At the time of Obama's electoral victory we formed the view that he would likely follow the trajectory of Jimmy Carter, the failed one-term US President. The thing that "killed" Carter politically more than anything else was the perception that he was flat out incompetent. He could not handle the job.
Incompetence on the part of the one who holds the highest political office in the land is offensive to most Americans--of all political views. Americans as a general rule are "can do" people. If Victorian Britain could be characterised as a nation of shopkeepers, Americans, like the ancient Romans, can be characterised as predominantly a nation of engineers. They expect solutions to problems. Quick, substantial solutions.
Now this dominant cultural attribute has both strengths and weaknesses. On the strong side of the ledger it leads to an undertone of optimism in just about everything. This is certainly why the American economy is so entrepreneurial for entrepreneurs have to be risk-taking optimists. On the negative side of the ledger it can produce a nation of gung-ho gunslingers who shoot first before asking questions and who reduce most problems and issues to simplistic dimensions.
Both the left and the right of the political spectrum are offended and scandalised when it dawns upon them (fairly or otherwise) that their President is actually incompetent. With someone as liberal as President Obama, the right starts off offended because liberals refuse to operate within the simplistic nostrums which so often course through conservative veins. The American right has been significantly influenced by Ayn Rand and Objectivist philosophy. Objectivists do not suffer gladly those they deem to be fools. For the Randians, a fool is anyone who does not see the world through Objectivist spectacles. From the get-go, to use the vernacular, Obama would be seen by the right as incompetence waiting to reveal itself.
Liberals, however, have a very different blood type, but in its own way, their type is equally simplistic and naive. The standing liberal assumption is that the state is competent to solve all social and national problems. Thus liberals also become deeply offended when a liberal president effectively denies the faith by not being competent. In the liberal world-view, presidential incompetence is very, very close to acting blasphemously.
Usually, the incompetence of liberal nostrums takes some time to show up--sometimes generations. So liberal sensibilities usually do not get offended by liberal presidents. The destruction of low socio-economic families through inter-generational welfare dependency takes time to be revealed. The cause-and-effect line is often blurred over time. The destruction and damage that will result from Obama's desultory nationalisation of health will take years to show up. By then Obama will be ancient history. But every once in a while a liberal president is elected who manages to get typecast as incompetent whilst still in office--and liberals feel betrayed and take deep offence. It is a scandal. Obama is now in that territory.
Dick Morris is not an Obama fan, but we believe he is right on the money with this piece--and note the spectral evocation of the failed Carter presidency.
Morris: Obama doesn’t have a clue
By Dick Morris - 06/01/10
Conservatives are so enraged at Obama’s socialism and radicalism that they are increasingly surprised to learn that he is incompetent as well. The sight of his blithering and blustering while the most massive oil spill in history moves closer to America’s beaches not only reminds one of Bush’s terrible performance during Katrina, but calls to mind Jimmy Carter’s incompetence in the face of the hostage crisis.
America is watching the president alternate between wringing his hands in helplessness and pointing his finger in blame when he should be solving the most pressing environmental problem America has faced in the past 50 years. We are watching generations of environmental protection swept away as marshes, fisheries, vacation spots, recreational beaches, wetlands, hatcheries and sanctuaries fall prey to the oil spill invasion. And, all the while, the president acts like a spectator, interrupting his basketball games only to excoriate BP for its failure to contain the spill.
The political fallout from the oil spill will, indeed, spill across party and ideological lines. The environmentalists of America cannot take heart from a president so obviously ignorant about how to protect our shores and so obstinately arrogant that he refuses to inform himself and take any responsibility.
All of this explains why the oil spill is seeping into his ratings among Democrats, dragging him down to levels we have not seen since Bush during the pit of the Iraq war. Conservatives may dislike Obama because he is a leftist. But liberals are coming to dislike him because he is not a competent progressive.
Meanwhile, the nation watches nervously as the same policies Obama has brought to our nation are failing badly and publicly in Europe. When Moody’s announces that it is considering downgrading bonds issued by the government of the United States of America, we find ourselves, suddenly, in deep trouble. We have had deficits before. But never have they so freaked investors that a ratings agency considered lowering its opinion of our solvency. Not since Alexander Hamilton assumed the states’ Revolutionary War debt has America’s willingness and ability to meet its financial obligations been as seriously questioned.
And the truth begins to dawn on all of us: Obama has no more idea how to work his way out of the economic mess into which his policies have plunged us than he does about how to clean up the oil spill that is destroying our southern coastline.
Both the financial crisis and the oil come ever closer to our shores — one from the east and the other from the south — and, between them, they loom as a testament to the incompetence of our government and of its president.
And, oddly, to his passivity as well. After pursuing a remarkably activist, if misguided and foolhardy, agenda, Obama seems not to know what to do and finds himself consigned to the roles of observer and critic.
America is getting the point that its president doesn’t have a clue.
He doesn’t know how to stop the oil from spilling. He is bereft of ideas about how to create jobs in the aftermath of the recession. He has no idea how to keep the European financial crisis contained. He has no program for repaying the massive debt hole into which he has dug our nation without tax increases he must know will only deepen the pit.
Some presidents have failed because of their stubbornness (Johnson and Bush-43). Others because of their character flaws (Clinton and Nixon). Still others because of their insensitivity to domestic problems (Bush-41). But now we have a president who is failing because he is incompetent. It is Jimmy Carter all over again.
Who would have thought that this president, so anxious to lead us and so focused on his specific agenda and ideas, would turn out not to know what he is doing?
Morris, a former adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of Outrage, Fleeced and Catastrophe. To get all of his and Eileen McGann’s columns for free by e-mail or to order a signed copy of their latest book, 2010: Take Back America — A Battle Plan, go to dickmorris.com. In August, Morris became a strategist for the League of American Voters, which is running ads opposing the president’s healthcare reforms.
As Richard Neustadt observed long ago, the essence of presidential power in the US is the power to persuade. The US system of checks and balances shuts the office of president up to persuasion. There is very little the US president can do without the assistance of others in other branches of government. Once you are branded as incompetent the ability to persuade has greatly diminished, if not completely eroded away.
If Morris is right, Obama has already become a lame-duck president.
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