Probably not. As they say down at the pool hall, there's a lot of green between here and there. The election of 2012 is miles away and much can happen. Barack Obama looks beleaguered today but it's still early. New issues will take center stage and the President will have plenty of opportunities to recover. His biggest problem going forward however isn't START or DADT or Guantanamo or even jobs. His biggest problem is his own personality.
Barack Obama is too damn rational for his own good. When confronted with a problem, say like Julian Assange and Wikileaks, 1) he gets opinions, 2) listens to aides, 3) forms an rational course of action and 4) chooses to act based on the best opinions available. This may be a wonderful way to run the Philosophy Dept at Princeton or the Fairfax County Library but it's a terrible way to run America. We just had the crap scared out of us in 2008 facing a depression. Unemployment is stalled at 9.5%. North Korea is angling for the Hemorrhoid of the Year award. Afghanistan is a quagmire. We don't want rational. We want a President who looks and sounds as pissed-off and frustrated as America feels.
I can give Barack Obama an instant 10 point boast in the polls. At today's photo op wherever it is, he needs to lean over to someone and in his best Joe Biden whisper, allow "if I could I'd grab Julian Assange around his scrawny Australian neck and shove a Louisville Slugger up his ass...without a condom."
What would you give to see Barack Obama stride to the podium and exclaim "Who the hell does John McCain think he is to deny the right of gay Americans to serve openly in the military? He is an out-of-touch relic who hasn't worn a uniform since soldiers wore spats. Getting captured and imprisoned gives McCain as much credibility to pontificate on gay rights as Jessica Lynch. As of today Don't Ask Don't tell is finished, over. Thank You".
Back in the 80's Ronald Reagan made a ill-advised joke about bombing Russia. Dumb as that was diplomatically at least it gave the country a window into the soul of it's leader. We saw a President who fantasizes about wiping out our biggest enemy. We were pretty sure he wouldn't do it (with Reagan, pretty sure was all you got) but he thought about it. He was human. When Libyans were suspected of dynamiting an off-duty nightclub in Germany killing several GI's, Reagan sent a sortie of fighter bombers to Libya with a payload sufficient to get the attention of Muammar al-Gaddafi. One suspects Reagan didn't ask for advice. He banged the desk and screamed "I want that camel-fucker dead by tonight". I'm guessing no one argued.
Richard Nixon, frustrated with the lack of progress in Vietnam, started throwing bombs all over Southeast Asia. The idea was to convince the North Vietnamese that he was erratic enough to do almost anything to beat them into submission. Had America not been so thoroughly sick of the war in Vietnam by that time, Nixon might have been more successful.
This is what America wants. We elected a smart guy but not R2D2. Hell, he took fifteen stitches in a pick-up basketball game and came up smiling not swinging. So far the closest thing we have seen to passion is a speech on Monday where the venom was leveled at his own party. Hello, Barack, the Dems are not the enemy; mostly. The problem isn't that our President is deliberate. The problem is that our enemies and most of Congress can count on his lack of temper. We fear Kim Jong Il because he's unpredictable. OK, no one wants that level of crazy but Churchill, de Gaulle andAtilla the Hun were all a bit tough to anticipate.
Barack Obama needs to be a little more cranky.
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