Obama--Was Sarah Palin Right?

You know what Barak Obama needs most? A Dick Cheney. Even I don’t believe I said that. I was no fan of Vice President Cheney for the last eight years; I’m not really a fan now. But he’s exactly what Obama needs to be a successful president.
George W. Bush may have shown a paucity of intellect from time to time, but he had the wit to get out of Cheney’s way at crucial moments and let the old master get things done. (If Obama had a Cheney, I’m not sure he’d know to do that, but he should.) There was a reason why papa—George W.H. Bush—recommended Cheney in the first place.
GWH Bush, the placator, the diplomat, understood something about the presidency—that Obama does not. You can play the presidency in one of two ways to be successful. Be charming and stubbornly determined (think FDR or Reagan) or nasty and determined (think L.B.J.)
Johnson got more legislation through in four years than just about any other president I can think of. He didn’t do it by looking for consensus or by letting the House and Senate do their own things. He’d threaten a recalcitrant Congressman with anything from no goodies for his district—ever—to public exposure of all his peccadilloes (nice to have J. Edgar Hoover as a buddy).
Johnson could be brutally convincing—he got his votes and his laws, from both sides of the aisle. There’s not a hint of this in Obama’s measured, cool, law school brief style. Not passion, no fire, no fight. You can’t even imagine it.
Even the charming presidents had ways and means of turning on the heat. Somebody, somewhere knew how to combine Reagan and Roosevelt’s charm with the ability to break political bones and spill political guts and blood when needed. Or there’d be no New Deal and no such thing as Reaganomics.
Sarah Palin’s speech writer said something about Obama that has turned out to be terribly true. He has all the smoothness and deferential manner required of a good community organizer—where you have to try to get people to do things with very little carrot and absolutely no stick. But you, yourself, don’t actually ever do anything.
(Obama carried that tactic into his role as a senator. Senators don’t really DO anything except pass legislation—and I know of no major legislation that carries Obama’s signature, or even a couple of his finger-prints.)
As Palin’s speechwriter had her point out, “I’ve been a governor; we have to DO things.” It got a big, appreciative laugh at the Convention, but it has proven to be dreadfully right on. You can imagine Palin deciding she wants something and going out to twist a few arms out of their sockets until she got it. Can you see Obama doing that? He certainly hasn’t yet.
Obama begins to remind us of Warren G. Harding—the man who LOOKED presidential and, for that reason and only that reason, was nominated and elected in 1920. Harding’s own dad once said to him, “Warren, it’s a good thing you’re not a girl. You’d be pregnant all the time.”
If you can’t twist arms, DO things and make other people do things they might rather prefer not to—you’re not going to walk out of the Oval Office labeled a success. You may not even get invited back into it for a second term.
As a Republican, I probably should be happy that Obama is shaping up to be a second Harding; as an American I’m nervous about it. If you have a man who knows how to get what he wants, he may get it right some of the time.
If he doesn’t know how to get what he wants at all—if he isn’t even clear about wanting anything—you’re likely to wind up going nowhere. That’s wrong all the time.