Exceptional rhetoric + mediocre performance = falling approval ratings.
Why isn’t Barack Obama as popular as he once was? I hazard my best guess over at True/Slant:
Perhaps a down economy is the biggest reason that President Obama’s numbers are down, but I cannot help but wonder if his slip isn’t also due to a lie at the heart of his campaign. This man is calculating politico, as comfortable as anyone we’ve got at navigating Washington DC as it exists today. It’s a style of leadership that is perfectly defensible. But he sold himself as an idealistic agent of change whose special contribution would be fixing a broken status quo.
Lots more here.
Obama is a machiavelian pragmatist.
It’s that simple.
A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
That may happen….and it may not.
But Torturegate is going to cast a long shadow over the Bush administration….like Watergate and Nixon in the history books.
— matoko_chan · Jan 20, 02:33 PM · #
also too.
Obama is not trying to “fix a broken status quo”, Conor Servant of Kylon.
I am not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
— matoko_chan · Jan 20, 02:37 PM · #
Not only is it a style of leadership that is perfectly defensible, it is the only truly conservative style of leadership; but such things are little matters compared to partisanship.
— Freddie · Jan 20, 03:26 PM · #
We always talk about how the President is a great rhetorician, but when was the last time you heard him deliver a good line or a good speech? I think he’s more of a one-hit wonder, the hit being 2004 at the DNC. In the campaign against Hillary he gave a lot of speeches about how great that DNC speech was, but since then his rhetoric has been mostly Bush-bashing of a kind which anyone could easily master. His appearances in support of Coakley seemed to be kind of half-hearted.
— Aaron · Jan 20, 04:11 PM · #
“We always talk about how the President is a great rhetorician, but when was the last time you heard him deliver a good line or a good speech? I think he’s more of a one-hit wonder”
What color is the sky in your world?
As for Obama’s approval ratings…why wasn’t Reagan as popular a year into his administration as he was on election day? Why wasn’t Bush II as popular on 9/10 as he had been on election day? Any President, especially one dealing with two wars and the worst economy in at least a generation, is going to have to do things and not do things that will piss people off.
What’s most disturbing about all this is how many liberals and Dems have apparently internalized Karl Rove’s belief that the President should run his Administration to maximize the political advantages of his party. All they care about is whether something is going to help Dems win in 2010, which is an outlook that guarantees no President will ever do anything difficult but necessary for his country.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 20, 05:09 PM · #
Obama is very smart, this evidenced by his brilliant campaign. But the campaign depended on maintaining the aura of articulate,balanced rhetoric, unflappable restraint before mean-spirited attacks, etc. These very attributes are exactly what have gotten Obama in trouble: he imagined people would sympathize with his apparently dogged effort to seek bipartisan support for health-care insurance reform. This approach caused him to waste valuable time and lose many originally in his corner.
I am waiting for someone to analyze the profound—in Obama’s case, I think disastrously negative—effect of relying heavily on advisors who are alumni of one’s own universities. The Up-From-Nowhere smart kid from the South Side finds himself keeping company with the quality at prestigious schools. It’s flattering, an incredible ego boost. When he’s elected, he invites them to join his team—and all at once, he’s become a new kind of good old boy.
Barry Knister
— barry knister · Jan 20, 05:59 PM · #
like Watergate and Nixon in the history books
Or like the My Lai massacre, which occurred on Lyndon Johnson’s watch?
You seriously believe, matoko_chan, that only conservative wars are evil?
Please m_c. If you are going to be a pacifist, be a real pacifist not a partisan pacifist. Right now your hypocritical double standard is making me puke.
— Keid A · Jan 20, 06:51 PM · #
Of course the economy is hurting Obama and most of it is not “his fault.” But pursuing health care overhall and cap and trade, etc in this economic environment is reckless. And Obama’s campaign promises were always incoherent. Expanding the size of the government and its involvement in our daily lives naturally increases the opportunities for corruption and for lobbyists. That’s why its a recipe for failure to call for cutting out the lobbyists while increasing government programs. That’s why Obama’s campaign speeches were always empty to me. Friends of intrusive government in both political parties want to ignore this fact.
Dramatically expanding the government’s role in health care, will further politicize it and make the lobbyists more powerful. Obama is a pragmatic on the war and many other issues. But calling him a pragmatic on health care or cap ‘n trade depends on where you put the goal posts. Clearly, your goal posts are way left of center on this topic.
— JC38 · Jan 20, 06:57 PM · #
edit: or maybe not!
— JC38 · Jan 20, 08:54 PM · #
“Or like the My Lai massacre, which occurred on Lyndon Johnson’s watch?
You seriously believe, matoko_chan, that only conservative wars are evil?”
Seriously? That is a really poorly chosen example. The truth about My Lai came out only after Nixon was already the POTUS. And then he pardoned the only guy who was actually sentenced (Calley) and got life (for premeditated murder of 22 people!), after THREE years.
And yes, I agree, ALL wars are evil. I have actually lived through one.
— Marko · Jan 21, 01:11 AM · #
yeah, exactly like Obama is not pursuing Bush.
All the conditions that created My Lai and all the tiger cages, etc, etc, were created by and during the Johnson Administration. Nixon came very late to the scene of the crime.
Do me a freakin’ favor. I was in the Vietnam antiwar movement. Johnson was the first target of the protests always, and the war was already winding down when Nixon took over.
He had his own share of crimes in Laos and Cambodia, but the creation of the Vietnam war was Johnson and even Kennedy’s baby.
— Keid A · Jan 21, 01:58 AM · #
Oh, yeah. I have no illusions about the Democratic party and wars.
I remember telling the Dean of my grad school, a nice liberal Protestant, that if the Christians (and other religions, but that’s irrelevant) are “right” about the afterlife, Obama (who was, I believe, already president-elect at the time) will certainly burn in hell.
Just like almost any other US President EVER.
I mean, can you really morally justify authorizing various drone-missions and other bombings of intelligence targets that end up killing a bunch of innocent civilians?
Sure, it’s Realpolitik and all, but why would the Almighty care about our petty disputes?
So, yeah, if you’re a Prime Minister of Luxembourg, you’ll probably be fine. But if you’re a leader of a country that fights wars and conducts preemptive strikes on various terrorist groups, you’re probably gonna end up with a lot of innocent blood on your hands.
— Marko · Jan 21, 06:01 AM · #
Obama, damned…W., double-damned…LBJ, damn-damn-damned…Truman, damned…, FDR, damned…Wilson, damned…Lincoln, damned? hmmm? Or does he inhabit the precious exception carved out by Marko’s “almost all?” Oh, what the hell, all U.S. Presidents, all non-Luxembourgian statesmen/politicians—Write it on yer helmet, men: DAMN THEM ALL! And let Marko the grad-school athiest theologian sort them out!
What foul-spirited, hopeless, and incoherent drivel. Impossible demands put upon politics, fluctuating with endless cynicism. Judgment with no foundation possible for judgment. Willfull and yet preposterously sophmoric misrepresentations of Christianity. What a disgrace to U.S. higher education.
— Carl Scott · Jan 21, 04:32 PM · #
The demand that we not kill people in needless wars of aggression? “Impossible”, indeed.
— Chet · Jan 21, 05:55 PM · #
Now Harry Trusman’s an interesting case. The Democrat who gave the order to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The only human who has ever used nuclear weapons in war.
The man who initiated the world’s first hydrogen bomb project.
Truman explored a whole lot of new moral space. Ethical pioneer, you might say. Boldly going where no man has gone before.
— Keid A · Jan 21, 06:12 PM · #
As a prelude to a more substantive response, just note how vague Obama’s promise to bring change to Washington are. Lots of people, you included, take that to be an empty promise to push through legislation without compromising or engaging in politics. But it can also be a promise to govern in a more honest way. A promise of less obfuscation, more transparency, less pandering and manipulation. All of those are admirable goals, none of which conflict with frequent compromises in making legislation.
A related point: I think Obama’s beliefs are not some sort of quasi-populist resentment of special interests, so much as an academic belief that lobbyists, etc, often distort the process of making laws in a way that makes laws worse. Crudely, it’s more public choice than marxism.
— Justin · Jan 21, 11:18 PM · #
In case that’s not clear, make that “public choice theory” in the last sentence.
— Justin · Jan 21, 11:19 PM · #
Carl,
it’s nothing about sorting anyone out. It’s just that politics, especially foreign politics of great powers, and the New Testament don’t really go well together.
And that’s simply how it is. Does that mean the New Testament has put impossible demands upon certain aspects of politics. By all means. Does it mean that it’s message should be totally ignored as irrelevant? Not at all.
This is not to say that I consider all of those Presidents were the same. Some did a lot of other good things, some did a lot of other bad things. None of them was perfectly evil or perfectly good.
After all, and perhaps I should’ve been more precise, they would not be completely irredeemable even from a Christian perspective – redeemability was one of the major points of Christianity, but I doubt that many of them have truly repented for those particular sins. (Some of which they were probably not even aware of.)
We tend to think of war as inevitable, if unfortunate, part of our human existence. And this particularly holds true for leaders of global powers.
Btw, I wish you provided some arguments, rather than a swad of derogatory remarks.
— Marko · Jan 22, 03:41 AM · #