Can Obama Save His Presidency?

As cold fear rises in the mainstream media that President Obama may be in over his head, my thoughts go back to a dinner I attended in New York last December. Obama had just been elected and the Right was deeply fearful that he might indeed live up to his hype and be a new FDR. One of the attendees at this dinner happened to be one of the very, very few right-of-center people who can legitimately claim to know Barack Obama well on both the personal and professional levels. (I cannot give his name because his comments were off the record, but I have provided it to the editor of New Majority.) Naturally, we were all curious about his assessment of the new president-elect. He was reluctant to speak to the subject initially, but gave in after some good-natured urging.

"Two observations," he said. "First, I have never known him to change his mind on any issue of any significance, even when provided with new facts and new information."

As we digested that rather disturbing bit of information, he added the second.

"And I don't think he has the foggiest notion of how an economy works."

When you think about it, though, neither observation ought to be terribly surprising. Unlike Bill Clinton, who had to survive in a culturally conservative state like Arkansas for two decades before becoming president, Barack Obama has lived his entire life in a left-liberal bubble. When he wasn't living in Indonesia, he was living in Hawaii, the most culturally atypical (and one of the most politically liberal) states in the Union. From everything I've read about them, the grandparents who raised him would not have felt out of place at a Communist Party USA meeting. Then there was Columbia and Harvard. He cut his political teeth in Chicago, and there can be little doubt he views the private sector the way any liberal, urban politician views the private sector: as a cow to be milked. He doesn't want the cow to die, of course. But it's not the politician's job to feed the cow, care for the cow, or see to it that the cow is healthy. That is somebody else's job. All the urban liberal politician wants to hear when he gets up in the morning is that the cow is giving milk, and will give more tomorrow. The mechanics of how that actually gets done is simply not his concern. He was elected to redistribute wealth, not create it. That is what Obama was getting at in his unscripted moment with Joe the Plumber last fall.

So, for those out there who think the president is inclined - or even able - to "pull a Clinton" and tack to the political center, someone who has known him for over a decade doesn't think it's in his DNA. And there isn't much evidence to the contrary. We have a president whose beliefs are rigid and who is ignorant of basic economics. Maybe all this will still work out, but any such belief has to be based more on faith than on evidence.