By Claude Sandroff ——Bio and Archives--November 28, 2010
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Khrushchev saw the Cuba fiasco as evidence that the young president was weak. Therefore he bullied him in Vienna. In the mistaken belief that had intimidated him there, he built the Wall. Kennedy answered the challenge by sending four hundred Green Berets to Southeast Asia, explaining to those around him that “we have a problem making our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.”With the media still obsessed about repudiating the claim that that our thin-skinned president with an even thinner resume is not up to the role they anointed him for, several of their rank are beginning to scout around for potential places where Obama could begin to look more credible. Mark Penn, whose last failure was formulating Hillary Clinton’s listless presidential campaign strategy, is looking longingly for another disaster on the scale of the Oklahoma City bombing. According to Penn it wasn’t Dick Morris’ triangulation strategy that turned the Clinton presidency around, but the massacre of innocents in the Murrah Federal Building. It was on that public stage where Clinton was able to lip-bite and empathize his way to revival. Obama needs, according to Penn, another similar event to “reconnect” with the American people. The Washington Post’s elder liberal oracle, David Broder, has upped Penn’s ante and in a recent column he openly pines for an all out war with Iran to help boost the economy but mostly Obama. All Obama has to do is “spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs.” Obama’s success is so overriding a concern for the insane left fringe that not even the deaths of thousand of Americans will get in the way of their Barack resurrection project. All of these bizarre, almost homicidal suggestions are emerging at a time when Barack Obama is becoming an international laughingstock and domestic albatross for the democrats. John Bolton, George W. Bush’s recess appointee to the UN, called Obama’s recent post-shellacking, Asian escape humiliating on both the political and economic fronts. It’s one thing to lose the Olympics quite another to fail to negotiate a free trade agreement with a key trading partner like South Korea and to limp back to the US having won no Chinese concessions over revaluing the renminbi. Overconfidence is forgivable, ineptitude is not. Though Obama read competently from his teleprompter in the Indian parliament he was unable to explain why he didn’t label Pakistan a terrorist state. And while he managed to avoid laughable gaffes like the one during his trip to Turkey when he created a new Indo-European language called Austrian, he couldn’t avoid expressing his anti-Israeli prejudices in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country. Obama’s self-inflicted leadership failures-- from the BP gulf oil disaster to defending quantitative easing to the G20-- have become so monumental and have so weakened him (and us) that he can now be declared as lethally dangerous as a drunk driving a speeding semi. We’re not quite sure what his careening presidency might crash into next. Highlighting Obama’s embarrassing deficit of accomplishment is George W. Bush’s recent re-emergence on the national stage with countless interviews delving into his unpretentious memoirs. Suddenly, Obama’s eternal nemesis reminds the country subtly that there was, a little while ago, a much more dignified White House. And the man who returned to Crawford, Texas in near disgrace with his approval in the low 30’s, now has ratings the equal of his successor and tormenter.
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Claude writes regularly on politics, energy and science. He is a former research scientist currently working with high tech companies in Silicon Valley.