He does not learn from his mistakes

We all knew that Obama was unqualified to be president. His only prior full-time job was working for an international trade business newsletter his first year after college in Manhattan. He has no leadership training or experience. He has a law degree but never won—or lost, or even argued—a case. He was president (not editor) of the Harvard Law Review, but never wrote an article about the law. He was a constitutional law instructor for twelve years but in publish-or perish academia, never published a word. He was chairman of a Senate committee—unheard of for a freshman—but never held a single committee meeting.

He mainly spent his 25 years between college and the White House as a dilettante, very slow writer of two books (I’ve written 91 books—they don’t take seven years each to write), and informal campaigning.

But, we were told so confidently, he’s “brilliant.”

I don’t buy that. I think he’s faking intelligence, and a lot of other stuff his life gives no evidence of. See my article on his use of cheap rhetorical tricks in his speeches.

But if he is even half intelligent, he would learn from his mistakes, right?

He does not.

He thinks he can use his speaking skills to charm everyone on earth. He certainly was a rock star during the campaign as a result of his smile, skin color, and teleprompter reading. But his wife said, before she swore off public comment, that he was overconfident. I agree with her.

He bum’s rushed his stimulus, budget, and earmarks bills through the Congress without the Congresspersons who voted for them even reading the bills.

Then, he lost his mojo. He denied that in a speech on 8/22/09. You can see video of him saying that at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgCn_TW4loU. But the facts say the opposite.

Obama has had no success since 3/11/09 when he signed the $410 billion earmarks bill—after promising to end all earmarks during the campaign. The loss of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat on 1/19/10 was just the latest and most astonishing defeat.

No longer a symbol

During the campaign and for the first three months of 2009, Obama was popular and had wide support because he was just a symbol of vague ideas like black progress and “change.” I wrote than that would end around March, 2009 because the fish bowl of the White House would enable Americans to get to know Obama as a person, not a symbol, and that events would force him to actually make decisions, not just shoot his mouth off in vague generalities.

And that is exactly what happened.

He made a zillion promises. For example, during the campaign, he said close Gitmo. But as president, he has to also say where the Gitmo inmates are going. He cannot. He never thought it through.

He who is most reluctant to make a promise is most likely to keep it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Obama is not reluctant to make promises. Hell! He set records making more promises and bigger promises than any presidential candidate in history.

But as Rousseau points out, such people do that because they have no concern about keeping any of their promises.

Obama’s skills turn out to be extremely limited and contrary to his self-image, he is no exception to the admonition not to overexpose yourself. He thought, probably based on adoring crowds, that the American people could not get enough of him. So his solution to every problem was more Obama speeches.

It turns out that the more he talks, the more clips he provides to juxtapose with the reality of his administration. He decided during the campaign that promising to put health care debate on C-Span and all bills on the White House Web site five days before signing was a good idea. So he made that promise over and over. Now his well-received promise has just become evidence that the guy doesn’t mean what he says and cannot be trusted. He said he favored single-payer health insurance (the federal government takes over all health care) and that it would take 10 or 15 years to get there. Now he denies favoring that, but the clips are still out there. When asked about his 2003 comments and his denial he became Mr. Weasel claiming he could not hear the 2003 clip, and ducking the question.

When a client is in civil or criminal litigation, lawyers invariably tell them to clam up about the case because anything they say can and will be used against them. Anything Obama says can and will be used against him by his opponents within and outside the Democrat party. But because he’s in love with his own voice, and thinks everyone else is too (“Harry, I have a gift.”), he just keeps giving his opponents more and more ammunition by running his mouth.

He thinks

To hear me is to love me.

In fact, to hear him is to find more and more lies and contradictions and broken promises. Thus has he transformed himself from exciting, new symbol to just another sleazy politician and an extremely radical left one at that. He has rendered his former affirmative-action meal ticket, his black father, and his own skin color, irrelevant by verbally replacing them with a mountain of more recent data on himself.

On 9/4/09, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said,

He’s become ordinary. The spell is broken. …mere mortal, a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama’s supreme self-regard may never adapt.

The predicted failures—and then some

In an earlier article I wrote during the campaign, I guaranteed Obama would 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.

Has he failed? You betcha. Let me count the ways:

• Closing Gitmo—A. He did not. B. Why close it anyway?
• Keeping unemployment below 8%
• Ending earmarks
• Cap & trade
• Getting the Olympics for Chicago
• Agreement at the Copenhagen Climate Conference
• Making the Nobel Peace Prize Committee regret giving him the prize
• Obamacare
• Card check
• Refusing to accept guilty plea and request for death penalty from Khalid Sheik Mohammed (main planner of 9/11) and giving him a Manhattan civil trial
• Not getting out of Iraq as he promised
• Increasing troop strength it Afghanistan in violation of the expectations of those who supported him in the crucial Iowa caucuses
• Health care deliberations on C-Span
• Putting all bills online for at least five days before he signs them
• Beer summit
• Making the world love us and, as a result, agree to stuff we want

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

So what did the “brilliant” Obama do when he began to encounter failure and falling polls? What course correction did he make? How did he adjust?

He did not. He just doubled down and increased the number of speeches and campaign appearances he made as if all Obama failures are solely the result of insufficient Obama in the lives of those who do not support him..

What would the Clintons have done in such a situation? What did Bill Clinton do when he was president and Arkansas governor and suffered a failure?

Instant radical course corrections, consultation with experts like Dick Morris, “triangulation,” signing laws he was previously against, balancing the budget and running a surplus, signing NAFTA in spite of union opposition because he believed it would help the economy. Remember “It’s the economy stupid.” Obama and his people have not yet learned “It’s the economy, stupid” even though in 2009 “It was the economy, stupid” far more than it was in 1993 when Clinton was president.

The words you hear and read now about the “brilliant” “political genius” Barack Obama are:

• oblivious
• out of touch
• not listening
• tin ear
• denial
• tone deaf
• political suicide
• “ignoring us”
• arrogant
• ramming it down our throats

Do you remember the public and pundits saying this about Clinton? Or Bush I? Or Reagan? Even Bush II did not inspire these particular words. And all four of those presidents got far more done than Obama.

Same mistake as Bush II, only far more so

Obama and Bush II made the same mistake. They overdrew their political capital account.

When Bush II won re-election, he said “I have some political capital and I intend to spend it.” What did he spend it on?

Reforming Social Security.

Was that a noble cause?

Darned right. Clinton would have done a poll and focus group and said, “No way will I do that.” Social Security is going bankrupt. It must be reformed and the longer we wait the more expensive it will be to fix.

Did Bush succeed?

Nope.

Even partly?

He got absolutely nothing—even from his own party.

What happened?

His political capital account had a balance of $X. The cost of reforming social security was about $100X. He was stupid to think he had enough capital for that particular cause.

Then we have Obama. He won the presidency by a decent margin. I’ve seen bigger margins—like Reagan-Mondale. Mondale won one state: his own, plus the District of Columbia. But Obama seems to think he won by a landslide. Before Obama gets a big head, he might want to consider that he won 28 2/3 states plus DC while in 2004 George W. Bush won 31 states.

Dems also won the House and Senate by the biggest margins since 1976—the post-Watergate election.

That’s a mandate, albeit a rather vague one.

On election night 2008, Obama and the Dems had $1.5X of political capital, then Obama set an agenda that would cost about $1,000X of political capital.

Result?

Same as Bush II. He got nothing. But he managed to outrage the majority of the American people in the process. Bush II lost on Social Security reform, but it was over pretty quick and with no great animosity stemming from the effort.

Bush I was criticized for never spending a dime of his political capital. And he had a lot of it. His approval rating after winning the Gulf War was 93%. Bush II went to the other extreme. Then Obama set new records for overdrawing one’s political capital account.

Like Michelle and I said: Obama’s self-confidence far exceeds the reality of his abilities and he disastrously underestimates the abilities of his opponents. He thinks he’s God and the rest of us are not much more than millions of cockroaches.

Persistence and determination

I am the author of the book Succeeding. It tells you how to succeed in life in general. Succeeding is what Obama is not doing as president.

Somewhere in his life, Obama was told the key to success is to be persistent and determined. Has he done that with Obamacare? Absolutely. He is too passive about the contents of the law, but he is extremely persistent and determined to pass it. He keeps wagging his finger at the camera and swearing, “We’re gonna get this done.”

Is that correct leadership?

No. Persistence and determination are, indeed, important success factors in many cases. They are extremely important “tools” in the would-be successful person’s “tool box.” But just doubling down on persistence and determination every time you get stymied is a bad approach in many cases,

One situation where persistence and determination are bad is when you are talking to the boss and the boss says no. Good bosses expect you to state your case. You can even state it forcefully and defend it against harsh questions from the boss. But when the boss ultimately rejects your recommendation, it’s over.

If, at that point, you persist in arguing your recommendation, all you’re going to do is piss the boss off and get your ass fired. You’re badgering or browbeating the boss, not informing him, trying to win by wearing the other side down with the sheer force of your willpower.

President Lyndon Johnson was that kind of leader, and got same worthy laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but he dramatically set back his own party and his own legacy in the process.

Obama thinks by becoming president, he became the boss of all bosses—the top guy. No. He became the top politician. In a democracy, the people are the boss. The president is a public servant. He’s a big shot within the White House, and a celebrity outside of it, but he has no authority to boss around either Congress or the American people. This former Constitutional law teacher does not comprehend that, or refuses to.

Fouad Ajami said, “Obama imagined that he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one’s own image.”

At first, the American people and especially his white supporters looked on in stunned disbelieving silence. Then Rick Santelli went nuts on CNBC and spontaneously suggested a tea party in Chicago. The idea caught on and the American people woke up to the danger of this nut job in the Oval Office.

Obama has been told no firmly. Yet, he persists. He and his associates say he has not had a chance to explain health care to the American people.

Say what!?

1. Part of the reason for that is there has never been a specific Obamacare plan. It has always been an amorphous, vague, ever-changing, will’o the wisp. That’s his fault. He seems to have delegated the matter to Pelosi and Reid with some vague instruction like “Do some sort of health care bill that makes me an FDR-like national hero forever.” He is not the boss of the country, but he is the boss of the Democrat party. He should have set the basic parameters of Obamacare. Instead he delegated the whole thing to Pelosi and Reid and they produced a monstrosity that resembles, and in a real sense, was caused by, the gerrymandered districts from which they were elected.
2. He has had years during the campaign and since the election to explain it.
3. If he needs to explain it better, why is it not on C-Span and on the Internet?

He can’t sell IT because there is not now and never has been any IT and he doesn’t know, or care, what IT will ultimately be as long as he gets to be the hero for making IT law.

Political pundits like to point out that you can’t beat somebody with nobody in response to discussion about how unpopular some elected official is. By the same token, you can’t beat something with nothing. In this case, the “something” is the health care status quo in America. Obama tried to wipe that out with his plan which does not exist. His basic position was,

My plan, which Congress is still fleshing out, is infinitely better than the status quo, which is an intolerable disaster. I don’t know what’s in my plan. No one does. And you can’t see it or hear it or watch it get debated or see it online. Now, how dare you vote against MY plan!?

By applying persistence and determination to the passage of Obamacare—whatever Obamacare turns out to be—Obama is pissing off his “boss” and inspiring that “bosses” to conclude that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are trying to shove an unwanted law down their throats. That is precisely the bad result you get from the inappropriate application of persistence and determination to situations where competent leaders recognize other approaches are required.

Persistence and determination are appropriate when you apply them to inanimate objects or animals or to yourself. Lifting more weight, cutting all the trees and pulling all the stumps on a parcel of forest you want to farm, hunting for bighorn sheep.

Relationships with human beings are a different situation. They are interactive. Iterative. Two-way streets. Subtle. Long-term. You have to listen to each other. You have to compromise—within your principles. You cannot go to war repeatedly with your wife or friend or boss or, in the case of a president of a democracy, with your citizens. If you mindlessly persist pressing your case in a relationship like a marriage or friendship or employee-employer, you will destroy the relationship.

This is worse than a rookie manager mistake. This is an adolescent mistake—something a teenage boy might do after seeing a movie where the action hero lived by the credo, “Never give up. Never give in.”

I have already accused Obama of getting his one-size-fits-all-situations, all-purpose demeanor from a Dry Idea deodorant commercial slogan:

Never let them see you sweat.

No-Drama Obama

He is also called “No-Drama Obama” by his staff. What’s the difference between that and Johnny One-Note—a person who shows no emotion about anything. During the 1988 presidenial campaign, Democrat Michael Dukakis did “No-Drama Dukakis” when asked in a debate what he would do if his wife were raped. His response was so professorial that it creeped people out—and he lost the election.

In Obama’s case, he got elected, but he is president in a world with many dramas—wheter he likes it or not—like the daily deaths of soldiers he sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. He does not get to write the entire script. But he does have to lead the nation and our allies through all those dramas. He and the people he leads must take dramatic action in response to many of the dramas beseting us. There is a time for drama and leaders of large organizations have to be actors to an extent because they cannot relate one-on-one to every citizen. Good actors have range. Nobody ever got an Oscar for being, say, “No-Drama” Meryl Streep.

On 1/22/10, Obama made his angriest speech yet, doubling down once again on determination, putting a sharper edge on his voice, yelling even louder that, “We’re gonna get this done!” As if he has the power to force us to accept every single one of his programs or else.

As in Copenhagen, where he was supposed to be talking about why the IOC should award the Olympics to Chicago, it was all about him. His Copenhagen sales pitch was all about him. And his 1/22/10 speech after the Brown victory in MA was also all about him. I, I, I, I. From his perspective, everything is all about him, including health care, cap & trade, financial regulation, you name it. To the rest of America, it’s about jobs, health of the citizens, and so on. To Obama, everything is about him, everything is personal. To him, resistance to “his” health care program, which really has never existed in a final version, is a personal attack on him and his opponents have no other motivation but to hurt him.

The only other word he used again and again—28 times—was “fight.” Fight whom? He shouted that he will not stop fighting for jobs. Against whom? Who is trying to prevent jobs? No one.

This is another of Obama’s cheap rhetorical tricks: trashing nonexistent straw men whom he implies are advocating some awful policy—like preventing job creation. No one is doing those things in any of his straw-man speeches, but listeners who are not too bright come away inspired by his heroic efforts against those imaginary straw men.

This man is truly dangerous.

Dwindling defenders

When I criticized Obama during the campaign and early in his presidency, many attacked me strongly. Many seemed to be blacks who have racial reasons for their blind support. But nowadays, I get no such response. His supporters are demoralized and clinging to flimsy excuses like “It’s still too early to evaluate him.” Hell! He evaluated himself: “A strong B+” Although he responds to all criticism with his magic words “the failed policies of the last eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration.” I am starting to think that he is working up to telling us we cannot evaluate him until his entire eight years are up. And I expect that when that time arrives, he will switch to blaming the new administration for not continuing his brilliant policies that were just about to work after their eight-year gestation period.

Negotiation stance

When you are negotiating, you have to take a stand and convey that you will not be moved—somewhat. This is a field known as game theory. Game theory says you have to bluff some of the time. You cannot bluff all the time. And you cannot never bluff.

Perhaps the top leader in my lifetime to hold the presidency was Ronald Reagan. Once, when he was governor of California, he was in a dispute with the Democratic legislature. He said he “feet are in concrete” on the issue. Later, at a press conference, he jokingly said, “The cracking sound you hear is the concrete around my feet breaking up.” He laughed, compromised, and got the law enacted. Obama is incapable of doing that.

Now look at another negotiation by Reagan. Shortly after he became president, the air traffic controllers went on strike. Reagan, who is the only president who was previously the head of a union, told them that it was illegal for them to strike because of their crucial role in safety and the economy of the nation and international air travel. Their feet were in concrete. He gave them 48 hours to get back to work. Most refused. He fired them and when they later agreed to his terms he said, “Too late.” They are still fired 29 years later.

Why the difference between the two Reagan incidents? unlike Bush II and Obama, Reagan could accurately calculate his political capital and legal authority.

Result? The entire U.S. and the rest of the world were damned careful when they negotiated with Reagan thereafter. He generally got credit for winning the cold war and part of the reason was his toughness when toughness was feasible.

Obama erroneously thinks toughness is just something you just adopt and fake regardless of your strengths and weaknesses and the details of the situation. He makes such mistakes because he is a man-child unqualified for the position he holds.

Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had been hamstrung because the Iranians took a bunch of Americans hostage. After Reagan won election, but before inauguration, a joke went around.

What’s green and glows in the dark?

Tehran after inauguration day.

Guess what happened ON inauguration day—during the inauguration ceremony?

The Iranians released the hostages without a single U.S.-Iran meeting, demand being met, or anything of the sort. They got nothing for the release, except relief from the fear that Reagan would ask Congress for a declaration of war against Iran. They humiliated Carter because he was weak—like Obama. When Reagan got elected, the Iranians said, in Farsi, “Oh, shit! This guy is no Jimmy Carter!” and they released the hostages before Reagan got back to the White House from the ceremony. It was actually a bit comical at the time.

Obama doesn’t bluff. As any poker player can tell you, if you never bluff, you never can win big. If you have good cards, the opponent will know it because you never bluff, and they will fold so you will win little. If you have bad cards, you will fold, because not folding in that circumstance, would be bluffing and you never bluff. Never bluffing and always bluffing are stupid violations of game theory.

Obama never bluffs or backs down because he is too insecure to ever give in, even when he has clearly overreached.

That form of incompetence, in another context, could get us into World War III.