THE PRESIDENT FACES FRIENDLY FIRE

By H. N. Burdett

The soft-spoken, sweet-talking Bayou country sage, James Carville, famously counsels, "When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil!"

Barrack Obama may or may not be going under for the third time, though he's undeniably swimming against a treacherous tide. But Republican congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner can't seem to find an anvil, only the end of George W. Bush's frayed rope.

It's hard to think of a single constructive idea the minority has contributed to the achievements of the first year and a half of the Obama administration: extending health care to from 16-32 million relatively poor Americans; meeting Obama's August 2010 deadline for the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, and the flawed but nonetheless enacted economic stimulus package and financial reform.

Even the GOP rages against the Obama program are flaccid and wobbly, delivered half-heartedly, as though rather than earnestly challenging they are just going through the motions. The right-wing blowhards of the airwaves are equally unsubstantive, only noisier.

No matter. The same so-called liberal media the foghorns of the right routinely bellow against are doing their job for them. The disloyal opposition has the luxury of at least temporarily sitting back, shutting up and enjoying the show. As if the Becks, O'Reillys and Limbaughs are about to let that happen.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich, reviewing Jonathan Alter's tome, The Promise, President Obama's Year One, in the New York Review of Books, feels it "confirms that the biggest flaw in Obama's leadership has to do with his own team. . .and it's a flaw that has been visible from the start."

Rich homes in on Obama's obsession with meritocracy which facilitated his own meteoric rise from community organizer to Illinois state senator to U.S. senator to the presidency, leaving mere mortal politicians to ponder whether he really does put on his pants one leg at a time as they do.

Recalling the administration's tardiness in responding to the BP oil spill, Rich recounts the White House endlessly repeating that energy secretary Stephen Chu is a Nobel laureate, as though credentials trump performance or lack thereof. And there's the droll observation that not only is Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag a Princeton summa cum laude with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, but his spokesman, Ken Baer, has a Ph.D. from Oxford. Facts that would impress only another thumb-sucking elitist.

Perhaps Obama felt that after eight years of Bush administration bumbling incompetence, high brain wattage would blind the public into faith and trust in its successors. Progressives are now learning that the smartest guys in the room can screw up as royally as the least engaged, and can be equally annoying, to wit, Timothy Gaithner and Lawrence Summers.

Indeed Gaithner and Summers are properly pole-axed as the foxes in Obama's chicken coop by John B. Judis in The New Republic.

While it has been argued that Gaithner's serial tax delinquencies should have disqualified him for secretary of the treasury, he has managed to intensify public disdain by his defense of the TARP initiative, his role in allowing Lehman Brothers to go under, and his indifference to AIG paying back their Wall Street creditors with taxpayers' money.

Meanwhile, Summers's reprehensibly imperious attitude as the top White House economic adviser about the inferiority of the judgments and opinions of his colleagues compared with his own, as well as his exaggerated concern over losing the confidence of business interests, have invited questions as to whether he has been helping or hurting the Obama administration.

While some Democrats see Obama's possible Waterloo in his single-minded persistence to pass health care restructuring "while the economy was hemorrhaging jobs," Judis insists that "the real damage was done earlier."

"What doomed Obama politically," Judis writes, as though the president's political demise is fait accompli, "was the way he dealt with the financial crisis in the first six months of his presidency. In an atmosphere primed for a populist backlash, he allowed the right wing to define the terms." Here Judis is quick to point out that had John McCain been elected, the all-too-apparent cluelessness the GOP presidential nominee exhibited on the campaign trail with regard to economics and financial issues indicated he most probably would have fared even worse than Obama has.

Judis goes on to correctly explain that populism is non-ideological, noting that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan each found ways of using its appeal during an economic downturn.

If during times of high unemployment and a weak economy, the president fails to adopt populism, the opposition will, Judis asserts. "That's what (Jimmy) Carter discovered during the stagflation of the late '70s," he points out. "And that's what happened in the last 20 months of the Great Recession to Barrack Obama and to the Democratic party he leads."

A litany of Obama actions that have driven progressives bananas is offered by Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation. The list ranges from backing away from inclusion of single payer insurance, the key to true health care reform, to reneging on the president's promise to fight for "a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming --an 80 per cent reduction by 2050. . ."

Musing upon the horrific George W. Bush legacy, with which Obama still contends and doubtless is fated to continue struggling against throughout his presidency, Alterman says: "Think about the Mineral Management Service, where chaos, corruption and incompetence competed with genuine malevolence to empower BP to ignore so many safety rules before the oil spill. Now multiply that by virtually the entire government regulatory structure, and you have some idea of the kind of mess left by Bush and Cheney to the Obama administration."

Judis stresses that the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter is "the specter hanging over Obama's presidency." Readily acknowledging that Obama has already accomplished more in the first 20 months of his administration than Carter did during his entire presidency, he adds, "But there is a disturbing political resemblance between the two presidents." Both ran inspired campaigns, positioned themselves above the partisan quarrels and scandals of their Republican predecessors, and initially raised the possibility of creating a "transformational" presidency. But Carter failed and Obama is failing to connect with large segments of the electorate.

PolitiFact.com, the St. Petersburg Times database that won a Pulitzer for fact-checking the 2008 presidential campaign offers another way of evaluating the progress of the Obama presidency. It catalogued and tracked a total of 502 promises Obama made during his campaign. One year later the analysis showed he had already kept 91 of them, made progress on another 285, "broken" 14, and was "stalled" on 89. Moreover, PolitiFact singled out 25 of Obama's most significant campaign promises; of these, in his first year 20 already have been "kept" or are "in the works." For a president who has yet to reach the halfway mark of his first term, that's hardly chopped liver.

Progressive dissatisfaction with Obama has less to do with the quantity of his accomplishments than their quality. More often than not, Obama settles for half a loaf. One of his political mentors puts it this way, "Sometimes you can't get the whole hog, so you settle for a ham sandwich." The White House mess will have to expand exponentially to accommodate the stockpiling of the president's ham sandwiches.

Obama constantly invites criticism from those who feel he relinquishes too much in the pursuit of his cockeyed quixotic dream of bipartisanship, which will become reality only when there is ice-skating on the Styx.

A one-term fate for the president is the current conventional wisdom of the Beltway soothsayers, who will never be accused of harboring foolish consistencies that Emerson tells us are hobgoblins of small minds.

But, as a former media colleague constantly used to remind me, you don't top chicken salad with chicken feathers, or something close enough to that. And Republican ammunition, no matter which candidate ultimately fires it, is reduced to belching the Methuselian cant of tax cuts for the rich, borrowing to cover government's bills and turning the tab over to our kids and grandkids to pay, and pulling the rug from under social programs.

The drumbeat for retrogression is less likely to produce a Republican bandwagon than induce an enormous collective yawn. With such a dog-eared, wrinkled and yellowing message, the GOP must pin its hopes on the messenger. That messiah has yet to surface, though there are more than a few aspirants itching to be so anointed.

If Barrack Obama can manage to dodge those frequent barrages of friendly fire, he may not only win re-election, he could even transform the Rushmore Four into a quintet.