I chortled last summer when columnist George Will aptly compared Barack Obama to Alibi Ike, a character in a classic Ring Lardner short story. (“His right name was Frank X. Farrell, and I guess the ‘X’ stood for ‘excuse me.'”) Obama has been ducking accountability for the consequences of his policies as they started heading south.
You can get away for awhile with assigning bad outcomes to circumstances beyond your control (like global economic forces) or things you inherited (“It was worse than we thought”) from your predecessor (Blame Bush!). But some things ARE under the control of the president, or at least should be, like the management of federal agencies.
And here’s where a couple of recent stories (and an evergreen) may spell more trouble for the president than each one would on its own.
The president may (or may not) have much to do with fuel prices at the pump. But he is responsible for the conduct of the federal employees that are supposed to be under his supervision, either directly or indirectly. In recent days, we’ve seen reports of the lavish Las Vegas convention attended by employees of the Government Services Administration (congressional hearings on the mess open today) and the purported prostitution scandal roiling the Secret Service in Colombia. Add to that the evolving Fast and Furious scandal involving gunrunning by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the role of Attorney General Eric Holder in getting to the bottom of the matter (what did he know and when did he know it?), and it’s reasonable to begin questioning the managerial competence of Obama and his top advisers. (For the sake of argument, I’ll leave Solyndra out of it, though the case that this was sheer cronyism is strong.)
Even those who give the president a wide berth in dealing with macro problems may not be so forgiving if he has little control over the people he has entrusted to supervise large government agencies. And the stories build on one another, and may have even more resonance if perceived mismanagement spans separate federal departments.
The 2008 election was an anomaly: The first time in more than a century that both major parties nominated candidates with no executive experience (vice president, governor, mayor, military commander). And in the case of the 2008 Democratic ticket, neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden had managed anything more complicated than a congressional office.
To be sure, macro issues (read: the economy) will dominate the fall presidential campaign. But if more instances of mismanagement leading to potential scandal bubble up, and an aura of incompetence hovers over the Obama administration, his case for re-election will be an even tougher sell.
