and
it is impossible that Obama did. The press chides Congress, but it
has yet to chide Obama. Yet in each bill there are secret passages
offering special favors to his special interests. It will take
years to weed the mischief out of these bills.
This past August, when at a White House dinner he solemnized the
opening of Ramadan, Obama leaped right in to endorse the building
of a mosque at Ground Zero. He-a man who has shown no religious
fervor during his time in the White House-let out a ringing defense
of religious liberty and tolerance. Of a sudden, he was at the
center of a growing national controversy and he single-handedly
made it worse. It put me in mind of his inability to defuse the
controversy over health care. He could have relented, as opposition
to health care grew to become the majority position. Any sensible
president would have settled for some sort of health care
compromise, but not the community-organizer-turned-president. He
wanted it all. He lunged on, and created among the electorate a row
over national health care that divided the nation, and put some of
us in mind of a civil war that continues to rage. What is more, he
imperiled his party’s margins in both houses. By this fall they
will be gone in the House of Representatives and possibly in the
Senate.
Notwithstanding his apparent personal insouciance toward
religion, he made it clear that the mosque should be built. Who
cares about the sensibilities of the loved ones of the 3,000
victims? Or for that matter, of the 68 percent of the American
people who according to a CNN poll oppose the mosque? Then, in less
than a day, he made things worse. While on a swing through Florida,
he claimed that the night before he had not been speaking “on the
wisdom” of building the mosque. He was merely commenting on the
constitutional right to build the mosque and to practice one’s
religion. A right “that dates back,” the prof allowed, “to our
founding. That’s what our country is about.” Blah, blah, blah-the
community-organizer-turned-lecturer at the University of Chicago
could not resist. Jimmy would have had the political skills to
remain mum on the mosque question. He, for a certitude, would not
have contradicted himself overnight. Of course, Jimmy was not a
community-organizer-turned-president. He had been a governor and a
peanut farmer. He had real-world experience.
Now Obama had a red-hot national controversy on his hands to go
along with all his other controversies. It is somewhat like the
controversy he created over Professor Henry Louis Gates when he
pronounced the Cambridge police’s reaction to Gates’s truculence
“stupid.” Or when Obama barged into the Arizona immigration pother.
He cannot resist showing the world how smart he is, but at what
cost? Every Democrat battling a tight race will be called upon to
answer questions about the mosque. It has become an issue even in
remote places such as Nevada. There the Senate majority leader,
Harry Reid, fighting for his seat against a Tea Partier, Sharron
Angle, has come out against the president. He announced that it is
not a question of right but a question of prudence. He says the
mosque should be built elsewhere. How many other Democrats will
join him? This could develop into a major rebellion against
President Obama’s leadership. It could be the beginning of the end
of his presidency.
PRESIDENT OBAMA represents the leadership of the sterile elite
discussed by Angelo Codevilla in our summer issue. His weird
lectures play at the University of Chicago or in the communities he
has organized in Chicago, but not among the mainstream of the
American electorate. He has united the conservatives and
independents in opposition. As Angelo says, he represents the
leadership of the Ruling Class. It is not the leadership of the
consensus of the American people. That consensus was established in
the 1980s by Ronald Reagan. The Gingrich Congress continued it, and
George W. Bush abused it. Yet it remained, and now is strong again.
It is for limited government, lower taxes, and an end to social
engineering.
So what will happen to our worst modern president? Whatever the
election holds this fall, he still will have two years in the White
House. It is my conclusion that they will be very happy years for
the Prophet Obama. He will continue doing what he does best,
organizing the community. That is to say, he will be running for
president but his community will be smaller. The Democrats are
growing restive. My guess is that he will soon be opposed for the
nomination and his first opponent will be Hillary. Already, I am
told, her friends are spreading the word, “make way for Hillary.”
Every mistake by the Prophet will be noted. People will peel away.
Already Rahm Emanuel has been unusually quiet. Hillary will declare
sometime in 2011. Just this August the New York Times ran
a ridiculous report on how Bill is on the campaign trail pulling
for candidates.
It will be a rerun of the 2008 primary season, which by
hindsight looks very close. Yet look again. Hillary always has a
solid 40 percent or more of the vote against her. My guess is she
will lose the nomination. Once again the Democrats will nominate a
community organizer. The question looms: whom will the Republicans
nominate? But the good news is that Jimmy Carter can no longer be
classified the worst president in modern times. He is only the
worst ex-president in modern times, and he will hold that title
until 2013 or perhaps 2014, by which time ex-president Obama will
have had time to really show his stuff.
