Dreading Obama’s JFK Moment

Presidents can make historically awful decisions when the nation and the world begin to view their regimes as hopelessly weak, naïve and incompetent. It was at such an ebb in JFK’s presidency that the first American military troops arrived in Vietnam, providing an opportunity for Kennedy to show the world that he was no pushover.

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The prolific and legendary historian William Manchester (a Kennedy family acolyte for over fifty years) wrote about that fateful decision in the introduction to his small volume on the Renaissance, “A World Lit Only by Fire”:

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.

Given his narcissism and disconnectedness from reality

Given this context it’s not surprising that the ever-diminishing cadre of centrist democrats, led most prominently by Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen, see that their party and country remain in peril if Obama continues as titular head. They have gone so far as to plead with Obama not to run for a second term. Their voices comprise a small section of a growing chorus of leftist dissatisfaction, but they misjudge Obama badly. Given his narcissism and disconnectedness from reality, only more extreme and bizarre behavior can be expected as Obama’s authority is openly questioned. Obama has access to an almost limitless playground for stirring up dangerous mischief while he desperately tries to recapture his 2008 mojo. Besides the Penn and Broder versions of salvation through catastrophe, Obama has been issued a handbook for executive order dictatorship from John Podesta and his Center for American Progress. The document is designed to help the president subvert the will of the new opposition-dominant House. With Obama having already promised to use the EPA as cap and trade enforcer, he hardly needed more rules from radicals. But it is foreign affairs where we have the most to fear. Vietnam, of course, was not JFK’s only foreign policy adventure. He called Khrushchev’s nuclear bluff in Cuba, and got lucky. Let’s hope Obama doesn’t take his fawning lackeys too seriously as he searches for foreign distractions. The Soviets were absolutely rational compared to the crazed North Korean and Iranians, who would love to be provoked by the president who bows to all.