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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2009-07-23

The Audacity of Audacity 

I watched the President's press conference last night. Color me unimpressed.

First, and most troubling, is that the President does not actually have a plan. He doesn't. He has some ideas, and he has a few guidelines (won't raise the deficit, will reduce costs . . . ) but none of those are actually his plan. He knows there's a few different things working their way through Congress right now, but none of them are well-enough fleshed out to be of any meaning, either. So what we're left with is this vague, rhetoric-filled argument about nothing in particular. Not that that stops him from demonizing or setting up straw men to knock down, but we still don't know anything.

Secondly, he just took up another hour of prime-time television to accomplish nothing. He had no new ideas, no new arguments, no new specifics, and frankly his arguments weren't convincing this time, either. So he used up an incredible amount of political capital to, in effect, change no minds at all. It's like a football coach calling a time out before an important third down and five, and sending in a fullback dive play: two yards, a cloud of dust, and nothing accomplished.

Which is all well-and-good, since I happen to think that this is a terrible idea that I hope dies in multiple committees.

The problem with that is that the President of the United States should never be in a position where he's wasting his capital or the American peoples' time. To much of the world, the credibility of the U.S. is directly tied to the credibility of the President, and when he is unable to accomplish anything meaningful with an important media event like this, it makes him--and us--look weak.

So why would he do such a thing, knowing full-well that his polls are slipping and that he had nothing new to add to the debate? Because that is the arrogance of this man, this administration, and this party. They believe that, since the rhetoric was sufficient to defeat the tired Clinton person and the geriatric GOP nominee, the rhetoric must be sufficient to accomplish any purpose. The people will follow if only I point them in the direction. They love me . . . or something like that. That is the underlying strategy of everything this adminstration and Congress do.

It is audacious. It is arrogant. It is tiresome. And, thankfully, it is finally starting to fail.
Posted by: Michael / 7/23/2009 07:44:00 AM

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