On Bowing, Competence and a Need for Real Leadership

*This importance treatise on the Obama presidency has been bumped up *

During the presidential campaign, Peggy Noonan rhapsodized about an Obama presidency, trashing Hillary Clinton to the bargain. Recent months have seen Ms. Noonan pen several articles deconstructing her prior romantic notions, reaching the same conclusions as the very people she derided for not jumping on Obama’s bandwagon. In her WSJ piece, He Can’t Take Another Bow, Noonan complains that the Obama White House is “coming to seem amateurish”:

This week, two points in an emerging pointillist picture of a White House leaking support—not the support of voters, though polls there show steady decline, but in two core constituencies, Washington’s Democratic-journalistic establishment, and what might still be called the foreign-policy establishment.

From journalist Elizabeth Drew, a veteran and often sympathetic chronicler of Democratic figures, a fiery denunciation of—and warning for—the White House. In a piece in Politico on the firing of White House counsel Greg Craig, Ms. Drew reports that while the president was in Asia last week, “a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man.” They once held “an unromantically high opinion of Obama,” and were key to his rise, but now they are concluding that the president isn’t “the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought.”

Misjudged? What other politician have you ever heard of who got a lot of important people to stake their reputations on his “integrity” without having offered any more than “words, just words” attesting to the same?

Noonan and Drew should not be surprised that another big Obama supporter now sits under his bus. Greg Craig was a highly respected operative and his early endorsement of Obama and simultaneous belittling of Hillary’s foreign policy street cred carried a lot of weight with beltway insiders. What a difference a year makes…

[Ms. Drew] scored “the Chicago crowd,” which she characterized as “a distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team.” The White House, Ms. Drew says, needs adult supervision—”an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment.”

And speaking of an older and wiser choice, this is the most telling part of Ms. Noonan’s article:

As I read Ms. Drew’s piece, I was reminded of something I began noticing a few months ago in bipartisan crowds. I would ask Democrats how they thought the president was doing. In the past they would extol, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, his virtues. Increasingly, they would preface their answer with, “Well, I was for Hillary.”

Thanks, Peggy, so was I. Noonan then worries that “No one loves Barack Obama; they’re not dazzled and head over heels. That’s gone away.” Is she kidding? The sycophantic press and his virulent supporters have not shown enough love? If she is wondering why the love has gone, I would like to point out one can only be dazzled by a movie trailer once. Having then paid for your ticket and bought your popcorn, you expect the film itself will deliver the goods. If the two minute trailer is as good as it gets, patrons will turn off very quickly.

“He himself seems a fairly chilly customer; perhaps in turn he inspires chilly support.”

Now Noonan’s figuring out he’s a chilly customer? There’s no there there. There never was. Please tell me which constituency or issue he has ever gone to the mat for? Noonan continues…

…In the Daily Beast. Mr. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and fully plugged into the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, wrote this week that the president’s Asia trip suggested “a disturbing amateurishness in managing America’s power.” The president’s Afghanistan review has been “inexcusably clumsy.”

He added that rather than bowing to emperors—Mr. Obama “seems to do this stuff spontaneously and inexplicably”—he should begin to bow to “the voices of experience” in Washington.

When longtime political observers start calling for wise men, a president is in trouble.

It appears Obama’s cheerleaders, The New York Times and Newsweek, concur with this thinking. During the primary, wine rack liberals I knew who supported Obama said “Congress does everything anyway. He’ll surround himself with really great people.” I wonder what they’re saying now about the “good judgment” they touted. One could say he exercised good judgment in appointing Hillary as SoS, yet he has been accused of hamstringing her at every turn. Many suspect the appointment was to ensure she was no longer a threat to him politically.

Aside from Noonan’s condemnation of the current health care bill “as a poor piece of legislation that Obama ought to scrap so that he may live to fight another day,” most shocking is her acknowledgment of what Democratic holdouts feared from the beginning:

There is the growing perception of incompetence, of the inability to run the machine of government. This, with Americans, is worse than Obama’s rebranding as a leader who governs from the left. Americans demands baseline competence. If he comes to be seen as Jimmy Carter was, that the job was bigger than the man, that will be the end.

She then brings us back to the issue of Obama once again bowing to a foreign head of state.

In a presidency, a picture or photograph becomes iconic only when it seems to express something people already think. When Gerald Ford was spoofed for being physically clumsy, it took off. The picture of Ford losing his footing and tumbling as he came down the steps of Air Force One became a symbol. There was a reason, and it wasn’t that he was physically clumsy. He was not only coordinated but graceful. He’d been a football star at the University of Michigan and was offered contracts by the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.

But the picture took off because it expressed the growing public view that Ford’s policies were bumbling and stumbling. The picture was iconic of a growing political perception.

Noonan is right about perception. Last week, I spoke with a young urban professional male, who I would have thought was Obama’s demographic. There were some things he did not know about Obama’s policies but he did know about the “bows” and he didn’t like them. Ms. Noonan concludes:

It is true that Mr. Obama often seems not to have a firm grasp of—or respect for—protocol, of what has been done before and why, and of what divergence from the traditional might imply. And it is true that his political timing was unfortunate. When a great nation is feeling confident and strong, a surprising presidential bow might seem gracious. When it is feeling anxious, a bow will seem obsequious.

The Obama bowing pictures…express a growing political perception … that there is something amateurish about this presidency, something too ad hoc and highly personalized about it, something . . . incompetent, at least in its first year.

You can get tagged, typed and pegged your first year.

Punditry is allergic to a long view and demands to stay vital by offering grand pronouncements daily so Noonan passing judgment on a snapshot in time is hardly evidence of anything. Yet we have seen one after another of these types of indicators, well stated in Steven Stark’s brutal RCP article last week, Has Obama Peaked? Yes, He Has. Stark states that the high point for Obama was the night of his election, but:

“[Y]ou can only be elected the first African-American once.”

Now that we, as a nation, have awakened from our post-election, post-racial dream state, we’ve begun to notice that our president may not be much interested in being a chief “executive,” given that he’s never run anything before or expressed the slightest inclination to do so. He has big ideas, to be sure, but that’s only a small part of the job. The hard, nitty-gritty labor of figuring out how government can actually work better – the operative word is “governing” – seems to hold no appeal for him.

Put another way, where are our flu shots? It’s worth recalling that, in what seems a lifetime ago, it was Clinton – not Obama – who promised to be ready on Day One.

More in the pundit class are wistfully mentioning Hillary, the work horse, not the show horse. It’s a shame they spent so much time kicking her around instead of lauding her when it would have mattered. I wonder if the glowing write up of “her brilliant career” in December’s Vogue Magazine sent the WH frat boys Gibbs-y and Favreau spinning? I’m sure they are looking for new ways to trash her and her ever increasing popularity.

Mr. Stark seems to think Obama needs to “come down from the mountaintop” and stop talking at us, i.e., campaigning, and start listening to the American people, yet he wonders if the President is capable of such a transformation. He rightly points out we are waiting for Obama “to lead us in real time.” When Governor Rendell of PA endorsed Hillary, he stated that the real work of governing is much more suited to Hillary’s knowledge, work ethic and indefatigable nature. Obama’s endless need for campaigning and photo-ops are not what is required now. Understanding proper protocol wouldn’t hurt either.

Stark points out that President Obama’s outsourcing of important legislation to Congress without offering adequate leadership, putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse by appointing Tim Geithner Treasury Secretary, and basically continuing the policies of President Bush, along with his many other rookie mistakes are making many raise the “c” word in Washington.

Competence. What a concept.