While it’s hard to believe anyone would consider such a grand insult of “The One,” former New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Edward Klein uses a Fox News column to label President Obama’s performance in office as amateurish.
Barack Obama’s refusal to negotiate with the Republicans in Congress on the government shutdown is proof once again that he doesn’t understand the first thing about presidential leadership.
Strangely enough, this one-time constitutional lawyer fails to grasp the fact that the president of the United States does not obtain results by giving orders.
Thanks to our Constitution’s separation of powers, he can’t get action without bargaining with Congress. The presidency and Congress are inextricably linked; one can’t govern without the other.
Obama has ignored this simple truth since he became president. With ObamaCare, he allowed Nancy Pelosi and her liberal Democratic cohort to ram through the most sweeping—and flawed—piece of social legislation in more than four decades without a single Republican vote, guaranteeing that the unpopular law will be challenged for years to come.
Compounding this mistake, he then handed out waivers and exemptions to the law to politically connected businesses, including restaurants and nightclubs in Nancy Pelosi’s district.
Despite his public posturing , he wasn’t at all unhappy about the partial government shutdown, because it allows him to demonize the Republicans in the run-up to the 2014-midterm elections.
But now, faced with a prolonged shutdown and a debt-ceiling crisis to boot, he finds that he can’t politic his way out of the mess, so he’s trying to campaign his way out, calling the Republicans every name in the book.
But his job is to govern, to lead, to find common ground, to persuade.
Unfortunately, Barack Obama is not wired to do that.