It happens to the best of presidents. Sometime during the
second term of popular presidents, the American people begin to bid goodbye to
their chief executive, at which point the president begins to think of his
legacy and hires a ghost writer to memorialize his time in office for future
generations. Ground is broken, if only in the president’s mind, for a future
library.
President Barack Obama is a popular, twice elected
president. Some of his programs, however, never have been universally admired
even within his own camp, which now begins to show stress fractures. Mr.
Obama’s political methodology is, unsurprisingly, that of a left wing Chicago
street organizer. During his presidency, Mr. Obama has spent an inordinate
amount of time on the bully pulpit attempting to sell round pegs to square-hole
purchasers in Congress. And he’s spent a great deal of money he does not have.
This parting of the ways, the fond farewell, often begins in
Congress when the usual shakers and movers are gathered together in a room with
the president and an idea or strategy is broached that, in the president’s
first term, might have been greeted with loud hosannas and exuberant assents. Now
it hangs in the air, a danger to the future prospect of all in the room. The actors
in the room then shoot furtive glances at each other, and all but one suddenly
realizes that there is but one lame duck among them. Time will smile upon the
lame duck; his admirers within the fourth estate will continue reverently to
mention his name in whispers. But ice will be in the air. The purposes of the
president and the purposes of his loyal partisans will no longer be the same.
Josh Kraushar of the National Journal,
an offshoot of The Atlantic magazine, generally regarded as left-liberal,
examined the failure of Democrats to pass a mild version of gun control
legislation. Some Democrats look forward to using the defeated legislation in
future campaigns against benighted Republicans; and indeed, President Obama
started the ball rolling moments after Democratic Majority leader Harry Reid
pulled the bill because he could not summon the requisite number of votes in
the Democratic controlled U.S. Senate to pass it.
“But the failure of Democrats to pass gun legislation (in a
Democratic-controlled Senate) for a future presidential nominee to use against
Republicans,” Mr. Krausher wrote, “makes the issue a lot less potent. One can
imagine Hillary Rodham Clinton trying to shame, say, Marco Rubio for opposing a
gun law that could be later claimed to have reduced crime. But without any law
passed, it’s hard to imagine the gun issue being nearly as resonant as it is
today in the wake of the horrific killings in Connecticut. And with Democrats
being a significant obstacle to its passage, it muddles the message even more… Simply
using the bully pulpit and making emotional appeals isn’t enough–it takes
legislative know-how and a good working relationship with Congress, two areas
this White House has struggled with since its difficulties passing a health
care law and persuading the public of its merits.”
Even Maureen Dowd,
a reliably left of center columnist for the New York Times, found it “unbelievable that with 90 percent of
Americans on his side, he [President Obama] could get only 54 votes in the
Senate. It was a glaring example of his weakness in using leverage to get what
he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him.”
A few of the more
obvious dents in the president’s armor would include: the continuing recession,
the failure of the Obama administration to stimulate the economy with crony
capitalist artificial stimulants, the inability of the administration to
honestly confront the murder of an American ambassador and others in Benghazi and
Obamacare – a very expensive baby step in the long progressive road to
universal health care, at the end of which healthcare in the United States may
come to resemble the health care dispensed at the Veteran's
Administration hospital in Newington.
The head of the US Veteran's Affairs, retired Army General
Eric Shinseki, came to Newtown recently to tout a new computerized processing
system that some expect will shorten seemingly interminable wait times on
claims. Standing at his elbow, in sight of the cameras, was U.S. Senator
Richard Blumenthal: “Among the most common complaints I get is the seemingly
endless delays," Mr. Blumenthal said.
Among Mr. Blumenthal’s complainants is veteran Paul Barron:
“I've been waiting three years for disability, I'm trying for 100%. I got
Hepatitis C from the shots they give you in the Army.”
Backlogs and government administered programs go together
like “a horse and carriage,” as the song has it.
The gun control legislation recently passed in Connecticut
has resulted in a spate of gun purchases and a paperwork backlog for state
police, who must approve the purchases. The backlog on transfer applications
for gun ownership has soared from 1,000 in December to 62,000 following passage
of the most severe gun regulations in the nation.
State Police Col. Danny Stebbins, who has been in
communication with Governor Dannel Malloy’s Office of Policy and Management “every other week regarding how to address
the backlogs” told a wide-eyed legislative committee, according to a report in
CTNewsJunkie,
that the backlog had not been anticipated. “All of these things are behind
because we don’t have people to keep up… all this will come with a cost,” Mr.
Stebbins said. Some of the tasks, he added, could be done by civilian
personnel.
So it may be with Obamacare: Who knew?
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