Obama doomed himself by overpromising

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Copyright 2010 by John T. Reed

It was evident way back in 2008

In an article about Obama causing being the final act of affirmative action in 2008, I said he was bound to fail for six reasons:

1. All presidents fail to an extent
2. Whoever is elected president in 2008 is going to inherit* an intractable, worldwide economic crisis.
3. Obama has almost no training or experience for the job.
4. Obama has ensured his failure by promising more than anyone can deliver.
5. Obama himself apparently believes he is incompetent.
6. Obama has tacitly approved the notion that he is John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.

* Since I wrote that, I realized that “inherit” is the wrong word and I wrote a whole article about how wrong it is for Obama to dc resonsibility by claiming he inherited everything that is wrong.

Not only was I dead-on right about that list, I have now realized there is a seventh reason: He, himself, said that he was a blank screen on which people projected what they wanted to believe. True. That’s called being all things to all people. It is the dream of all politicians: promise nothing really but get people to believe you agree with THEIR views. Obama accomplished it on election day.

But live by the blank screen, die by the blank screen. Obama did not explicitly promise all that people saw on that blank screen, but he deliberately tricked people into thinking he did. At my college alma mater West Point, that was an honor code violation called “quibbling.” It is using silence to tell a lie by remaining silent when you can see that others will interpret your silence incorrectly. Cadets were thrown out of West Point for doing just that and only that when I was there. Obama did that during the campaign when he failed to correct all the incorrect stuff that was projected onto the blank screen he made famous.

That’s the bad news about the blank screen. It gets you elected, but it also causes people to hold you accountable for what they projected on your blank screen. Just as they did in the voting booth in November 2008, in 2010, they see you as having promised all sorts of stuff on which you did not deliver. So Obama promised too much literally, but he also seemed to promise a whole lot of other stuff that he did not explicitly promise via his sin-by-silence blank screen act.

8% unemployment, ‘Recovery Summer’

There is only one way on earth to do a good job and have people pissed off at you: promise more than you deliver. Assume for argument’s sake that Obama has done a good job as his diehard supporters would like us to believe.

He still promised to close Guantanamo Bay, not tax anyone who makes less than $250,000 a year one dime, hold unemployment to 8% or less if the stimulus passed, and a 2010 Summer of Recovery. He broke all those promises and others I did not bother to mention, and he did not even have to make most of those proises. That is just stupid.

There is a Pulitzer Prize winning Web site dedicated to tracking and verifying whether Obama broke or kept his explicit campaign promises at http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/. They do not track the blank-screen promises people imagined he made like ending the wars.

Not only did he promise more than he, or anyone, could deliver during the campaign, he continued to make promises he could not keep since inauguration. Why?

He’s a dope. His supporters said he was brilliant and a brilliant politicians and a brilliant leader. He is none of those things.

Willie Brown IS a brilliant politicians. He was a long-time Assembly speaker in CA. Indeed, he is probably why we got all the term-limit laws, one of which forced him out of the speakership. He then became Mayor of San Francisco until term limited out. He now writes an excellent column in the San Francisco Chronicle. He says the White House staff and president are lousy at politics in a recent column about Obama unnecessarily sticking his foot in his mouth on the mosque, yet another subject he did not have to get involved with (others include the Cambridge beer fest, Chicago Olympics).

If he were brilliant, he probably would have released his college and law school transcripts and SAT and LSAT scores. That he refuses to (Bush and Gore’s were released in 2000) is consistent with my theory that he is a faux intellectual, not smart. See also my comments on his supposed rhetoical skills.

Perhaps his most important overpromising was saying Iran getting nukes was unacceptable or however he worded it. “All options are on the table,” he bluffed. Iran president Mock Mood I’m a Dinner Jacket called Obama’s bluff. It turns out Obama was lying about all options being on the table. Military options were not on the table. Iran is going to spit in the face of Obama and the U.S. and get away with it. Obama destroyed U.S. credibility vis a vis misbehaving countries and we may pay a high price for that. Next crisis, we will have to actually use the military option rather than just threaten it because Obama cried wolf on that. It is arguable that Americans will die because Obama bluffed about military force and when his bluff was called by a two-bitIranian election fraud perpetrator, he, and by implication, we, backed down.

Ronald Reagan did the exact opposite. When he occasionally talked tough, he meant it. Iran was so scared of him that they released the hostages held during the Carter Administration literally during Reagan’s inauguration. Later, the former Soviets seemed afraid of him after he ordered the PATCO federal air traffic controllers back to work and when they refused, fired all of those who struck. They ended the Cold War without a shot being fired.

It is a lot easier to lead the nation in domestic and foreign policy by occasionally talking tough and backing it up when opponents call your bluff than to bluff tough guy and get caught. Obama has done the latter and we will pay for it.

This is Game Theory, one of the zillion important things that a leader ought to know about but that did not come up in Obama’s “community organizer” training.

John T. Reed