Job Too Big, Or Man Too Small? INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY Leadership: Just as when Jimmy Carter was president, were hearing the familiar refrain of the presidency being too much for any one man. But then as now, the problem is not the office. Its the officeholder. Writing in National Journal magazine, Washington press corps fixture Ron Brownstein bemoans Why its becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to be president of the entire United States. Such excuses from the press are not new. As NewsBusters pointed out at the time, Obama wasnt president two years before Newsweek was insisting, The issue is not Obama, its the office ... Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st-century presidency? Apparently, if a genius like Barack Obama cant succeed as president, even given two whole terms, no one can. But this is a well-worn tune, albeit sung with a few altered words this time around. Back in January 1980, President Carter was shell-shocked by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This is a radical departure from the reticence the Soviets have shown, Carter wrote in his diary, putting his incompetence on full view. Within two weeks of the invasion, not unlike Obama today as armies of illegal aliens invade our own country, Carters paramount interest was political fundraising. Billy is really helping with country-and-western stars, Carter said of his buffoonish, Billy Beer-guzzling brother. And the president boasted that he met with Muhammad Ali, who was instructing his 75 million followers in the U.S. to pull the lever for me and Fritz (then-Vice President Mondale). But the Washington Posts Walter Shapiro on Jan. 13, 1980, came to the rescue with an article entitled, Voters Expect to Elect a Mere Mortal. The presidency has grown, and grown and grown, into the most powerful, most impossible job in the world, Shapiro contended. Voters have lowered their expectations of what any president can accomplish; they have accepted the notion that this country may never again have heroic, larger-than-life leadership in the White House. Greatness is now impossible in the eyes of the public who, Shapiro wrote, were convinced Carter is doing as good a job as anyone could in facing new and difficult problems and in coping with an independent and restive Congress. But then something happened: A man big enough for the job was elected, by the name of Ronald Reagan. By 1986, as NewsBusters Kyle Drennen noted, liberal Time magazine featured a cover story admitting that Americans heard for years that the presidency had grown too complex for one person to manage, that the office had been crippled. Reagan seems to slide through a presidential day with ease. Brownstein groundlessly suggests that Obama took office embodying convergence and reconciliation, but immediately faced unremitting Republican opposition and has been the victim of structural forces that are increasingly preventing any leader, no matter how well-intentioned, from functioning as more than the president of half of America. In fact, Obama the Uniter was always a fraudulent image. His 2010 Blair House health care summit, for instance, was conceived as nothing more than a photo op, never meant to give Republicans any input on shaping ObamaCare. Thats not to mention an al-Qaida offshoot taking over large parts of Iraq and Syria; appeasing a soon-to-be nuclear Iran; the Taliban on its way back to power in Afghanistan; an unprecedented — and apparently premeditated — crisis on Americas porous southern border; and an economic recovery that feels like it might as well be a recession. Oh yes, and dont forget Benghazi, IRS, Fast and Furious, and all the other scandals. These failures and transgressions are not the result of a newly unwieldy presidency in the age of smartphones. They are the fault of another leftist ideologue of Carteresque incompetence in the White House.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 13:27:05 +0000
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