‘HIT THE ROAD, BARACK,’ SHOUTS NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE
      The bastion of liberal reportage calls for the President’s departure

 ROMNEY APPEARS POISED FOR SIGNIFICANT WIN IN NOVEMBER

  A POTENTIAL SHIFT OF REAGANESQUE PROPORTIONS IN THE OFFING?

By Alan Z. Forman

Like a Ray Charles hit, the cover of Newsweek magazine shouted out the headline: “Hit the Road, Barack”! followed by a series of Washington Post news stories that were highly critical of the nation’s second black president.

The first, as the saying goes, was Bill Clinton. But for Barack Obama and his top advisers this was no laughing matter.

The Newsweek cover must have been a wakeup call, because just over a month later the President played it so safe in his first debate in nearly four years he all but ceded the election to his GOP opponent, who on that single night accomplished everything he could possibly have hoped for, and more.

Voice of Baltimore believes that as a result a seismic shift in the American electorate began, unlike any this country has seen since 1980 when Ronald Reagan soundly defeated a similarly weak and ineffectual president Jimmy Carter.

The Newsweek cover made the top of the Drudge Report, a right-leaning news compendium. The article inside discussed at length Barack Obama’s duping of the American public into believing he was something he was not and focused on the startling absence of accomplishment in his single undistinguished term.

Within weeks, Newsweek would announce the impending end of its print edition as the magazine goes all digital in January, just before the conclusion of the current presidential term; its final print publication will hit newsstands Dec. 31. Perhaps the Obama cover was a last-ditch effort to stave off the inevitable for the magazine?

But the message was clear: A left-leaning pro-Obama publication was dissing the President. And its liberal parent company was suddenly writing news stories critical of his administration.

PLASTERED ON THE AUG. 27 COVER FOR ALL TO SEE

Granted, the cover story was the opinion of a single columnist — British historian Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard University and senior research fellow at Oxford — not necessarily that of Newsweek’s editors and staff. However it was plastered on the Aug. 27 cover for all to see.

The polls were then showing Obama with a comfortable lead over challenger Mitt Romney, but that was a week before actor and director Clint Eastwood energized the Republican National Convention, unmindful of the media’s lockstep criticism of his controversial “dialogue” with Obama in an empty chair.

And weeks before the President’s stunning lackluster performance in the first of three debates, in Denver Oct. 3, an event of potentially seismic proportions, an “October surprise” unlike any that has occurred in presidential politics since Reagan’s election more than 30 years ago.

[See Voice of Baltimore’s lone opinion of the dramatic effect of Eastwood’s allegedly unscripted/unrehearsed convention speech (click here) ^[2]. VoB believes the iconic actor/director accomplished whatever it was he set out to do. Witness the TV ad he produced for the Romney campaign last week — using language from his convention presentation.]

If there’s anything Voice of Baltimore learned from seven years of graduate study in politics it’s that political scientists shouldn’t try to predict political outcomes, especially elections. We’re very good at analyzing results — after the fact but not before.

However, political pundits can sometimes recognize history about to repeat itself, and that’s what VoB sees happening in this year’s presidential election.

Before Ronald Reagan was loved he ran against a weak and ineffectual incumbent Jimmy Carter who didn’t know how to solve the Iranian hostage dilemma that he tried to blame on everyone but himself. Two weeks before the election the impending outcome was too close to call.

Reagan’s advisers in fact were still anticipating an October surprise that would threaten to knock their candidate out of the water. It didn’t happen, of course, but that’s the advantage of hindsight. What turned out to be a huge surprise however was how decisively Reagan won the election, and how massively the country had shifted in his favor.

The shift — unrecognized before the election by virtually all the analysts — was seismic, and didn’t become evident until the returns began rolling in election night. But why such a surprise? The telltale signs were evident all along, only no one looked hard enough to see them.

Yet Reagan wasn’t loved till after his attempted assassination, nearing the end of his first 100 days as president, just as the Democrats were beginning to criticize him at the conclusion of his honeymoon period. It was many more months before anyone could say a critical word about him after that.

Carter was a weak president, and accomplished little in his only term other than bringing the Israelis and Palestinians to Camp David. He entered office on the cusp of Watergate — like Obama, with no national experience — and by most accounts, seemed not to learn on the job. Despite his academic credentials — he’s a Naval Academy graduate — he was ineffectual militarily and is universally considered to have been the worst American chief executive of the twentieth century, ranking near the bottom with Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and several other failed presidents of the 1800s.

OBAMA AND CARTER:  TWO UNLIKELY PRESIDENTS

Had it not been for Watergate and Gerald Ford’s clumsy pardon of Richard Nixon, it’s unlikely Carter would have ever been president at all.

Had Obama not been black, it’s unlikely he would have ever become president either.

Yet if Carter had freed the hostages as late as October or even early November 1980 the Reagan Revolution would never have occurred. Obama is banking on his killing of Osama bin Laden to similarly prevent a Romney Revolution.

In last week’s third debate the GOP nominee politely praised him for eliminating the mastermind of the 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, then was lectured by the President, who was “harsh, even condescending at times, toward Romney,” according to the Washington Post.

Obama “later explained, as if to a child,” the Post continued in its reporting of the debate, “that the modern U.S. Navy has aircraft carriers ‘where planes land on them’ and ‘ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines,’ to rebut Romney’s criticism that federal spending cuts threaten to reduce U.S. naval power to levels not seen since early in the last century.”

Not the behavior of a president who’s confident of his reelection.

Plus he’s run out of excuses for why he hasn’t fixed George Bush’s mess that he was presented with when he entered office.

He was elected for his promise. But he has failed to deliver. The nation may be just now learning that, big time.

According to former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, in her column last weekend ^[5] in the Wall Street Journal, the arrogant, “petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself” Obama that was revealed in the debates is actually “the real Obama,” a president — as Bob Woodward describes in his book just published, The Price of Politics — “who is at once over his head, out of his depth and wholly unaware of the fact….

“His confidence is consistently greater than his acumen, his arrogance greater than his grasp,” says Woodward. He is the emperor unclothed, and even his fervent supporters are not liking what they see.

In Sunday’s New York Times’ Sunday Review section Frederick C. Harris, director of the Center on African American Politics and Society, part of Columbia University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, questions, “Have African-American elites given Obama a pass, accepting symbolism over substance?”

Harris then answers his own question — in the affirmative — by concluding: “Sadly, when it comes to the Obama presidency and black America, symbols and substance have too often been assumed to be one and the same.”

For his part, in the third debate, Romney emphasized, “We’re four years closer to a nuclear Iran” but “we can’t kill our way out of this mess” that is worldwide terrorism, perhaps referring to the necessary elimination of terrorist leaders despite the distasteful image of a president’s being required to order assassinations.

On a gut level, Americans don’t like to think of their president as a killer.

INDECISIVE ABOUT KILLING BIN LADEN TILL PRODDED BY CLINTON

To date, the former Navy SEAL — whose book on the bin Laden assassination, No Easy Day, asserts Obama was indecisive until prodded by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to capture and kill the al-Qaeda leader — is the only one to criticize the President’s handling of the matter.

Writing under the pseudonym Mark Owen, Matt Bissonnette claims there was never any intention to capture bin Laden alive, that killing him was the goal of the Obama White House from the get-go. And that had it not been for the secretary of state’s insistence that the mission move ahead, Obama would have continued to waffle indecisively over what to do, postponing the incursion into Pakistan yet again as late as the day before, claiming that weather conditions, although perfect, were not exactly right.

The country has been willing, even eager, to give Obama a pass on most issues, for lots of reasons, not the least of which is the color of his skin. Yet none of us benefits when a president fails.

However Romney, who has long been criticized for being aloof, impersonal and dismissive of the common man, by virtue of the debates is suddenly seen as “presidential,” while by contrast Obama appears arrogant, petulant and defensive.

The President may have “won” the second and third debates — as alleged on Twitter and Facebook — albeit by a razor-thin margin, but Romney appears to be the one who accomplished his objectives.

^[6]What Obama “accomplished” at the debates was to reveal his true character, through his condescension and uncontrolled expressions of anger and irritation.

All of which begs the question, Did Newsweek and the Washington Post shift because Obama revealed a dark side of his personality long kept hidden? And did the country begin to shift as well, for the same reason?

Is the President really disdainful of others? Does he actually dislike most people? as one of his former aides was quoted as saying a couple weeks ago.

“It’s stunning that he’s in politics,” the former aide, Neera Tanden, told New York magazine in a recent interview, “because he really doesn’t like people,” adding that “people say the reason Obama wouldn’t call Clinton” during the first two years of his term “is because he doesn’t like him,” only recently renewing his ties with the former president out of political expediency.

“The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone,” Tanden said. “[I]t’s like becoming Bill Gates without liking computers.”

But Obama’s no Bill Clinton. When the Democrats lost their majority two years into Clinton’s first term he readjusted and regrouped, and ultimately proved far more effective dealing with a Republican Congress than he had been with his own party in control. Richard Nixon, another minority president, was similarly effective in his dealings with Congress in the early 1970s.

But Obama has never been able to make that transition.

CLINTON COULD OUTSMART THE GOP AT EVERY TURN

Bill Clinton was able to outsmart the Republican leadership at every turn. Even under threat of impeachment, he ran circles around Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and won additional Democratic seats in the House of Representatives in 1998, a virtually unprecedented gain for a president in a year when he wasn’t personally on the ballot.

Not even Franklin Roosevelt, in more than 12 years as president, could accomplish that feat.

And despite Clinton’s impeachment, it was Gingrich who left the government in disgrace, taking responsibility for his party’s failed initiatives against the Clinton presidency.

Clinton is arguably the most effective and astute politician this country has seen in more than 40 years. If his wife wants to run again for president in 2016, he will make it happen.

Her attempt to deflect blame from Obama for the fiasco in Libya that resulted in the death of American Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others has all the earmarks of a Bill Clinton-engineered maneuver, as does his “enthusiastic” support on the campaign trail for Obama.

But it is Romney who has made Clinton’s James Carville mantra “It’s the economy, stupid” the focus of this election: The economy and the President’s failure to relieve unemployment and create jobs.

Voice of Baltimore previously noted in this space that it’s not in the Clintons’ best interests for Obama to be reelected. But who can fault them when they put on a display of party and Obama loyalty, even though no one believes that Hillary and the State Department are in the least responsible for the lax security and the killing of our ambassador in Libya.

Or for the lies being told by the administra- tion to cover it up. That is Obama’s albatross.

But does all this mean the voters will abandon him on Nov. 6?

A large percentage of the Jewish population, for example, despite his lukewarm support for the State of Israel say they still intend to vote for him, that he won’t really throw the Jewish nation under the bus as Romney and the Republicans charge he’s done and will continue to do.

And the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper, in spite of the closeness of the final two debates, described Debate No. 2 as a “knockout” for Obama and No. 3 as “checkmate,” both on Page 1. One wonders what the Afro’s editors were watching those two nights?

Fact is, if Obama were white he wouldn’t stand a chance in this election. Still, it remains to be seen how extensive his support will be in the black community — and also the Hispanic. Hispanics do not like Romney and the Republicans’ strong views on illegal immigration.

Being black is thus a mitigating factor for Obama.

Neoconservative pundit Norman Podhoretz summed it up in an August 2011 commentary ^[8] for the Wall Street Journal:

“To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright”— Obama’s spiritual mentor for 20 years — “and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass.

“And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) ‘non-threatening,’ all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?”

WILL OPRAH STILL BE CRYING TEARS OF JOY?

But will they and the other disparate groups ignore the facts again and embrace him like they did in 2008 against John McCain?

Will Oprah Winfrey, as Clint Eastwood humorously observed, still be crying tears of joy? Or will it be OK now for whites to not vote for a black man without being labeled racist? and to attribute his less-than-distinguished Ivy League education — with mediocre grades that got him into Harvard and Columbia — as being due to affirmative action?

Will the “audacity of hope” be enough to propel Obama to a second four-year term? Or will he crash and burn as the full electorate sees him more and more for what he is?

Voice of Baltimore thinks his time has passed, that the electorate is finally beginning to see him as the emperor unclothed, although we’re not too sure about Oprah’s tears of joy.

We think the playing field is shifting, that people are increasingly unwilling to cut the President the slack that got him into office and sustained him till this point.

We think they’ll no longer accept his excuse that George Bush is responsible for all that’s wrong in America, even after four years of Barack Obama.

We think the country is moving massively toward Romney. And that it could be a shift of Reaganesque proportions.

And we think that’s going to spell defeat for Barack Obama on Election Day.
 
Washington, D.C. insider Gloria Cataneo Tosi contributed to this commentary.
 
alforman@voiceofbaltimore.org