On “Fox and Friends” this morning at 7 a.m. came the news that President Obama and Speaker Boehner had had a phone call last evening, content not disclosed.
That shouldn’t have been news—these are the leaders of each party trying to avoid a governmental disaster that could come in less than a month, and should be talking 10 times a day. But it was news, and that’s troubling to say the least.
As Daniel Henninger makes clear in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Where in his career did Barack Obama ever learn the art of the political deal? Nowhere.” He writes:
Recall the famous Blair House summit he called early in 2010 amid the legislating over Obamacare. Lamar Alexander, Tom Coburn, Paul Ryan and other Republicans talked about wonkish compromises. All of it, every single idea, blew right by the president. Naturally the legislation got zero GOP votes. A kid running for high-school president could have gotten more opposition votes than that.
Obama negotiates with Congressional Republicans the way General MacArthur negotiated with the Japanese on the deck of the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945: Here’s a pen, sign your surrender. But the Japanese were powerless at that point; the Republicans are not today–they hold the House.
Compare that with how Lyndon Johnson got Medicare through Congress in 1965. Johnson was vastly more politically potent in 1965 than is Obama today. Johnson had just carried all but six states in the presidential election and with a higher percentage of the popular vote than FDR achieved in 1936. The Senate was 68-32 Democratic (as compared with 53-47 right now), the House was 295-140 Democratic (as compared with 241-191 Republican).
But Johnson treated Congress as a part of the process, not an annoying obstruction to his will. “I am not for denouncing Congress all the time,” he told a historian that year. “I am not like . . . writers who think of congressmen as archaic buffoons with tobacco drool running down their shirts. . . . I got up at seven this morning to have breakfast with them. I don’t have contempt for them.”
As James T. Patterson explains in a new book, “LBJ spent hours on the phone with congressmen and senators, held frequent one-on-one meetings with leaders, and hosted regular Tuesday morning breakfast gatherings at the White House.” No wonder he got 13 Republican votes in the Senate and fully half the Republicans in the House to vote for Medicare. In contrast, the first time Barack Obama bothered to meet with Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in the Senate, for a one-on-one chat was in July 2010, sixteen full months into his presidency. He’d had time for dozens of rounds of golf by then.
Obama’s utter disdain for any ideas but his own is going to be the ruin of this president and that ruin might not be that long in coming. Too bad it is the country, along with his place in history, that has to suffer for his hubris.
Lyndon B. Johnson was also a workaholic. Obama is a very lazy man. We should not overlook this character flaw. I am personally unaware of any president in American history who was anywhere near as lazy as the present occupant of the White House. Can anyone even point out a close second?
"Lazy' is a racist code word, don't you know? n nJust like sour, icy, drizzly, cloudy, sparse, threatening, empty and any other word that has a negative connotation. n nToure, and the NYTIMES, told me so.
Another "racist" word is "Chicago".
and "apartment"
Thank God he is lazy. Imagine how much more damage he could do if he were a hard worker.
Good point!
LBJ had also been in Congress, as a senator and in the House, for what… decades? Obama was a half-term senator that barely knew where his office was.r nr nRegardless, we're likely stuck with this self-absorbed, useless nincompoop for another four years. The bitter fruits of his ineptitude will be harvested over that time, making them likely very difficult ones. Good luck to us all, we're gonna need it.
Truly remarkable that no one noticed this for the past six years. (ok, I know I am not the only one who did notice the absence of presidential leadership and disdain for schmoozing) n nMaybe he prefers Caro's "The Power Broker": Robert Moses as role model. n nHarry Truman managed to get the Marshall Plan thru Congress. Helps to play poker with your former Senate friends. n n
Don't think this is going unnoticed on the left. Obama will ultimately lose even his adoring press. It is already starting. Obama will be seen as the true obstructionist.
“Obama will ultimately lose even his adoring press. It is already starting.” n nIt is? I would be interested in some compelling examples. n nIn my view Obama is merely a front man for the Liberal media. The more he is out of the way flying around making campaign speeches and playing golf, the less he, with his nonexistent executive/leadership/management skills, is mucking things up for the Progressive wonks running things in the background. (Notice how much flack Obama gets in the MSM for playing lots and lots of golf?) If Obama actually rolled up his sleeves and got involved in actual process of creating laws and policies, with his nonexistent executive/leadership/management skills, who knows what would happen, least of all the President himself. Things could get really chaotic; the media might be put in the awkward spot of having to criticize Obama, which as we all know is a racist act. Yikes! n nAs long as Obama continues to waste money at the present outrageous rate, he’ll be fine with or without more tax revenues. If the country “goes over the fiscal cliff,” the media will hold up its end and make sure all blame goes to the GOP and Bush, and maybe even Reagan, if they can manage to overachieve. n nBHO is certainly not LBJ, and I suspect the MSM reckons that is a good thing.
Obama's doing exactly what he should be doing — letting the GOPers stew. They've said raising taxes on the rich is off the table, so what's the use of talking?
HillelA, as a former liberal, I enjoy reading your comments. It reminds me how much I've grown as a person. To promote the idea that it's okay for the president to be playing "chicken" with the country's long-term future likely at stake seems to be the height of childishness. But, then, we get the gov't we vote for, so maybe that is what it will take to wake us up…
Prof. Gordon states the case beautifully. President Obama has yet to demonstrate any skill at passing bipartisan legislation, any "art of the deal". Any deal will have to be worked out in reality between the Senate and House leadership.
Next, we might all want to identify where his "hubris" has led him! Once a man or woman comes to the "realization" that he knows better than anyone else in the world how human beings should live, the thing cascades, becomes monstrous. Even Hitler in 1933 was not the maniacal fanatic he had become by 1936. By 1940, the Nazi dictator had turned from being merely an unstable, hateful, racist lunatic, into a full-blown, delusional, psychopathic criminal! n nIs Barack Obama such a man, liable to turn into something monstrous? Yes, unless we stop him. And that's the trouble with electing such men to positions of power—at a point citizens then must oppose them, remove them from office before they go too far, or suffer the consequences. n nWhat should worry all of us is the degree to which almost one-half of Americans think lying is just as good as telling the truth. So long as they get what they desire, the lies are just fine with them. And this is nowhere more apparent than among black Americans, many of whom defend Obama's lies in order to keep the "benefits" flowing! To me, this is pathological, a serious problem in a substantial segment of our society. Scamming the system is not confined to black Americans, but many of their number seem to think they are "entitled" to get whatever they want from the rest of us, no matter how they get it, no matter how it damages the United States, and how it affects their white, hispanic and Asian neighbors. n nAnd Obama, just as surely as Hitler stoked the worst traits in the German character in order to make war on the rest of Europe, especially the Jews, is feeding the resentments, disappointments and despair many black citizens feel. What Obama does not do—for reasons that are both cynical and hateful—is address the problems blacks face, in order to help them find a dignified and effective way to move past them. Just as the Arabs have done with the Palestinians since 1948, Obama intends to keep black Americans "in their place," so that he can harness their rage and despair to further his political goals. How do I know this is so? Friends, this is standard Marxist operating procedure, no mystery, nothing new, surprising only insofar as so few seem to connect this to Obama! n nBarack Obama is America's worst nightmare: a man who believes what this nation has sworn to eradicate from the earth wherever possible. Where America itself is dedicated to preserving and defending human liberty, Obama's ideology seeks to bind human beings to him and his ideas. And, that black Americans—along with a huge majority of my people, America's Jews—defend and promote this man and what he stands for, will—if John Steele Gordon is correct in his prognosis—bring the wrath of the American people down on all of our heads. And that probability will perhaps be Obama's most tragic legacy of all. He will go down in flames at some point, but so will those who put him where he is.
Correction: "he will go down in flames at some point, but so will…" ALL OF US.
Lyndon Johnson was at the epicenter of the JFK assassination. Read these books:__1) "LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination" by Phillip Nelson_2) Watch "The Men Who Killed Kennedy – the Guilty Men – episode 9" at YouTube – best video ever on the JFK assassination
Google LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK.