The New York Times asks, “Are the missteps at the White House rooted in message or substance?”
The question is not quite right. A better one is: Was there ever substance behind the message? Every talking point Barack Obama has attempted to turn into policy went to dust in his hands. His missteps came from thinking that message is substance.
The funny thing is that the White House plans to make a comeback by digging in on the message front. The Times reports on tonight’s State of the Union address: “The speech will be punctuated with a handful of new ideas — calling for a spending freeze on a portion of the domestic budget — but aides said it would largely be an opportunity for Mr. Obama to return to the proposals that swept him into office.”
What proposals? To close Gitmo, ram through universal health care, rally against Wall Street, dismantle the War on Terror, apologize for America’s sins at every turn, and blame George W. Bush for everything? He can’t very well “return to” the bad ideas he’s held fast to all along. The problem is that what swept him into office is exactly what fails as policy: vague, naive, left-wing children’s stories.
The president has tried to camouflage his policy failings in half-commitments and contradictions. This tactic has put Obama in a deeper hole than people are acknowledging. He now has nowhere to go, because in his effort to be politically elusive, he’s already been everywhere. Consider the range of criticisms thrown his way. He’s been a cozy friend of big business, an enemy of capitalism, an American apologist, an American war-monger, a populist, and an elitist. The country is sick of the Man of a Thousand Political Disguises.
Remember Obama’s big revelatory line? “I am new enough on the national political stage to serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such I am bound to disappoint some, if not all of them.” He phrased it as if he were talking about a hindrance, but a year later it’s clear he believed it to be an asset. After all, Obama could have corrected this perception very easily. Being “new enough” doesn’t make you a blank screen; being opaque does.
Now, Barack Obama isn’t even new. His act has gotten so old so fast he no longer holds his own attention at the lectern. Yet he continues to insult Americans by thinking he can still effortlessly hold ours.