What leadership means to Obama

Experience suggests Obama has his own definition. He seems to understand the word in some of its usages, such as leading us off a cliff, leading man, or leading on the dance floor. But leader as in leader of the free world isn't a concept he has embraced. I don't think he gets it. His modus operandi in a crisis is to play rope-a-dope. He did it again yesterday.

J. E. Dyer before Obama's statement on Libya yesterday:

This administration enjoys breathtaking latitude to respond to foreign-policy issues with defensive triangulation. One of its principal allies is the modern public’s unfamiliarity with history; another is the sense of the post-post-colonial era that, while everything may still be the West’s fault, nothing is now its problem. Opinion media and the public know instinctively that something is missing, but they can’t quite name what they expect to be different.

What’s missing is leadership. Having a plausible explanation for everything is the opposite of leadership; it’s defensive navigation through situations shaped by others.

Read the rest.

John Podhoretz after Obama's statement yesterday:

After days of silence, the president of the United States took to the microphone and, in a statement of almost unbelievable pointlessness, said as little as he could. He condemned the violence, said he was sending Hillary Clinton to Europe, said he had instructed his team to look at all options, and said that the “most basic aspiration” of people was (and here he quoted a Libyan) “to be able to live like human beings.” Crises either elevate leaders or make them look shrunken and unequal to the task history has assigned them. I think there’s little question which of these two categories describes Barack Obama right now.

RTR.

John Hawkins laments Obama's lack:

Speaking of leadership, as per usual, you're not going to find any if you're looking to the White House. After dragging his feet, Obama finally got around to spewing out a pile of nearly meaningless mush yesterday.  [. . .] With such big events afoot in the Middle East right now, it's tragic that we have such a small man in the White House to deal with what's happening.

Tragic, indeed. But that's the man American voters elected. Living in the DC area, I see Obama-Biden bumper stickers every day and marvel at the bubble these people must live in. 

Obama's budget proves he's no leader domestically, either. Victor Davis Hanson looks ahead to the post-Obama, "post deluge" era, after "a perfect storm of rising international interest rates, an anemic dollar, and panic on the part of foreign lenders may force an end to this unhinged American rush to borrow and blow what it has not earned":

In these lean times of nearly 10 percent unemployment and rapid hikes in gas and food prices, the president has chastised “fat cat” Wall Street bankers, the wealthy who jet to the Super Bowl, and those who junket to Las Vegas, and in general suggested that strapped American families might wish to “sacrifice” and “put off a vacation.” But in “let them eat cake” style, the first family seems tone-deaf to the potential symbolism of postponing its own exclusive vacations. Michelle Obama just returned from skiing at an elite Vail, Colo., resort. Last summer, in Marie Antoinette fashion, she jetted to Costa del Sol in Spain for a costly Mediterranean vacation. The rich playground at Martha’s Vineyard, not Camp David, seems now to be the favorite presidential recession-era getaway spot.

Shortly after Barack Obama leaves office, we are all going to have to eat cake. Then a less eloquent president will have to balance budgets, pay off trillions in new debt, develop more energy, come up with a sane health-care policy, and in symbolic fashion have the first family share the sacrifice of a more mundane lifestyle.

Read the whole thing.

Obama's idea of leadership: holding ineffectual "break-out sessions," delivering yet another campaign speech, and hosting one more celebrity soiree at the taxpayers' expense. Yes, it's true. Jammie Wearing Fool:

Need another sign sign this White House is completely tone deaf? After ignoring the Libya crisis for a week until yesterday, and then merely offering a perfunctory statement, it's back to party time in DC. Let's just hope Michelle has jetted back from her lavish ski vacation in Vail so she doesn't miss anything. Can't wait to see what's on the menu.

President Barack Obama is celebrating classic rhythm and blues on Thursday, spotlighting the music of Motown in a White House concert.

Stars invited to tonight's event include Motown icon Smokey Robinson as well as contemporary singers Sheryl Crow and John Legend, who will perform Motown hits. It's the latest musical tribute hosted by the president and first lady, and will be broadcast March 1 on PBS. 

It wouldn't surprise me if he went golfing beforehand.

No wonder the guy has scheduling issues.


Linked at Michelle Malkin (Buzzworthy) -- many thanks.

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