President Barack Obama is still just a lost boy at his age, and he searches for a world he wished existed. His insistence upon living in his world, though attractive to the uneducated, neglected, and naive, is dangerously heaping hot coals of consequence on the heads of those who know better.
As the very first pundit in America to predict the rise and electoral success of President Barack Obama, it is with great regret that I say the following: President Barack Obama is not a strong leader. His willingness to cede most of his domestic agenda to Nancy Pelosi has cost him dearly in his first year. And his unwillingness to admit that the world is facing a crossroads of strength through force now, or humiliation and pain through attack in days to come is a demonstration of his paralysis in the most important question of our time. His rejection in Copenhagen was a sting of confirmation--not only of his global powerlessness--but of his ability to use campaigning on his personality as a legitimate tool of negotiation.
President Obama believes his good press far too often, trusts his advisors' agreement as a sign of genuine critical analysis, and believes the American people are too unenlightened to truly understand his methods. All three realities push the President further into an altered state of worldview that are having disastrous impact on the life of average Ameicans.
The new jobs report out this week shows, for yet another month in a row, that the American people are suffering under near 10% unemployment and 17% under-employment. A proven strategy to grow the economy, and thus help small business owners expand their operation, and thus begin a hiring trend would be to not just keep the tax incentives for small business from disappearing in 2010, but to add to them, and allow the free market to multiply. An expansion of a robust economy is the only answer to serious unemployment. But the President believes that if he just has the right czar, in the right position, then job losses will be controlled. In the President's utopia, employment and the number of jobs available are fixed and "saving them" is better than or, at minimum, equal to "creating them."
With the newest Rasmussen polling numbers showing again that the majority of the American people do believe in health care reform, but do not under any circumstances desire the government controlled option--or takeover--of the industry, President Obama doesn't seem to grasp the expressed will of the people who elected him. In the President's utopia it is doctors, not trial lawyers, that are being selfish and charging people for procedures they do not need just to "make a buck." In the world you and I live in, we know that doctors run the risk of a massive lawsuit every time they deliver bad news to a patient.
In Afghanistan, President Obama has waited now for more than a month to make a decision to expand our footprint there by no more than 40,000 troops. 43 more soldiers have perished while he awaits settling on a new strategy, while the military personnel he put in place to do the job are begging him for more troops. He met with General McChrystal for all of forty-five minutes on Air Force One (for only the second time since commissioning McChrystal to the theater), while Joe Biden whispers in his ear to continue things that are not presently working. In President Obama's utopia he wishes war did not exist, but he has yet to realize that in order for it to be halted, he himself may have to recognize the threat that not addressing it properly would have.
On Iran, President Obama has issued a stern assessment of their nuclear ambitions. His stern words, in President Obama's utopia, should be enough for a reasonable world leader to be worried about so as to pick up a phone and wish to work it out that afternoon. Yet even after the IAEA's meetings on Iran, even after President Obama issued another stern deadline, the administration has begun to backtrack. In President Obama's utopia, the United States is not superior to other nations and therefore we should be powerless to have any say on how they develop. In fact if we simply give up our weapons, in President Obama's utopia, he believes they will give up theirs.
On the economy, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" sounds good. In a perfect world, such purity of goodness would be a place none on this planet recognize. In President Obama's utopia, the socialists and the communists DO have it right, and this is perhaps the major reason he records in his own books his great delight in hanging with them in college. But man's depravity has always been and will always be the fatal flaw in this theory.
On America's image in the world, in President Obama's utopia he is fine with the idea of "American Exceptionalism" being challenged or even turned upside down. Yet in reality no country has suffered more loss of its own, for the welfare of others in history. To Obama, an America that stands tall in contrast to others seems arrogant. To our enemies, an America that seems ashamed of herself seems weak.
President Obama is not a strong decision maker--most law professors aren't. They are too accustomed to arguing the issue from all sides possible. He is also a man who envisions a world that will never exist. It is his inability to see it thus, that tonight makes America more vulnerable, more hopeless, and without any immediate hope of changing coming anytime soon.
It is, in a word, dangerous.