Agreement II

Ed Morrissey has a terrific blog post over at his home at Hot Air.   He excerpts an interview from Politico with the man who should be the president now (if only they had listened to me), Rudy Giuliani.  Ed focuses on Giuliani’s assertion that the Obama administration has no one but themselves to blame for the current health care fiasco (Giuliani “They never really studied the legislation that has been proposed.”)  Ed then uses the interview as a basis for some terrific observations of his own, key among them:

It does demonstrate…the curious disengagement of a President who promised hope and change on the campaign trail.  He seems perfectly content to let Nancy Pelosi run his domestic policy with no interference or even any particular objection.  Of the big three agenda items Obama has pushed this year, one might have expected him to get most personally involved in health-care reform, the one issue that started with bipartisan support both in the Beltway and among the electorate.  Instead, he has floated above the fray and above the details and the hard work, and it shows.  When nuggets like Section 1233 come to light, the White House response has been late, incorrect, and usually more damaging than the initial criticisms.

Obama’s not leading.  He’s campaigning, and doing that on a float of ignorance about the very bill he touts.  Giuliani has it right — this is the President with no leadership clothes at all.

The italics above are mine for, to me, the section is key to understanding Obama.  He has no details because he’s never worked to learn them.  I wish I could remember who it was a few weeks ago who said Obama has never had to work hard at anything in his life.  Usually just showing up and making a speech was all that was asked of him.  It’s clear now that he thought he could get away with the same thing as president.  But politics is the art of persuasion and he lacks the information to properly persuade the nation. 

He’s never had to work hard.  He probably doesn’t have it in him.  I recall about two weeks after the inauguration an article in the paper whose main point was how exhausted Obama and the members of his staff were.  My wife and I were incredulous – two weeks!  There were similar stories earlier from the campaign, the Obama people boo-hooing about how tired they were.  Well, too bad.  This whole meme gets down to one of my long-time beliefs: what separates great men from the not-so-great is that the great possess a level of energy and dedication most of us mere mortals don’t.  Edison’s famous quote, “success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration,” is, in my view, true.  Of course, the perspiration must be combined with some true talent.  Tiger Woods was blessed with the talent to be the greatest golfer who ever lived, but he wouldn’t have been had he not dedicated himself to it with a lifetime of rigorous hard work, hard work most of us are incapable of. 

Obama too seems incapable of it, or anything even close to it.  Hillary said during the campaign that all Obama had ever done was make a speech in 2004.  He rode the buzz from that speech all the way to the White House but now he’s finding (or should be) that speech-making is not nearly enough, especially when those speeches are filled with platitudes, evasions, and downright falsehoods.  If he can’t reasonably explain to the American public why comprehensive health care reform is necessary; if he doesn’t master the details of those reforms; if he can’t win the argument about whether the planned reforms would benefit us, he’ll lose (the same goes for cap-and-trade energy policy and next year’s planned immigration reform.)  And that’s going to take hard work on his part, along with something else I’m not sure he’s capable of - compromise. Ramming legislation through Congress before anyone has a chance to read or understand it is a thing of the past for this administration.  From now on it’s going to take work, persuasion, and ability to realize what the American people really want.  Obama, if he is smart, will learn the limitations of the Chicago-way of politics, of the Saul Alinsky method.  His only hope of a successful administration now is to move to the middle ala Bill Clinton, persuading independents and some consrvatives to work with him to pass real bipartisan legislation that the majority of Americans favor.  All other roads lead to failure.