Barack Obama has a new problem: credibility. Where he was once the unbound ideologue and then the flatfooted amateur, he has become the transparently talentless spinner. It is a uniquely damaging role for a president.
“[O]ne of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech,” writes Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler about Obama’s Saturday address on the auto-industry bailout. “Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.”
Kessler is right. The president is selling lemons. Last year’s “Recovery Summer” wasn’t a reality. It was a sales drive, intended to shove the Obama economy down American throats in time for midterm elections. In stagnant 2010, it was pathetic. In sliding 2011, it is surreal. Today, in a speech at Northern Virginia Community College, Obama claimed that his “Skills for America’s Future” program will get half a million community college students prepared for manufacturing jobs. But in reality, employment in the manufacturing sector fell by 5,000 jobs in May. Why throw public money into a well-trained army of the jobless? In Virginia, Obama touted the benefits of federal stimulus while even the stimulus’s advocates are now reconciling themselves to the “surprising” longevity of our economic doldrums.
When the president tries to explain the nuances of our mission in Libya, he sounds like Anthony Weiner on the refinements of digital crotch portraiture and cybercrime. No one in the country is clear on the administration’s rationale for war.
We half-heartedly followed a noble coalition into a murky humanitarian effort, but we can’t leave until we’re done “supporting” the accidental killing of the head of state. It’s no wonder Obama is fearful of the War Powers Resolution. His fetish for internationalism and American humility has left him incapable of selling the worthwhile Libyan war to Congress.
One could go on. ObamaCare, Israel, leaving Iraq, drawing down in Afghanistan, green-energy “innovation”—you name it. Wherever there’s progress, the president is looking for exits. Where there’s folly or disaster, he’s doubling down. And for each experiment in the absurd he’s got to make a sales pitch to a country that’s not buying.
Obama is inept at spin because it never occurred to him that he’d have failures in need of spinning. He took the rightness of liberal policy prescriptions as articles of faith. He didn’t even need to know what was in the ObamaCare bill. It would work because liberalism, given its day in the sun, was prophesized to succeed.
His initiatives and modifications are based on notions that were nurtured in the hot houses of academia and the activist circuit. Obama never had to defend his ideas before, let alone his policies. A less visionary paladin could roll up his sleeves and artfully push a few lemons off the lot. Instead, our president has no means with which to take on an incredulous consumer public—one demanding that everything must go.
