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President Barack Obama pauses as he speaks to the media about the government’s Ebola response in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2014
Opinion writer
There’s
only one problem with this pose, so obligingly transcribed for him by the
Times. It’s his government. He’s president. Has been for six
years. Yet Barack Obama reflexively insists on playing the shocked outsider
when something goes wrong within his own administration.
The
IRS? “It’s inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am
angry about it,” he thundered in May 2013 when the story
broke of the agency targeting conservative groups. “I will not
tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but especially in the IRS.”
Except
that within nine months, Obama had grown far more
tolerant, retroactively declaring this to be a phony scandal without “a smidgen
of corruption.”
Obamacare
rollout? “Nobody is more frustrated by that than I am,” said an aggrieved Obama about the botching of
the central element of his signature legislative achievement. “Nobody is madder
than me.”
Veterans
Affairs scandal? Presidential chief of staff Denis McDonough explained: “Secretary [Eric]
Shinseki said yesterday . . . that he’s mad
as hell and the president is madder than hell.” A nice touch — taking
anger to the next level.
The
president himself declared: “I will not stand for it.”
But since the administration itself said the problem was long-standing, indeed
predating Obama, this means he had stood for it for 5½ years.
The one
scandal where you could credit the president with genuine anger and obliviousness
involves the recent breaches of White House Secret Service protection. The Washington Post described the first lady
and president as “angry and upset,” and no doubt they were. But the first
Secret Service scandal — the hookers of Cartagena — evinced this
from the president: “If it turns out that some of the allegations that have
been made in the press are confirmed, then of course I’ll be angry.” An
innovation in ostentatious distancing: future conditional indignation.
These
shows of calculated outrage — and thus distance — are becoming not just
unconvincing but unamusing. In our system, the president is both head of state
and head of government. Obama seems to enjoy the monarchial parts, but when it
comes to the actual business of running government, he shows little interest
and even less aptitude.
His
principal job, after all, is to administer the government and to get the right
people to do it. (That’s why we typically send governors rather than senators
to the White House.) That’s called management. Obama had never managed anything
before running for the biggest management job on earth. It shows.
What
makes the problem even more acute is that Obama represents not just the party
of government but a grandiose conception of government as the prime mover of
social and economic life. The very theme of his presidency is that government
can and should be trusted to do great things. And therefore society should be
prepared to hand over large chunks of its operations — from health care
(one-sixth of the economy) to carbon regulation down to free contraception — to
the central administrative state.
But
this presupposes a Leviathan not just benign but competent. When it then turns
out that vast, faceless bureaucracies tend to be incapable, inadequate,
hopelessly inefficient and often corrupt, Obama resorts to expressions of angry
surprise.
He
must. He’s not simply protecting his own political fortunes. He’s trying to
protect faith in the entitlement state by portraying its repeated failures as
shocking anomalies.
Unfortunately,
the pretense has the opposite effect. It produces not reassurance but anxiety.
Obama’s determined detachment conveys the feeling that nobody’s home. No one
leading. Not even from behind.
A poll conducted two weeks ago showed that
64 percent of likely voters (in competitive races) think that “things in the
U.S. feel like they are out of control.” This is one degree of anxiety beyond
thinking the country is on the wrong track. That’s been negative for years, and
it’s a reflection of failed policies that in principle can be changed.
Regaining control, on the other hand, is a far dicier proposition.
With
events in the saddle and a sense of disorder growing — the summer border
crisis, Ferguson, the rise of the Islamic State, Ebola — the nation expects
from the White House not miracles but competence. At a minimum, mere presence.
An observer presidency with its bewildered-bystander pose only adds to the
unease.
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The bewildered bystander president who does not even lead from
behind, yet no one sees this in relation to the greatest
threat - Iran