It’s the same old story with Obama; just when everyone is resigned to the fact that he’s useless, he sees the campaign season around the corner and he hits you with a speech that reminds you why he was elected in 2008. The problem is…unless you’re my friend who’s listed in the Guinness book as having the worst memory in history, you remember how utterly impotent Obama has been for the last three years. He came out of the gate strong: “Hope and change,” “Common sense principles,” “We’re adults and we can all work together” and all that. Then he hit this brick wall called the republicans. And his response was to continue to just trumpet “We can all work together” over and over again, like some kind of idiotic binary robot. Now as I said in a previous post, there’s a very simple analysis when it comes to great sports players: they best ones don’t take what they want, they take what the defense gives them. They have an incredible ability to read a situation and adjust tactics accordingly. Think of a Kobe Bryant, or a Steve Nash: they don’t put their heads down, plow towards the rim and just try to lay the ball in; no, they survey the defense, break it down with skills that are part instinct and part experience, and then they either pull a series of insane jukes, spins and head-fakes or they come up with an insane pass. Any true leader needs to have those abilities as well. They have to be able to read situations, break down the opposition and adjust tactics accordingly. If you’re Kobe Bryant and you’re playing with a bunch of midgets, then yes, tactics need not apply. Charge towards the rim and lay it in. But when you’re playing against a squad of 7 foot tall hardass ne’ers, then you need to use every weapon in your arsenal. Kobe Bryant has machine guns, rocket launchers, and nukes in his arsenal. Obama, as it turns out, has just one weapon: a BB gun that pops out a “We can all work together flag” when you fire. It is beyond pathetic. Again, “We can all work together” is fine if it’s true. But…don’t you have any ability to break down the defense? Can’t you see that they’re most definitely not interested in working with you, and can’t you formulate tactics to respond to their unwavering commitment to jamming you at every turn? If you’re Kobe Bryant and someone gets in your face, you have the killer instinct and experience needed to carve their heart out, show it to them and make them eat it. Obama has shown us who he is over these last three years; he is a smooth, common-sense guy with absolutely zero killer instinct. He does not understand how to fight fire with napalm. He is simply not a born leader; he has a couple of the required ingredients but he’s missing other key ones.
But now…fast forward to this 2012 State of the Union speech. This is the only time his killer instinct kicks in; he smells the general election coming and he starts hitting your rhetoric sweet spot. He laid out a series of proposals which, on their face, sound reasonable. But that’s nothing new; what I liked was his tone. It sounded like someone had administered an iron injection straight into his spine; he sounded VERY committed to battling senseless obstructionism that’s based on purely ideological grounds. In fact, this was the line that really hit the sweet spot for me: “As long as I’m President, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.” I like it; he sounded committed and resolved, and the facts are squarely on his side since deregulation was perhaps the key precipitator of the financial meltdown. It needs to be addressed and republicans balk at the idea on principle. Later in the speech, he talked about “not clinging to rigid ideologies” and “following common-sense principles”. All good; I love it and I love the tone. And…it’s a load of happy horseshit. Look, it’s very simple: you either have the goods or you don’t. You either are Kobe Bryant or you’re not. Obama has demonstrated who he is: he’s a guy that gets turned on by political campaigning, but when it gets down to it and he needs to punch his opponent in the face, he instead takes a seat in the corner of the ring and haughtily says “Stop being children; let’s all work this out.” You’re from mars, buddy. You need to be less intellectual and more instinctive, and by that I mean you should don the professor’s glasses when you’re hammering out wonkish legislative details, but when your instincts tell you to pull out the boxing gloves…pull out the fucking boxing gloves and get to scrapping.
You know, the sad thing is that this ad put out by the RNC (pretty much right after the State of the Union address) makes the case for Obama’s impotence better than anything else. Year after year, he repeats the same message and goes right back to getting cock-blocked by the republicans. And again…this speaks to a point I made in a previous post. If your message is sense-based and logically clear, the malleable middle WILL be persuaded. But it requires more than you just popping your head up once a year to give us some of your familiar Obama talker-in-chief rhetoric. It requires you to stay committed to spreading your message amongst the populace no matter how long it takes, no matter how many times you have to repeat yourself and no matter how much you have to argue with bullheaded ideological republicans. And you HAVE to employ your army (i.e. your political team and your democrat brethren) to do the same. Obama doesn’t do that. Democrats are dickless and disorganized, there seems to be little to no communication from the white house to the public, and there are never any kind of effective sales pitches made for these so-called sense-based policies Obama keeps going on about. I mean I can see that Obama is a sense-based non-ideologue, but you still have to prove that your ideas DO make sense. It’s like health care; Obama kept trying to tell us how it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but…nobody actually understood what the hell the it did. He doesn’t take republicans to task when they pop off on their brainless ideological ideas, he doesn’t bother properly explaining his OWN ideas and you’re basically left with very little understanding of what exactly he is trying to accomplish and no confidence that he’ll actually be able to get anything done. For someone that’s called the talker-in-chief, this guy sure has some piss-poor communication skills.
1/27/2012 – Christ
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January 28th, 2012 at 1:32 pm
So true. I thought the guy was called talker-in-chief for the very fact that that’s all he can do well. All talk. Zero action. Either way, there is a high correlation between Obama talking and nothing getting done. And that correlation ain’t spurious.