by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n Presidential oddities<\/strong><\/p>\n Obama has been very good in lowering expectations by reminding us 24\/7 that there are no easy solutions to the present fiscal meltdown. True enough. But why then a continuation of the megalomaniac sets \u2014 the retracing of the Lincoln Illinois trip to the inauguration in the spirit of\u00a0vero possumus<\/em>, the Victory Column, the Greek temple convention sets, etc?<\/p>\n The more he willingly takes on the Lincolnesque or Caesarian mantle, the more the media worries that we have put too many expectations on Obama. Well, surely one way to lower our expectations would be to take a night-flight on a 737 to DC from Chicago, rather than reenact train-bound Young Mr. Lincoln. (Remember, unlike Lincoln, Obama flew back to Chicago from DC to take the train back to DC again). It sort of reminds one of the lectures about the Obama family off limits \/ Obama family center stage for photo-ops and interviews.<\/p>\n One president at a time<\/strong><\/p>\n Obama was also insistent that there is only one President at a time \u2014 well, sort of at least. On the economy, however, he started issuing communiqu\u00e9s weeks ago; on Gaza, in contrast, it was silence and all Bush\u2019s. Note the Israelis just stopped in Gaza. Odd timing? They are unsure of the reaction of the Obama administration, fearing an off-handed sympathetic remark about Hamas, or, more likely, eager not to leave him with an embarrassing situation on his first day in office that he might not forget.<\/p>\n Bush considered<\/strong><\/p>\n I wrote an essay about Bush\u2019s successes for the Monday\u00a0National Review Online<\/em>. Here are some disappointments:<\/p>\n a. Cronyism: I don\u2019t think Scott McClellan, Harriet Meyers, Michael Brown, etc. were employable outside the White House.<\/p>\n b. First-term spending: the gargantuan leap in the size of the federal government discredited the tax cuts (that brought in more revenue) and the entire notion that Republicans were financial watch-dogs.<\/p>\n c. The Iraq war was authorized on 23 Congressional counts \u2014 not just WMD. So why focus on that alone?<\/p>\n d. Why do administration figures conduct engaging and spirited interviews and defenses of policies in the last two weeks of their tenure, but not the last eight years?<\/p>\n e. Congressional Democrats were not bipartisan Texas Democrats: not vetoing their bills as the price for their support of the war meant endless red-ink.<\/p>\n f. Loudly with a small stick: Bellicose rhetoric like smoke \u2018em out or dead or alive cannot be juxtaposed to pulling back from Fallujah in April 2004, or giving a reprieve to Sadr.<\/p>\n g. Katrina was mostly a state and local breakdown, coupled with a culture of dependence fostered by federal entitlement: Had Bush landed, sloshed around in the muck, had a photo-op wet and muddy, yelled at some bureaucrats, then the press would not have so easily turned it into a racist genocidal plot.<\/p>\n h. The financial meltdown was in part due to letting Frank, Dodd, Rains, etc. ruin Fannie and Freddie, the result of hundreds of billions of additional debt, and na\u00efve promotion of an \u2018ownership society\u2019, when about 30% of the population always has no business owning the responsibilities of a home.<\/p>\n All the above is set off against a corruption free, honest Bush governance (cf. the Blago\/Obama nominees pre-office problems), lack of another 9\/11 at home, constitutional governments in place of the Taliban and Saddam, a decimation of al Qaeda, with negative polls in the Middle East for bin Laden and suicide bombing, no more nuclear processing in Libya, Dr. Khan shut down, Syrians out of Lebanon, pro-U.S. governments in Europe, good relations with China and India, the Obama acceptance of the Bush anti-terror framework, crashing oil prices, an isolated Ahmadinejad and Chavez, two good Supreme Court Justices, etc.)<\/p>\n All bad on day one?<\/strong><\/p>\n I think history suggests that it is far better for an incoming President (cf. Reagan, Clinton, Bush, etc.) to face a recession than to enter office during a boom \u2014 given the cyclical nature of economic downturns juxtaposed with the four-year election span. And abroad the world is not in such dire shape, despite what we have heard the last eight years. Iraq is stable. There is an existing strategy to deal with the Taliban. The Bush second term was multilateral to the core, and pro-American conservative governments now flourish in Europe. Chavez, Putin, and Ahmadinejad are about broke, and losing influence. India and China are friendly. Africa appreciates the massive influx of U.S. HIV-relief. Al Qaeda is in disarray. Bin Laden\u2019s popularity and that of suicide bombing itself have plummeted. Thousands of al Qaeda operatives were killed in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Dr. Zawahiri is shriller than ever, and more than ever neglected. The homeland has been untouched since 9\/11. Gas prices have crashed, giving us a half-trillion-dollar stimulus and robbing our enemies of trillions more.<\/p>\n Bush was right then or is Obama wrong now?<\/strong><\/p>\n Readers may cite some earlier criticism of Bush\u2019s foreign policy (concrete not rhetorical) that Obama has not de facto retracted before even entering office, but I cannot. FISA, the Patriot Act, renditions, Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan? So what in the end was the opposition to FISA, the promises to summarily close Guantanamo, and the desire to have combat troops out of Iraq by March 2008 (yes, 2008 not 2009) all about?<\/p>\n There is no media, again\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n After watching Eric Holder fumble over questions that pertained to his own independence, subservience to the President, and faulty memory, I thought those were just the problems that once prompted Senators and the NY-DC press to declare Alberto Gonzales unfit for the office of Attorney General.<\/p>\n In regards to the Geithner nomination, I also thought after the Zo\u00eb Baird and Linda Chavez doomed cabinet nominations that the press and Congress would not allow anyone to serve who had hired either an illegal alien or a worker with improper green card credentials. And in regards to the Geithner tax problems, believe it or not, most of us really do try to pay all estimates on self-employed income on time, do pay all of our self-employed FICA taxes, and prefer to overpay than to underpay them. So I am baffled that with his nomination, the two chief federal officers who oversee American tax policy \u2014 the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and Charles Rangel, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee \u2014 simply cannot follow the tax codes. But if they cannot, who else can and will?<\/p>\n The rich party, the poor go hungry<\/strong><\/p>\n The 2005 Bush inauguration, despite occurring in boom times, was, I remember, deemed by the media as crass and a rich man\u2019s fest, insensitive to the general poverty around. The more than twice as expensive 2009 Obama inauguration, despite occurring in a severe recession, is a measured and proper celebration of diversity and landmark progress.\u00a0Annuit coeptis<\/em>\u00a0indeed.<\/p>\n Is Biden obsessed with Cheney?<\/strong><\/p>\n Now Joe Biden claims that he is better qualified than any prior VP, and knows as much or more than Cheney. I feel for Obama, for how can he expect Biden to behave the next four years? Joe is self-obsessed, insecure, and lacks the temperament for high executive office. In short, he will have to have a coterie of censors who monitor his every move. The more he gratuitously attacks Cheney, the more one senses that he wishes to be as influential as Cheney. Given Biden\u2019s zillion positions on the war, and his impression that FDR addressed the nation on television as President in 1929, why does he believe he knows as much or more than Cheney?<\/p>\n That\u2019s all it took?<\/strong><\/p>\n Gulag Guantanamo becomes problematic and complex once it\u2019s Obama\u2019s rather than Bush\u2019s. Suddenly what do you do with Khalid Sheik Mohammed? Will the Senators allow these non-uniformed terrorist enemy combatants to be tried or held in their states? Do any countries want their own detainees back? If you catch more terrorists on the battlefields of Afghanistan, do you turn them over to the Afghan army? Hold them in prison camps in Afghanistan? Let them go? Do an FDR \u2014 that is, try them in military tribunals and shoot them in secret if found guilty? Ship them to Cuba? Indict and try them \u2014 if so where \u2014 New York or DC (and hope a single juror doesn\u2019t nullify the verdict and free the architect of 9\/11)? Probable solution? I think it is the following: say everyday you\u2019re going to close Guantanamo (but don\u2019t for a year), sell some detainees back to their home countries (some federal perks given in the exchange), say you can\u2019t try any of them since three were water boarded and Bush polluted the court process, and then put them in some sort of nameless facility overseas before quietly letting them go.<\/p>\n The Obama winning formula<\/strong><\/p>\n 1. Combine charm, youth, rhetoric, a multiracial persona with dramatic sets like the retracing of the Lincoln route to DC and the Latin seal to create a sort of messianic personality that ensures popularity ratings over 50%.<\/p>\n 2. In deference to the Left, showcase black feminist poets, gay priests, radical environmentalists, open borders advocates \u2014 all in symbolic ways or in appointments to lower, less important offices that won\u2019t turn up too embarrassing on the Drudge Report.<\/p>\n 3. Tack to the center on the hunch that the media was anti-Bush rather than anti-his positions per se. So putting an Obama stamp on existing Bush foreign policy does wonders, and helps unite the country. As we have seen with Sen. Patrick Leahy\u2019s softball questioning of Eric Holder (in comparison to his fiery dissection of Attorney General Gonzalez), or the media silence about the suddenly OK Patriot Act (there will be no more stories about a shredded American Constitution), power is all that matters, and all that ever did.<\/p>\n How long can all this last? Well, Clinton survived Monica as the media began emphasizing that Ken Starr was a \u2018cigarette lawyer\u2019 rather than the President as a serial philander with a subordinate employee in the Oval Office, who lied about it to the American people. To near silence, he pardoned a fugitive on the FBI\u2019s most wanted list who had given Clinton subordinates and surrogates hundreds of thousands of dollars for the pardon. Again, we have no media anymore, only a group of rather elite socializers who believe they play a key role in ensuring social justice by their enlightened ethical commentary. A successful journalist in DC or New York is instead a social position, analogous to the thousands who lived in 18th-century Versailles, and occasionally were invited to dine with Louis himself.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Presidential oddities Obama has been very good in lowering expectations by reminding us 24\/7 that there are no easy solutions to the present fiscal meltdown. True enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[725],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-MD","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2997,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/unreal-expectations\/","url_meta":{"origin":3015,"position":0},"title":"Unreal Expectations?","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"President Obama Asked for Them by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services For nearly three months since the election, we have been warned by President Obama, his staff and the media not to burden him with unreal expectations that no mere mortal could meet. But why then consciously borrow from\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2009"","block_context":{"text":"January 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/january-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1333,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-president-who-never-was\/","url_meta":{"origin":3015,"position":1},"title":"The President Who Never Was","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 8, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media A Teen-age President in Search of an Adult Identity Barack Obama keeps looking for\u00a0a presidential identity not his own\u00a0[1]. In 2008, he wished to be JFK\u2014whom he often referenced as a youthful and charismatic figure supposedly similar to himself. So we heard references to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Commentary"","block_context":{"text":"Commentary","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/commentary-obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2982,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/it-isnt-easy-being-a-saint\/","url_meta":{"origin":3015,"position":2},"title":"It Isn’t Easy Being a Saint","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 4, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media All of you readers have had this odd experience. Just remember a bit. Someone you know, even know well, whom you thought was reasonably conservative, if perhaps at least a centrist, who would have welcomed a McCain \u201cmoderate\u201d campaign, rather than a hard-core conservative\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2009"","block_context":{"text":"February 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/february-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1472,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/journalists-as-ring-wraiths\/","url_meta":{"origin":3015,"position":3},"title":"Journalists as Ring Wraiths","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 11, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Today\u2019s Washington journalists are like J. R. R. Tolkien\u2019s ring wraiths, petty lords who wanted a few shiny golden Obama rings \u2014 only to end up as shrunken slaves to the One. The Bob Woodward\/Ron Fournier\/Lanny Davis psychodrama is another small reminder that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mainstream Media"","block_context":{"text":"Mainstream Media","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/mainstream-media\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1316,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/when-the-legend-becomes-fact-print-the-legend\/","url_meta":{"origin":3015,"position":4},"title":"‘When the Legend Becomes Fact, Print the Legend’","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 22, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Obama Mythologos Barack Obama is a myth, our modern version of Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan. What we were told is true, never had much basis in fact \u2014 a fact now increasingly clear as hype gives way to reality. \u201cBrilliant\u201d Presidential historian Michael\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Commentary"","block_context":{"text":"Commentary","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/commentary-obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2972,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-apocalyptic-style\/","url_meta":{"origin":3015,"position":5},"title":"The Apocalyptic Style","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 8, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner The Problem Following the speaker's prediction of 500 million jobs lost a month, Secretary of Energy Chu now warns there will be no more vineyards in California soon, indeed, no more agriculture at all as we know it. As an owner of one of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2009"","block_context":{"text":"February 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/february-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3015"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3016,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015\/revisions\/3016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}