Obama’s weirdness

I’m sure I’m not the only person who scratched his head at Obama’s odd anecdote of his experience with car insurance, which didn’t sound like anything that had happened in this world. John at Powerline discusses it in detail and shows its absurdity.

Amidst our criticisms of Obama, however, let us give him credit for something, which a friend pointed out. He had the guts and the generosity of spirit to sit there on national television for six hours allowing his political opponents to tell him to his face that his signature legislative initiative is no damn good.

But there is a less complimentary way of seeing it. Obama is so arrogant, so filled (in the typical liberal way) with the sense of the rightness of his own opinions and of the complete worthlessness and irrationality of his opponents’, that he didn’t realize that the Republicans were demolishing the case for the health care bill.

Update: from cool to clueless

And what about Eric Cantor placing the entire 2,700 (or was it 2,400?) page Senate bill in front of him during the conference, and Obama getting annoyed about that? That was just remarkable. Obama made it clear that he thought it was somehow unfair for Cantor to bring to the meeting the actual bill that the meeting was about. He then launched into a lengthy, and rather pretentious, discourse about the need for complexity in federal legislation, that is, about the need for bills that are 2,700 pages long. At one point, when Obama was expressing his irritation with what Cantor had done, Cantor had a little smile on his face which I thought expressed disbelief that Obama was reacting the way he was.

The man who seemed so cool as a candidate seems so clueless today. But that’s what happens when you are hired for a job for which you are not prepared.

- end of initial entry -

James P. writes:

“Amidst our criticisms of Obama, however, let us give him credit for something, which a friend pointed out. He had the guts and the generosity of spirit to sit there on national television for six hours allowing his political opponents to tell him to his face that his signature legislative initiative is no damn good.”

Obviously he didn’t go into it thinking he was being taken to the woodshed for a well-deserved hiding. He thought he was going to show the country that his political opponents were evil, mean-spirited, racist obstructionists who want to deny medical care to the poor, the minorities, the women, and the crippled children. His goal was to regain the propaganda advantage through the exertion of his vaunted charisma. In this he did not display unusual courage but simply defaulted to his preferred political tactic.

LA replies:

Still, whatever his motives for doing it, and whatever the consequences for him of his doing it, the fact is that he sat there for six hours on national television letting his political opponents speak at length about why his program is terrible and should be rejected. And he sat there listening (or not listening) to them.

I repeat what I said at the beginning, that I think a gathering of this nature is highly inapproprate to the nature of our Constitution, as it diminishes the separation of powers. The powers are so separate than even the House and Senate never refer to the other body by name, but only as “the other body.” That’s the way each part of our government maintains its independence and dignifity. So a meeting like this diminishes the president, and also diminishes the senators and congressmen, for example by their saying, “Mr. President” while he called them by their first name, which they should have protested, but didn’t. but the cheap one-upmanship of Obama did not increase his stature.

The irony is, Obama loves to diminish his presidential stature by kowtowing to foreign enemies. But in this case, he diminished his authority by politely listening to Republicans.

At the same time, I can’t entirely regret this unique event. The country has been roiled by the health care issue for a year. For the top Republicans and Democrats to lay out their positions at a high level meeting like this was useful.

D. in Seattle writes:

There is another strange aspect of the Obama auto insurance story, and I’m surprised John at Powerline didn’t pick it up.

When your car gets rear-ended, most of the time it’s the other driver’s fault. In that case, you don’t call your insurance company to get your car repaired; you call the other driver’s insurance company, or they call you. Only if the other driver doesn’t have insurance would your insurance company cover the repair, and then only if you’re covered against the other driver’s lack of coverage (not all states even have this option).

In light of this, the story is even stranger. It’s like making up an insurance story to tell to a person that has absolutely no clue how insurance work and would take whatever you say at face value.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 26, 2010 07:36 AM | Send