The Increasingly Self-Pitying Obama White House

[bijou]

According to the preview offered by Vanity Fair:

    [Todd] Purdum spends a day inside the West Wing and talks to Obama’s top aides, who tell him about the challenges of playing the Beltway game, ugly as it has become, even as their boss insists they find a way to transcend it.

    “There’s a relentlessness to this that’s unlike anything else, especially when you come into office in a time of crisis,” says Obama senior adviser David Axelrod. “We did not exactly ease into the tub. The world is so much smaller, and events reverberate much more quickly, and one person can create an event so quickly from one computer terminal.”

    Larry Summers, who served as Clinton’s Treasury secretary for the last 18 months of his term, says, “It used to be there was a kind of rhythm to the day” with the tempo picking up after the markets closed and as newspaper deadlines approached, between four and seven P.M. “That’s gone.” And, according to Rahm Emanuel, C.I.A. director Leon Panetta thinks “it’s a huge problem” that Washington runs at such “a highly caffeinated speed.”

    Emanuel calls it “F***nutsville,” and Valerie Jarrett says she looks back wistfully to a time when credible people could put a stamp of reliability on information and opinion: “Walter Cronkite would get on and say the truth, and people believed the media,” she says.

    It got so bad last December that President Obama and Emanuel would joke that, when it was all over, they were going to open a T-shirt stand on a beach in Hawaii. It would face the ocean and sell only one color and one size. “We didn’t want to make another decision, or choice, or judgment,” Emanuel tells Purdum. They took to beginning staff meetings with Obama smiling at Emanuel and simply saying “White,” and Emanuel nodding back and replying “Medium.”

I’ll reserve final judgment until I read the entire piece. But based on these excerpts — which presumably reflect the thrust of the 10,000-word article — what is striking is the degree of self-pity we find in Obama’s advisers, which is reflected in the president’s words and attitude as well. Team Obama sounds nothing so much as overmatched and overwhelmed, unable to understand what has gone wrong, and increasingly bitter toward the nation’s capital and the pace and nature of politics. ...

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/wehner/338666

[Mike220]

They took to beginning staff meetings with Obama smiling at Emanuel and simply saying “White,” and Emanuel nodding back and replying “Medium.”

Racist!!!11!elventy!!1!

 

[BlueStateSaint]

This quote is telling . . .

Valerie Jarrett says she looks back wistfully to a time when credible people could put a stamp of reliability on information and opinion: “Walter Cronkite would get on and say the truth, and people believed the media,” she says.

Now, people think for themselves.  Witness the rise of the New Media . . . 

[debk]

In the last several weeks, when seeing Obama talk...whether on tv (interviews, The View), or his campaign speecifying...I think there has been a distinctive whine to his voice.

Women whine. We are genetically predisposed to so do.

Real Men....bitch and moan.

A man whining is effeminate and completely unattrative.

The President of the United States whining.....is disgraceful and to me, an obvious sign of weakness that proclaims to the world "oh look at me, getting beat up by all these bullies, pity me".

The world is sitting back ....laughing at the US.

[zeitgeist]

In the last several weeks, when seeing Obama talk...whether on tv (interviews, The View), or his campaign speecifying...I think there has been a distinctive whine to his voice.

Women whine. We are genetically predisposed to so do.

Real Men....bitch and moan.

A man whining is effeminate and completely unattrative.

The President of the United States whining.....is disgraceful and to me, an obvious sign of weakness that proclaims to the world "oh look at me, getting beat up by all these bullies, pity me".

The world is sitting back ....laughing at the US.

Sounds like you are describing what Rush would call a Metrosexual or Castra-te`.  Yup it fits.  But is this really Obummer's fault?  After all, it would seem he never really had a strong father figure in his life.

And now this snip from Thomas Dolan's Editorial Commentary in this weeks Barron's.

{snip}

The Future Is Always Uncertain

There's no telling what the current great reset will produce. Clearly it was going on for years before the financial crisis, and it includes a shift of skilled and unskilled labor out of manufacturing and into services.

Florida imagines that the world is rearranging itself more to his liking, creating wealthy urban clusters of talented members of the "creative class," who live in high-rise apartments and are happy to pay taxes for public services such as transportation.

But suppose instead that America is led by people determined to preserve the old economy with the tools of nationalism—macroeconomic stimulus, protectionism, inflation, price controls, subsidies and regulation.

McCullough sees a lot of that today, and more coming: "You get a complete breakdown of American society, replete with corruption and abuse of power, a brutal economic recession, wrenching long-term unemployment, massive deficit spending and an opportunity for power-grabbing, stagnant wages, lack of consumer confidence and very unnerving price instability."

Americans must choose: futile stimulus or creative investment.

[RightCoast]

Valerie Jarrett says she looks back wistfully to a time when credible people could put a stamp of reliability on information and opinion: “Walter Cronkite would get on and say the truth LIE, and people believed the media,” she says.