Michael Barone

Being There 

Obama is not so much Jimmy Carter 2.0 as the second coming of Chauncey Gardiner.

Which past leader does Barack Obama most closely resemble? His admirers, not all of them liberals, used to compare him to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

Well, Obama announced his candidacy in Lincoln’s hometown two days before Abe’s birthday, and he did expand the size and scope of government. But no one seriously compares him with Lincoln or FDR anymore.

Conservative critics have taken to comparing him, as you might imagine, to Jimmy Carter. The more cruel among them, like The Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost, say the comparison is not to Obama’s advantage.

But there is another comparison I think more appropriate for a president who, according to one of his foreign-policy staffers, prefers to “lead from behind.” The man I have in mind is Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 movie Being There.

As you may remember, Gardiner is a clueless gardener who is mistaken for a Washington eminence and becomes a presidential adviser. Asked if you can stimulate growth through temporary incentives, Gardiner says, “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well, and all will be well in the garden.”

“First comes the spring and summer,” he explains, “but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.” The president is awed as Gardiner sums up, “There will be growth in the spring.”

Kind of reminds you of Barack Obama’s approach to the federal budget, doesn’t it?

In preparing his February budget, Obama totally ignored the recommendations of his own fiscal commission, headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Others noticed: The Senate rejected the initial budget by a vote of 97–0.

Then, speaking in April at George Washington University, Obama said he was presenting a new budget with $4 trillion in long-term spending cuts. But there were no specifics.

Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf was asked last week if the CBO had prepared estimates of this budget. “We don’t estimate speeches,” Elmendorf, a Democrat, explained. “We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis.”

Evidently “first we have the spring and summer” was not enough.

Then Obama deputed Vice President Joe Biden and congressional leaders to handle negotiations over raising the debt ceiling. Biden apparently did a good job of letting everyone set out their positions and interact.

But last Thursday two influential Republicans, Rep. Eric Cantor and Sen. Jon Kyl, left the bargaining table and said that they wouldn’t return until Democrats dropped demands for tax increases. After all, if the Democrats hadn’t been able to raise taxes on high earners when they had large majorities in December’s lame-duck session, what makes anyone think this more Republican Congress will raise them now?

Cantor said it was impossible to make progress unless Obama got personally involved. Top Senate Democrat Harry Reid said the same thing. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, fresh from making a bipartisan compromise on public-employee benefits, offered succinct advice: “First, the president can show up.”

Well, Obama has agreed to do that Monday. But while Chauncey Gardiner, in his befuddlement, tried to answer questions squarely, Obama has seemed less interested in the substance of public policy than in framing issues for the next presidential campaign.

That was plainly the case in the decisions on Afghanistan he announced Wednesday night. Regardless of conditions on the ground, the president promised that the last of the surge troops will be removed by September 2012, the month Democrats hold their national convention.

As for Libya, Obama pretends we’re not involved in “hostilities” and has been content to “lead from behind.” Another sop to the antiwar Left.

Sometimes it seems he’s president of the AFL-CIO, not the U.S.A. The man who said he wanted to double exports in five years has nothing to say about his National Labor Relations Board appointee’s attempt to shut down a $1 billion plant being built by the nation’s No. 1 exporter.

And don’t forget the enviro types. Obama is releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but his appointees are barring drilling in the Gulf and Alaska and refusing approval for a natural-gas pipeline from Canada.

On all these issues, Obama seems oddly disengaged, aloof from the hard work of government, hesitant about making choices.

That doesn’t sound like Lincoln. Or Roosevelt. Or even Jimmy Carter. More like “then we have fall and winter.”

— Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2011 The Washington Examiner.

We need a leader with a vision, not a reaction to polls or election cycles...

I have been a member of two unions over the course of my working life.... that's 17+23 years, and never have felt that I could trust "the brotherhood"... example, I have worked at two schools in the district that I work in. Both were hotbeds of union activity. Active members (presidents, etc) were both long-time friends and relatives of mine. There is one basic question that I have  continually brought up, "Can you give the membership an accurate accounting of our $900 per year individual union dues?" They never have! Several years ago they faked it by sending out an expenditures list that was horribly vague, rather than be viewed as an answer to a "brother's" question, it was more a slap in the face.... as in, "Shut up, you don't know what's good for you like we (the central committee) do!"

And what's with the Teamster Union setting up shop in police departments (thirty years now)... and the correct images of Chicago politics and the fox being let loose in the henhouse...

I have remained a member out of misguided obligation. This year with the help of a friend wrote a letter to the union redirecting my dues to the Unity Home (a surprising California law allows this).... but, its time for me to take a stand and simply quit the union! I'm almost ready to retire... Somehow I have to make up for all of my years of turning a blind eye to "the brotherhood"...  so, beware my brothers and sisters, I'll work to reduce your influence.... next!

Twilight of the Unions

Scott Johnson, Powerline

In "The union-owned Democrats" (the Washington Post's headline) and "Union owned and operated" (NRO's headline), Charles Krauthammer devotes his weekly column to compiling the notable services that Barack Obama has performed on behalf of his paymasters in organized labor. "Instructive cases all," Krauthammer comments, "demonstrating how those who lose popular support -- Democrats at the polls, unions in their declining membership -- can subvert and circumvent the popular will by judicial usurpation (Wisconsin) or administrative fiat (Boeing)." It's a story that reeks.

Mark Hemingway provided a comprehensive look at the phenomena in a recent Weekly Standard cover story. Hemingway deduced that the violent spasms of the union struggles we have witnessed in recent months represent death throes. He characterized the situation as "Unionsdämmerung," the twilight of the unions. I think that Hemingway makes a powerful case, but that there should probably be a question mark next to the title.

Hemingway covers a lot of territory in his article and reminds readers of stories that may not have registered in the rush of news this spring. Here Hemingway supports the thesis of his article with a union leader's own assessment of the prospects:

Unions themselves are deeply pessimistic about the future. Until last fall, when he left the SEIU, Stephen Lerner was director of the union's high-profile campaign for reform of the banking and finance industries. He's not just any other union official​--​according to Washington Post wunderkind Ezra Klein, Lerner is "considered one of the smartest organizers, if not the smartest organizer, working in the labor movement right now. .  .  . At a time when a lot of people in labor have become, if not resigned to their fate as a marginal force in American life, increasingly confused as to how to reverse it, Lerner has a lot of fight left in him."

So how does the labor movement's smartest organizer propose to save unions from irrelevancy?

According to audio of Lerner speaking at a recent closed session at Pace University that was leaked on the Internet, Lerner thinks the labor movement has to "destabilize" the country. There needs to be a mass strike on paying mortgages, student loans, and, bizarrely, local government debt. (How local governments are expected to continue paying the salaries and pensions of unionized employees after defaulting on their bonds is unclear.)

Lerner expressed the hope that this would force banks into insolvency. They would then have to renegotiate all their mortgages and loans. It would also "bring down the stock market," depriving the rich of their wealth. Lerner approvingly cited the fatal and destructive riots over austerity measures in Greece and solemnly invoked the famous Cloward-Piven strategy​--​a theory cooked up decades ago by two leftist sociologists that urges forcing the government into a crisis so as to address economic injustice.

Finally, Lerner announced the first target of this campaign​--​JPMorgan Chase. Why? "So a bunch of us around the country think, 'Who would be a really good company to hate?' We decided that would be JPMorgan Chase."

Hemingway quotes Lerner: "Unions are almost dead. We cannot survive doing what we do." Krauthammer himself intimates the ultimate failure of the favoritism and corruption that are propping up the unions. Along with the other evidence adduced in his article, Hemingway deepens this qualification of the events depicted in Krauthammer's column.