He’s tried homey backyard settings, large campus rallies and teamed up with a crass hip-hop show.
Wherever he goes, he floors the rhetorical pedal, as when he likened his slow-motion polices to the time it took to “free the slaves.”
Barack Obama has gone from a failing president to flailing at ghosts. Even allowing for desperate times, his desperate measures are a national embarrassment.
Emancipation? Give us a break.
With each passing day, his denunciations of dissent and inflated claims of economic progress turn off the independent voters who will decide the midterm elections. He is ignoring the sensible advice to listen to the majority of voters and build a governing coalition.
Instead, he recklessly bets the remainder of his presidency on maintaining the huge liberal Democratic majorities that helped him impose a string of unpopular policies on America. If he fails, and there is good reason to hope he will face a Republican Congress, he’ll be the loneliest man in Washington.
He is losing much of his White House team, yet the obsequious hagiography continues. When Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel departed Friday, he claimed the last 20 months were “the toughest time any president has ever faced.”
This is farce masquerading as fact, but there is no sign Obama is willing to bring in new aides who could help him chart a new course.
If anything, he is doubling down on his self-aggrandizing Big Government agenda, dashing hopes he would use the public revolt against him to finally become the centrist many Americans believed they were electing.
A friend said the other day that Obama’s nonstop campaign speeches were useless because the country has tuned him out. Politically speaking, that’s true.
The thrill is gone, and his efforts to gin up enthusiasm seem a pale imitation of 2008. It’s all vapors now as he hectors former supporters to “buck up.”
But it’s impossible simply to ignore Obama. He is the president of a troubled nation, and he regularly reaches new depths of demeaning the office as he fights public will.
His isolation from reality produces cringes when he opens smaller gatherings to questions. First, it was a woman in Washington who said she was “exhausted defending you” and waiting for meaningful change.
Then it was a business owner in Iowa who complained tax hikes would make it impossible to add jobs.
Both questioners were informed and polite, one a supporter, one not. They represent the sturdy and loyal backbone of the nation, but Obama was clueless about how to respond.
He answered as if on automatic pilot, showing no ability to connect to their everyday problems or even to stray from stock answers.
Sadly, the failure to deliver on his promise of unity doesn’t end at our borders. He vowed his election would raise America’s standing around the world and enable us to building expanding networks of allies to face global issues.
A recent incident at the United Nations shows it’s not going well. When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in the General Assembly that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” carried out by our government to help Israel, U.S. diplomats walked out in protest.
Delegations from all 27 European Union nations joined us, as did Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Costa Rica, according to an Associated Press tally.
Nobody else budged. Not Russia, not China, Japan, South Korea or Mexico, and nobody from Africa or South America.
Imagine that. A nut case who is building a nuclear bomb, whose regime tortures and kills its own people, slanders the living and the dead, and Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton can’t rally even half of our allies to our side.
In fact, there is no evidence they even protested the silence. This is not leadership. It is failure on a grand and consistent scale.
Michael Goodwin is a New York Post columnist and a Fox News contributor. To continue reading his column, click here.
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