Barack Obama has trouble commanding respect.
By JAMES TARANTO
So this is what we have come to: the president of the United States, and not just any president but the World's Greatest Orator, standing in the White House petulantly reproving his partisan opponents and imploring his supporters: "If you want a balanced approach to reducing the deficit, let your member of Congress know."
Three cheers to the U.S. Postal Service, which by all accounts has dealt with the ensuing flood of mail without missing a step.
Earlier yesterday, as National Journal reports, Obama "let his frustration over the stalled debt talks seep into an address on Latino issues, confessing that he'd like to 'bypass Congress and change the laws on my own' ":
He told the National Council of La Raza, "Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you."
But, he had to concede, "that's not how our system works."
Being a dictator is a relatively easy job. Even junior tyrants like Bashar al-Assad and Kim Jong Il can do it. All a dictator needs to be effective is the ability to instill fear. An effective democratic leader needs to be able to command respect.
Obama has a problem commanding the respect of his adversaries. Immediately after his address to the nation last night, Speaker John Boehner went on TV with a response. Fox News Channel's Bret Baier reported that apart from the State of the Union, it was the first such response from the opposing party to a presidential address since 2007, when George W. Bush gave a speech on Iraq.
And Boehner mocked Obama's rhetoric: "The president has often said we need a 'balanced' approach--which in Washington means we spend more, you pay more." One might observe that the partisan sniping was mutual. But the president is the higher-status player. He diminishes himself by punching down.
Obama has turned into President Rodney Dangerfield: He doesn't get no respect. (For readers too young to remember Dangerfield, that's not litotes. He used the double negative as an intensifier.) "So we're left with a stalemate," he said last night. "At least that's what Michelle tells me."
OK, we made up that punch line. But it's true that lately Obama hasn't been getting much respect from his friends, either. "I think it would do this country a good deal of service if people started thinking about candidates out there to begin contrasting a progressive agenda as opposed to what Obama believes he's doing," Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent self-styled socialist from Vermont said last week. John Nichols of The Nation, a hard-left magazine, cites a CNN poll that finds this feeling increasingly common among Obama's base:
The number of Americans who say they disapprove of the president's performance because he is not liberal enough has doubled since May. "Drill down into that number and you'll see signs of a stirring discontent on the left," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland, who explains that, "Obama's approval rating among liberals has dropped to the lowest point in his presidency, and roughly one in four Americans who disapprove of him say they feel that way because he has not been liberal enough, a new high for that measure."
"What evidence do we have that Obama knows what he's doing?" former Enron adviser Paul Krugman asked last week. A stopped clock is right twice a day, but Krugman then asked: "When has Obama given progressives any reason to believe they can trust him?"
That may explain Obama's unwillingness to compromise in the debt debate. "Nobody today is talking about tax increases except Barack Obama," CNN's Gloria Borger noted last night. Reports over the weekend had congressional Republicans and Democrats negotiating for an agreement to cut spending without raising taxes. By butting in with his demand for tax increases, Obama only prolongs the standoff. Why? There's one logical explanation: to pander to his left-wing base.
Obama's position is as brittle as it is rigid. It's true that some polls suggest the public is more inclined to blame congressional Republicans than the president if the dispute remains unresolved and the results are disastrous. But Obama would have to be delusional to think that presiding over such a disaster would enhance his re-election prospects.
Fox Business's Charlie Gasparino reports that "administration officials have told bankers that the administration will not allow a default to happen." Our guess is that Obama will end up signing whatever last-minute agreement Congress comes up with. As with last December's deal to avert the Bush tax increases, he will bitterly protest, disclaiming responsibility for the outcome. He will maintain the left's sympathy, but respect, once lost, is hard to recover.
A couple of other points on the Obama speech: The president said he rejected Boehner's plan that "would temporarily extend the debt ceiling" because it "would force us to once again face the threat of default just six months from now." Today the White House issued a written veto threat. Yet last night he praised Congress for raising the debt ceiling 18 times during Ronald Reagan's presidency--once every 5.3 months on average.
In demanding an extension that would carry him through next year's election, Obama is departing from the precedent he cites in support of his position. His anxiousness at the prospect of another such confrontation reflects his political weakness in this one.
Toward the end of his speech, the president threw in some of the sort of airy pieties to which he owes his status as World's Greatest Orator:
America, after all, has always been a grand experiment in compromise. As a democracy made up of every race and religion, where every belief and point of view is welcomed, we have put to the test time and again the proposition at the heart of our founding: that out of many, we are one. We've engaged in fierce and passionate debates about the issues of the day, . . . from slavery to war, from civil liberties to questions of economic justice.
Wait a minute, he's citing slavery as an example of "fierce and passionate debates" leading to "compromise"? As The Nation's Kai Wright wrote in December 2010, the last time Obama trotted out this trope, "Mr. President, WTF?!":
Which one of the "compromises" that allowed a slave republic to endure from more than a century is he celebrating here? Perhaps the one where black people were counted as a fraction of humans in order to preserve a balance of power that allowed Northern and Southern aristocrats alike to get rich off of murderous slave labor? No, we wouldn't have had a union without that. Or maybe he's pitching forward to the "compromises" of the post-Reconstruction era, when the white capitalists of the North got too spooked by white laborers' demands for reasonable wages, and so abandoned the promises of Emancipation. That, too, kept the union plowing forward--into another century of apartheid and state-sanctioned terrorism.
No wonder Obama doesn't get any respect. Either he's woefully ignorant or he thinks everyone else is.
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