We are currently learning whether the United States really
needs a president. Barack Obama has become a mere figurehead, who gives speeches
few listen to any more, issues threats that scare fewer, and makes promises that
almost no one believes he will keep. Yet America continues on, despite the fact
that the foreign and domestic policies of Barack Obama are unraveling, in a
manner unusual even for star-crossed presidential second terms.
Abroad, American policy in the Middle East is leaderless and in shambles
after the Arab Spring — we’ve had the Syrian fiasco and bloodbath, leading from
behind in Libya all the way to Benghazi, and the non-coup, non-junta in Egypt.
This administration has managed to unite existential Shiite and Sunni enemies in
a shared dislike of the United States. While Iran follows the Putin script from
Syria, Israel seems ready to preempt its nuclear program, and Obama still
mumbles empty “game changers” and “red line” threats of years past.
We have gone from reset with Russia to Putin as the playmaker of the Middle
East. The Persian Gulf sheikhdoms are now mostly anti-American. The leaders of
Germany and the people of France resent having their private communications
tapped by Barack Obama — the constitutional lawyer and champion of universal
human rights. Angela Merkel long ago grasped that President Obama would rather
fly across the Atlantic to lobby for a Chicago Olympic Games — or tap her phone
— than sit through a 20th-anniversary commemoration of the fall of the Berlin
Wall.
Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are beginning to see that the U.S. is more a
neutral than a friend, as Obama negotiates with Putin about reducing the nuclear
umbrella that protects America’s key non-nuclear allies. Perhaps they will soon
make the necessary adjustments. China, Brazil, and India care little that Barack
Obama still insists he is not George W. Bush, or that he seems to be trying to
do to America what they seek to undo in their own countries.
The world’s leaders do not any longer seem much impressed by the president’s
cat-like walk down the steps of Air Force One, or the soaring cadences that
rechannel hope-and=change themes onto the world scene.
They acknowledge that
their own publics may like the American president, and especially his
equivocation about the traditional role of American power in the world. But
otherwise, for the next three years, the world is in a holding pattern,
wondering whether there is a president of the United States to reckon with or a
mere teleprompted functionary. Certainly, the Obama Nobel Peace Prize is now the
stuff of comedy.
At home, the signature Affordable Care Act is proving its sternest critics
prescient. The mess can best be summed up by Republicans’ being demonized for
trying to delay or defund Obamacare — after the president himself chose not to
implement elements of his own law — followed immediately by congressional
Democrats’ seeking to parrot the Republicans. So are the Democrats followers of
Ted Cruz or Barack Obama? Is Obama himself following Ted Cruz?
The problem is not just that all the president’s serial assurances about
Obamacare proved untrue — premiums and deductibles will go up, many will lose
their coverage and their doctors, new taxes will be needed, care will be
curtailed, signups are nearly impossible, and businesses will be less, not more,
competitive — but that no one should ever have believed they could possibly be
true unless in our daily lives we usually get more and better stuff at lower
cost.
More gun control is dead. Comprehensive immigration legislation depends on
Republicans’ trusting a president who for two weeks smeared his House opponents
as hostage-takers and house-breakers.
Moreover, just as no one really read the
complete text of the Obamacare legislation, so too no one quite knows what is in
the immigration bill. There are few assurances that the border will be first
secured under an administration with a record of nullifying “settled law” — or
that those who have been convicted of crimes or have been long-time recipients
of state or federal assistance will not be eligible for eventual citizenship. If
the employer mandate was jettisoned, why would not border security be dropped
once a comprehensive immigration bill passed? Or for that matter, if it is not
passed, will the president just issue a blanket amnesty anyway?
In the age of Obama, we just ran up a $700 billion annual deficit and called
it restraint, as if success were to be defined as not adding another $1 trillion
each year to the national debt. The strange thing is that after the end of the
Iraq War and the winding down in Afghanistan, forced sequestration, new taxes on
high earners, and a supposedly recovering and revenue-producing economy, we are
still running up near-record deficits.
Stranger still, Obama is bragging that
the deficit has been cut by billions — as if the 400-pound heart patient can be
content that he lost 50 pounds in record time and so trimmed down to a
manageable 350 pounds.
The Federal Reserve is pretty well stuck with near-zero interest rates. Even
a slight rise would make servicing the huge debt nearly unmanageable. Yet
continued record low interest, along with Obamacare, is strangling the economy.
Millions of older Americans are learning that a mid-level government employee
draws more in pension compensation than a private retiree receives in interest
on 40 years’ worth of life savings.
“Millions of green jobs,” “cash for clunkers,” and “stimulus” are all now
recognized as cruel jokes. Oddly, the more scandals come to light, the more
immune the virtual president becomes. After the politicization of the IRS, the
snooping on AP reporters, the Benghazi mess, the NSA eavesdropping, Fast and
Furious, the multibillion-dollar overpayment in income-tax credits by the IRS,
the Lisa Jackson fake e-mail identities, and the Pigford payments, the public
has become numb — as if it to say, “Of course the Obama administration is not
truthful. So what else is new?”
Three considerations are keeping the U.S. afloat without an active president.
First, many working Americans have tuned the president out and simply go on
about their business despite rather than because of this administration. If gas
and oil leases have been curtailed on federal lands, there is record production
on private land. Farmers are producing huge harvests and receiving historically
high prices. Wall Street welcomes in capital that can find no return elsewhere.
American universities’ science departments and professional schools still rate
among the world’s best. There is as yet no French or Chinese Silicon Valley. In
other words, after five years of stagnation, half the public more or less
ignores the Obama administration and plods on.
Second, the other half of Americans gladly accept that Obama is an iconic
rather than a serious president. Given his emblematic status as the nation’s
first African-American president and his efforts to craft a vast coalition of
those with supposed grievances against the majority, he will always have a
strong base of supporters. With huge increases in federal redistributive support
programs, and about half the population not paying federal income taxes, Obama
is seen as the protector of the noble deserving, who should receive more from a
government to which the ignoble undeserving must give far more. And if it is a
question of adding another million or so people to the food-stamp or disability
rolls, or ensuring that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon or that China does
not bully Japan, the former wins every time.
Finally, the media accept that Obama represents a rare confluence of forces
that promotes a progressive agenda. His youth, his charisma, his background, his
exotic nomenclature, and his “cool” all have allowed a traditionally unpopular
leftist ideology to enter the mainstream. Why endanger all that with a focus on
Benghazi or the disaster of Obamacare? We have had, in the course of our
history, plenty of Grants, McKinleys, Hardings, Nixons, and Clintons, but never
quite an administration of scandal so exempt from media scrutiny.
As far as his image goes, it does not really matter to what degree Obama
actually “fundamentally transforms America.” For the media, that he seeks to do
so, and that he drives conservatives crazy trying, is seen as enough reason to
surrender their autonomy and become ancillary to the effort. The media believe
that once he is out of office, they can regain their credibility by going after
the next president with renewed vigor as recompense.
In other words, the presidency has become a virtual office. Almost half the
people and most of the media do not mind, and those who do just plod onward.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis
Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is The
Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury
Books.NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
