When President Obama ran for office in 2008, many people believed he was a brilliant academic who would lead to bring people together, but a new book Leading From Behind by Richard Miniter, shows just the opposite. Miniter paints a picture of an Obama who doesn't lead at all, but instead is used as a pawn through which his many advisers push their own political agendas.
Take for example White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett. President Obama takes credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden while he hides Jarrett's efforts to stop the operation three times before finally giving the green light.
"At the White House, Obama advisers were told to 'interrogate the data' to disprove that bin Laden was in the compound," Miniter writes. "Eventually, a 'war caucus' emerged with Leon Panetta, Hillary Clinton, and Robert Gates favoring action of some kind. Jarrett opposed the idea. She worried about a backlash against the president if the operation failed, or even if it succeeded."
Obama was willing to cave to Jarrett's "concerns" on multiple occasions until Hillary stepped in with full force to urge Obama to move forward with the bin Laden raid. But of course, Obama's eventual decision to lead from behind on the raid, didn't come without some "hard thinking."
On the fourth attempt to either capture or kill bin Laden, the intelligence was better than ever, yet as Miniter writes, Obama still had Jarrett's doubtful words in the back of his mind.
"He was going to 'sleep on it.' The room was silent. Given the nine-hour time difference, it was too late to order an assault that night. 'I'm not going to tell you my decision now. I'm going to go back and think about it some more,' Obama said. When he saw the looks on the faces of Panetta and Gates, he added, 'I'm going to make a decision soon.' When the president left the room, Panetta met Clinton's gaze. They were floored. Could the president really kill America's best opportunity to get bin Laden?"
When Osama bin Laden was finally killed, Obama spiked the football while failing to admit his own cowardly behavior and baulking on the operation for the sake of Jarrett multiple times.
President Obama's even greater achievement, second to slaying Osama bin Laden, is ObamaCare. However, based on Miniter's findings. ObamaCare should actually be called PelosiCare.
"President Obama's greatest and most controversial achievement wasn't his idea, at least, at first. And, in the earliest days of the Obama administration, his chief of staff and his senior officials did everything they could to stop it, shift it, or sideline it. It was really the work of a different relentless and ruthless leader with a vision--Nancy Pelosi," Miniter writes. "In the beginning, the president looked on efforts to revolutionize health care in America with a kind of detachment. He didn't order his inner circle to back the reform plans. He took a wait-and-see approach."
These are just a some of many examples Miniter gives in his latest book Leading From Behind, which is out today.