Zero Credibility

A Mouth In the Shape of a Polygon

Let's assume that most governments around the world of any consequence study the utterances of the President of the United States.  Are his words to be taken seriously?  Is he bluffing?  Is there a hidden message?  What is hyperbole or literary license?  If so, what is the real message beneath the trope?

All political leaders eventually realise, if they did not know it to begin with, that credibility, if you have it, is an enormous boon.  It buttresses one's influence and power far beyond laws, rules, and institutional power.  In a democracy it is electorally life-threatening to lose one's credibility.  If it gets to the point where a growing majority of people disbelieve what a leader says, and he is sinking in the credibility, stakes it is only a matter of time until he is rejected by voters.

In recent decades we have seen politicians rise up--usually on the Left--who believe that politics is all about focus groups.
  Saying what people want to hear becomes, in their minds, the artifice of the possible.  Focus groups inform the leaders about what people like and how they respond to words and phrases.  The leader delivers: whammo, popularity soars.  The huge risk--one that eventually bites with relentless savagery--is that the focus-group driven leader eventually becomes perceived as "all talk and no do", or as the Texans say, all hat and no cattle.

President Obama is way down this no-exit street.  He has talked a big game.  He has made stupid commitments which he could never possibly meet.  But to focus-group politicians this does not matter in the slightest--as long as poll numbers stay up.  Only it does matter.  Voters do not look kindly upon politicians that have taken them for a cynical ride.

President Obama is one of the most stupid and mendacious politicians in recent Western history.  The best one can say of him is that he has genuinely believed that mendacity is the game and he has played it fully and fairly and actively.  So why would people be offended?  Everyone knows that politics is a focus-group guessing and delivering game, right?  Everyone knows that politics is all about cynical manipulation--and Obama has applied himself with great energy.

There are endless examples, but we will cite just one.  Pump petrol prices.  Obama has talked out of so many sides of his mouth on this issue, with such guile and duplicity, that this particular orifice has assumed the shape of a polygon. Here is the Wall Street Journal's summary:

'The American people aren't stupid," thundered President Obama yesterday in Miami, ridiculing Republicans who are blaming him for rising gasoline prices. Let's hope he's right, because not even Forrest Gump could believe the logic of what Mr. Obama is trying to sell.

To wit, that a) gasoline prices are beyond his control, but b) to the extent oil and gas production is rising in America, his energy policies deserve all the credit, and c) higher prices are one more reason to raise taxes on oil and gas drillers while handing even more subsidies to his friends in green energy. Where to begin?

Obama's shape-shifting has nothing to do with telling the truth, but all to do with titillating the electorate as seen through focus-groups.  The WSJ exposes the contradictions"

It's true enough that oil prices can't be commanded from the Oval Office, so in that sense Mr. Obama's disavowal of blame is a rare show of humility in the face of market forces. Would that he showed similar modesty in trying to command the tides of home prices, car sales ("cash for clunkers"), or the production of electric batteries.

Naturally, global oil prices are far more complex than the simplistic jibes designed to appeal to xenophobic voters.  But Obama has used all the "explanations" under the sun, when it has suited him, leaving him looking like a politician sucking on a porcupine.

The oil price surge has several likely sources. One is the turmoil in the Middle East, especially new fears of a supply shock from a conflict with Iran. But it's worth recalling that Mr. Obama also blamed the last oil-price surge, in spring 2011, on the Libyan uprising. Moammar Gadhafi is now gone and Libyan oil production is coming back on stream, yet oil prices dipped only briefly below $90 a barrel and have been rising since October. Something else must be going on.

Mr. Obama yesterday blamed rising demand from the likes of Brazil and China, and there is something to that as well. But this energy demand is also not new, and if anything Chinese and Brazilian economic growth has been slowing in recent months. 

 Obama's actions are speaking far louder than words.  He has relentlessly opposed increasing oil production and supply in the United States, even while publicly protesting that he supported it.  He still engages in this verbal legerdemain.

In early 2010, he proposed to open some new areas to drilling but shut that down after the Gulf oil spill. According to the Greater New Orleans Gulf Permits Index for January 31, over the previous three months the feds issued an average of three deep-water drilling permits a month compared to the historical average of seven. Over the same three months, the feds approved an average of 4.7 shallow-water permits a month, compared to the historical average of 14.7.

Approval of an offshore drilling plan now takes 92 days, 31 more than the historical average. And so far in 2012, an average of 23% of all drilling plans have been approved, compared to the average of 73.4%.
Oh, and don't forget the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have increased the delivery of oil from Canada and North Dakota's Bakken Shale to Gulf Coast refineries, replacing oil from Venezuela.

The reality is that most of the increase in U.S. oil and gas production has come despite the Obama Administration. It is flowing from the shale boom, which is the result of private technological advances and investment. Mr. Obama has seen the energy sun rise and is crowing like a rooster that he made it happen.

When other governments  look at the words of this politician, they doubtless conclude either that the man is so confused he is well out of his depth, or that he is artfully duplicitous and not a thing he says can be believed at face value.  The worrying thing is that this can become really dangerous.

Internationally, Obama's credibility is now shot through with more holes than a swiss cheese.  Consequently, he is neither believed nor listened to.  We have never seen a more striking example of this than his recent protestations to Israel and Iran that, "I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don't bluff." He went on, "I also don't, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say."

The very fact that Obama has had to come out and say such things betrays that in fact neither country really believes what he is saying--and now Obama knows it.  He is being forced, now, to protest too much.   But his lack of credibility and truthfulness cloys around him as a bad smell.  Ironically, he has evoked Teddy Roosevelt's maxim of "taking softly and carrying a big stick" even as he is being forced to talk loudly saying, "I really mean it."

As soon as anyone feels the need to thus asseverate, they betray their credibility as long gone.