I could have added Peggy Noonan’s latest column in my most recent post about the oil spill, but the column deserves a post of its own. Noonan, if you recall, was actually an Obama believer from the right during the campaign. Now, she’s recognizing what many of us were concerned about from the start:
The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They’re in one reality, he’s in another.
I don’t want to beat up on Noonan, but Obama had done nothing by 2008 that suggested he would be “in sync with the center.” In fact, much of his record was one of avoidance on key issues. The ones he did vote on, like the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, showed he was as far left as one could be.
Of course, that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be a competent president. There was certainly reason for doubt, however, and we were among the many who tried to make that case against Obama. What we didn’t want was a weak president, and that is now a concern of Noonan’s:
What continues to fascinate me is Mr. Obama’s standing with Democrats. They don’t love him. Half the party voted for Hillary Clinton, and her people have never fully reconciled themselves to him. But he is what they have. They are invested in him. In time—after the 2010 elections go badly—they are going to start to peel off. The political operative James Carville, the most vocal and influential of the president’s Gulf critics, signaled to Democrats this week that they can start to peel off. He did it through the passion of his denunciations.
The disaster in the Gulf may well spell the political end of the president and his administration, and that is no cause for joy. It’s not good to have a president in this position—weakened, polarizing and lacking broad public support—less than halfway through his term. That it is his fault is no comfort. It is not good for the stability of the world, or its safety, that the leader of “the indispensable nation” be so weakened. I never until the past 10 years understood the almost moral imperative that an American president maintain a high standing in the eyes of his countrymen.
If we want to avoid having a polarizing, weak president, we should avoid electing people with almost no executive experience or voting record.
UPDATE: There is another point that should be made. Noonan suggests the president’s detachment from key issues like the oil spill has been at least partly a political move, but that it has at least partly backfired in this case. I’ve argued that Team Obama basically took the same approach with ObamaCare, and that it wasn’t until the administration calculated that a failure on healthcare reform would severely damage the presidency that Obama put the issue on his shoulders.
There is a need to protect the presidency and keep it strong, and so keeping a president detached from some issues is smart. When it comes to the biggest issues, however, a true leader must step up because, as Noonan writes: “When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way.” A true leader would not take a back seat in a situation of this magnitude in order to pass blame.
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