The President’s Predecessors Must Marvel at His Political Incompetence — the Tax Cut Extension Fiasco

© 2010 Peter Free

 

08 December 2010

 

 

What School of Political Ineptitude graduated President Obama?

 

President Obama appears to have missed his political fundamentals classes.

 

Incompetence usually pushes us into corners from which graceful escape is impossible.  The point to being competent is to avoid being pushed into avoidable dead ends.  That’s why athletic coaches stress the importance of good fundamentals.

 

Yesterday, the President made a visibly angry defense of his tax cut extension meltdown.  Some liberals mistook this as a display of worthy spine, apparently operating under the illusion that an incompetent’s anger is better than a competent person’s grace.

 

In my view, his reasoning merely highlighted the politically inept course he has consistently taken to this point.

 

 

Columnist Richard Cohen said what I’ve been thinking for months

 

He accurately skewered the President’s bumbling performance:

 

 

You will note the faux equality. The middle class gets something; the rich get something. . . .

 

For the sake of the economy, the deal has to be done. What is amazing, though, is how President Obama, holding the cards of economic logic and moral virtue, managed to be outfoxed by the GOP.

 

What kind of inept politician cannot cow the opposition into backing down from defending the rich and, at the same time, adding almost a $1 trillion to the deficit?

 

I cannot but imagine how Franklin D. Roosevelt or Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson or John F. Kennedy . . . and, especially, Bill Clinton, would have dripped sarcasm on a political party that was so out of touch with the concerns of the American people that it was willing to go to the mat to defend tax breaks for the rich. . . .

 

 "Can't anybody here play this game?"

 

© 2010 Richard Cohen, Tax Cuts for Rich and Poor Alike, Washington Post (08 December 2010) (paragraph split)

 

 

If the President can’t see his political mistakes, there is no way forward

 

President Obama’s self-defensive lashing out at his political base yesterday appears to block his ability to understand the magnitude of his past political errors.  If one does not understand that one made significant mistakes, it is impossible to learn from them.

 

The President’s defense of his proposed tax compromise is probably accurate, insofar as it goes.  Certainly the horrific governing weight that he experiences each day forced the compromise that he last-minuted himself into having to accept.

 

But that’s like saying that we had leave our tanks to save the rest of our retreating army because we stupidly put ourselves into the very situation in which we would foreseeably have to leave them behind.

 

No points from me for that one.

 

 

A president’s job in these times

 

A president’s job under today’s threatening conditions is to lead us measurably forward, not to escape from self-created dead ends that lead to nowhere essentially different than we are right now.

 

 

The three AM call

 

Were the President me, I’d be on the phone to Bill Clinton.