The juicy Game Change book, which landed Harry Reid in political quicksand, is even more damaging to Joe Biden and, by extension, to the president’s own image as chief executive. As Politico recounts:
The relationship between Barack Obama and Joe Biden grew so strained during the 2008 campaign, according to a new book, that the two rarely spoke and aides not only kept Biden off internal conference calls but refused to even tell him they existed. Instead, a separate campaign call was regularly scheduled between the then-Delaware senator and two of Obama’s top campaign aides — “so that they could keep a tight rein on him,” write journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. … The tensions began in September of 2008 [when] word got back to Obama’s campaign headquarters that Biden had told reporters on his campaign plane that he was more qualified than his running mate to be president.
“A chill set in between Chicago and the Biden plane,” Halperin and Heilemann write in the book, to be released Monday. “Joe and Obama barely spoke by phone, rarely campaigned together.”
And when Obama campaign manager David Plouffe was asked about having Biden dial into the nightly campaign conference call, he responded: “Nah.” Instead, Biden had his own call with Plouffe and senior campaign adviser David Axelrod.
Obama himself was growing increasingly frustrated with his running mate after Biden let loose with a string of gaffes, including a statement that paying higher taxes amounted to patriotism and criticism of one of the campaign’s own ads poking fun at John McCain.
But when Biden, at an October fund-raiser in Seattle, famously predicted that Obama would be tested with an international crisis, the then-Illinois senator had had enough.
“How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid?” he demanded of his advisers on a conference call, a moment at which most people on the call said the candidate was as angry as they had ever heard him.
Well, we knew Joe Biden was a loudmouthed buffoon. Indeed, most people knew that before he was selected as Obama’s VP. His gaffes were well known, his penchant for cringe-inducing boasts was no secret, and he was, after all, bounced from one presidential campaign for appropriating Neil Kinnock’s life account as his own. But here’s the thing: Obama selected him anyway. So what is the real message here — that Biden was a goofball, or that Obama showed atrocious judgment in making the most important personnel call, one that cannot be reversed until 2012?
If Obama was furious at his VP, he should perhaps have thought back to the vetting process. Surely, Eric Holder and Caroline Kennedy didn’t let him down by failing to take their candidate through Biden’s shortcomings chapter and verse, right? Obama nevertheless made the decision to hire someone for whom he had contempt. Nice work.
Moreover, in office Biden has not only lived up to his reputation for gaffes; his judgment, most especially on Afghanistan, has been (as it has been for 30 years) faulty. To Obama’s credit, Biden’s advice was rejected on the surge, although one suspects the process would have been less excruciating and prolonged had it not been for Biden’s efforts to override the advice of all our military commanders.
Obama hasn’t distinguished himself as an executive. His Afghanistan policy-making process was tortured, and he has outsourced much of that policy making to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid — who proceeded to junk up the stimulus and come up with the worst-of-all-worlds health-care bill. He flunked the 3 a.m. telephone-call test on the Christmas Day bombing. But it’s in his personnel selection — from the hapless and ethically challenged Tim Geithner to the decidedly unwise Sonia Sotomayor to the goofy James Jones — where he has demonstrated his utter lack of executive competence. And the prime example is the man who sits the proverbial one heartbeat away from the presidency.
Do any of us really believe that GW actually KNEW the details about that phrase that you so fully and clearly described?
I mean who here would bet the ranch on that one?
GW butchers language, English, Spanish, you name it; it it can be botched, GW will surely do so.
Now he may have been fingered inappropriately for this one, as you mentioned, ————————————– but in the larger scheme of things, the case against GW’s command of this or any language is air tight, rock solid.
GW stands well indicted as a flaming, verbal cripple.
And we in the GOP should never have considered him for high office.
“GW stands well indicted as a flaming, verbal cripple”
I guess you missed the Knesset speech?
“GW stands well indicted as a flaming, verbal cripple”
I guess you also missed PRESIDENT BUSH’s victory over an incumbent VP, AG, & victory over JK (the JK who served 3 months in Vietnam) with the most votes ever in a presidental election. OH how I love that state of TEXAS!!.
George Bush is the single worst extemporaneous speaker in the modern history of the American presidency. He’s just awful.
And it has been a major drag on his ability to perform many of his duties as President. Especially as head of state – not reading prepared statements – and as commander in chief.
I don’t like it; but I can’t ignore it.
folks, who cares about his speaking. it’s his policies that are the problem.
as to hazony’s analysis, while he is liguistically correct, mazal tov is usually understood in common use as good luck. he IS nitpicking here.
I love this. I agree Dubya is no Churchill. But to have a NYT reporter call him on something of which she clearly has an imperfect grasp is simply too marvelous. I would at least check with someone who knew the language in question well before publishing such a “correction.” Of course “Jewish” knowledge is not widespread among many secular Jews and even some religious. That being the case, the thing to do is study up.
To be fair to Ms. Stolberg, the phrase “mazal tov” (or “mazel tov”) is rarely used that way by native English speakers – but native Hebrew speakers use it in that grammatical construct all the time. Example: “she-yih’yeh lekha mazal tov,” translates into “there should be ‘mazel tov’ for you.”
I am sure that what happened is this: President Bush has native Hebrew speakers (or at least fluent Hebrew speakers) on his staff, and they advised him how to use the phrase based on how Israelis use it.
Ms. Stolberg is clearly not a Hebrew speaker – at least not a fluent one – and prominently displayed that fact to the world with this article. Congratulations, Ms. Stolberg, foot has successfully reached mouth!
“GW stands well indicted as a flaming, verbal cripple.”
I don’t usually cavil about the use of language, but if you’re going to call someone a name like that you should do so without grammatical errors. I recall an explanation from my ninth-grade English text about when to separate adjectives by a comma. The rule of thumb given was that it’s appropriate to use a comma when the word “and” could be inserted between the adjectives. This always works, and if you had imagined what it would sound like to say “a flaming and verbal cripple” you would have realized how awful the comma would look.
This reminds me of JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner”.
Countless silly-clever critics have exhausted their wits arguing that
the words mean “I am a jelly doughnut”, and that
he should have said “Ich bin Berliner”.
“In fact, Kennedy’s statement is both grammatically correct and perfectly idiomatic, and cannot be misunderstood in context.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner#Jelly_doughnut_urban_legend)
#8 Peter Shalen:
Fair enough: “forgive us our solecisms as we forgive those who solecize against us.”
But snub a snob.
First-hand opinion: Ted Sorensen, in his recent memoir reviewed in yesterdays Sunday Times’ Book Review, claims he was responsible for inserting “ein” into Kennedy’s speech, and admits to it being an error, that the meaning as then understood among Berliners was “jelly doughtnut,” but they also understood what he was trying to say. It is not, in other words, an urban legend, and please remember that articles in Wikipedia are rarely considered definiitive sources.
I love this even more. How DO native English speakers use mazel tov or other foreign phrases they don’t understand? With care and caution I hope.
But first hand opinion gets at what irks me most. It is the arrogance of the put down of Bush, which went to print without the facts ever being checked (are there fluent Hebrew speakers at the NYT? I’m sure they could find one). And they have layers of editors, sub editors, copy editors, etc. etc.–and still no one asked, is this in fact correct?
That this could happen reveals a lot about how preconceptions frame news stories, and does so in a straight factual way.
hehe.. This page about zodiac signs
is good too.