Words Failing Obama

Presidents have two roles: they must inspire (Teddy Roosevelt called this aspect of the office ‘The Bully Pulpit’) and they must manage. We know Obama can do the former, but he’s proving rather poor at the latter.

A successful chief executive must back up pretty words with solid goals and accomplishments. Consider this gem from Winston  Churchill in the darkest hours  of World War Two:

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender

Imagine how hollowly those words would echo today if Germany had gone on to overrun Britain. Inspiration turns into a joke when it isn’t backed up with muscle. Neville Chamberlain’s deal Hitler with might actually have lived up to his “peace with honor” rhetoric if it had achieved either. But it didn’t and now he and his flowery claim are history’s buffoons.

This is Obama’s problem in a nutshell. He’s half a President. He talks the talk but has yet to prove he can walk the walk, and the public’s catching on. Last week he went public in his 32nd or 24th prime time address (hard to keep track, these days) to rescue the health care plan he outsourced to Pelosi/Reid and to shore up his faltering approval numbers. But this time it didn’t work. He sprinked the rhetorical fairy dust liberally, but it failed to lift.

Michael Barone has noticed

:

One reason, perhaps, is that he has had little practice. He served as a legislator for a dozen years before becoming president, but was only rarely an active one. He spent one of his eight years as an Illinois state senator running unsuccessfully for Congress and two of them running successfully for U.S. senator. He spent two of his years in the U.S. Senate running for president. During all of his seven non-campaign years as a legislator, he was in the minority party.

In other words, he’s never done much work putting legislation together — especially legislation that channels vast flows of money and affects the workings of parts of the economy that deeply affect people’s lives. This lack of experience is starting to show. On the major legislation considered this year — the stimulus, cap and trade, health care — the Obama White House has done little or nothing to set down markers, to provide guidance, to establish boundaries and no-go areas.

Who was it who said “This is no time for on-the-job training?” He was dead-on right.

Honeyed words sour into self parody over time. Obama needs to get off the teleprompter, plant his butt in the Oval Office and do some actual work. Permanent campaign mode doesn’t cut it anymore. And he needs his “Sister Souljah” moment. The Dems in congress are quite happy to sell him out – he’s got to take a stand against somebody (besides our allies abroad) and show he’s his own man. Until he does that he’s going to continue to look more and more like the Human Muppet.

UPDATE: Why none of this is likely to happen.