“There has been a growing narrative taking hold about Barack Obama’s presidency in recent weeks: that he is loved by many, but feared by none; that he is full of lofty vision, but is actually achieving nothing with his grandiloquence.
Chicago’s dismal showing today, after Mr Obama’s personal, impassioned last-minute pitch, is a stunning humiliation for this President. It cannot be emphasised enough how this will feed the perception that on the world stage he looks good — but carries no heft. A narrow defeat for Chicago would have been acceptable — but the sheer scale of the defeat was a bombshell” — Tim Reid, The Times of London
[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]In reality, outside of a tiny dot in Illinois, who cares if Rio won the Olympic Games for ’16? Not two Americans.
I mean, we can’t say that all of those Europeans and South Americans who voted against Chicago are racists like his Republican opponents, can we? Soon, nobody will be left except the President and his advisors.
What matters is that the serially impulsive President Obama, showing a distressing absence of mature judgment, once again has foolishly gambled his prestige, and our country’s,on his still unproven claim to persuade decision-makers throughout the world.
Even a kid knows that the president of a country does not place a bet on anything, not anything, with the whole world watching, without a reasonable assurance of victory.
Famous for rejecting even feathery doses of counsel, the President’s expanding stack of defeats is about to trump Trump Tower.
As if the lopsided defeat of Chicago by the International Olympic Committee wasn’t galling enough, the tarnished idol of American liberals compounded this gaffe moments later with a second miscalculation that proved the first one was no fluke.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the leader of American troops in Afghanistan, who has been trying for months to gain an audience, was ordered to report to Air Force One after the President’s 4-hour Olympic stopover in Copenhagen. Mr. Obama allotted him 24 minutes to make his case for adding 40,000 to our Afghan commitment. The dumbest unemployed P.R. man in Los Angeles knows this is a virtually deliberate P.R. disaster.
Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Obama have made such a fetish of going out of town, to any destination, that they already have exhausted the White House travel budget for his entire term.
Home Sweet What?
On the wings of my fondest hope — that the indefatigable Obama Travel Agency have mercy and shut down for the weekend — Barack Obama needs to retreat into absolute isolation, to soberly reflect, at length, on his unraveling Presidency.
Aware of Mr. Obama’s vast conceit, two certainties perilously loom overhead — perhaps for both him and us:
- His ego will not permit him to acknowledge, even privately, his mounting streak of policy/preference failures.
- His supreme confidence in his own genius will not allow him to consider either criticism or advice that calls for him to abandon his wacky zig-zag course of governing in favor of a more traditional, lower-key route.
What evidence do we have for the above conclusions?
Not even 20 percent into his four-year term, Mr. Obama’s inflated erudition — commonly referred to as tunnel vision — stubbornly has prevented him from learning from opening mistakes that every rookie President commits.
The longer he is in office, the more apparent it becomes that neither his rivals nor his enemies are damaging his Presidency as much as his own psyche is.
With the possible exception of Michelle there is no known counsel Mr. Obama accepts, the most lethal failing in a leader’s portfolio. In his crucial moments, the strange crowd of advisors around the President has no more influence than decorations on a Christmas tree. They look nice, but they are largely interchangeable. Select their successors randomly from a telephone directory. The cast makes no difference in the way Mr. Obama thinks, philosophizes or governs.
Accustomed to uninterrupted adulation for the breadth of his adult life, and boasting of an unbroken strand of personal and professional verdicts stamped as “successes,” whether they were or not, Mr. Obama entered the Oval Office truly believing he was invulnerable.
He Is Admission-Free
Not even the unchallenged ego champion of Presidential history, LBJ, believed that he was undefeated or undefeatable in life.
Mr. Obama did and does.
This should be an equally sad day for supporters and opponents of Mr. Obama because he took a dashing punch to the belly — and he cannot admit it. He thought that iron fist to his midsection was a hiccup. It could not possibly have been a repudiation of him.
This is the latest stinging defeat that he will neither acknowledge nor profit from.
No personal setback is more disheartening than one the guilty party refuses to admit, assuring that its ingredients will be future fodder for being repeated.
