Barack Obama is suddenly behaving like the bratty kid the last thirty days before Christmas, realizing that maybe, just maybe, Santa Claus is watching.
Effusive praise from Gov Chris Christie notwithstanding (who had his own double dose of reality fall in his lap this week, as to the true meaning of extreme governance) I doubt many people laid aside Obama’s un-presence at the Situation Room just six weeks ago, as Benghazi burned and four of our own left to die. I doubt they forgot these things as they watched him don his wings to strut and pose around that same situation room this week, while making platitudinous promises of support.
Shades of the 2008 Campaign, no one, not even Bill Clinton, is better than Barack Obama at making sincere, heart-rending empty promises that require nothing more.
Frankly, all Obama can do is cut loose money, and he could do that just as easily from Air Force One or a golf cart. It was all about optics, and I suspect everyone knows that. Six days appearing to be presidential where not one single thing of substance is required of him, no hard decisions that require him to summon up his by now infamous trait for indecision and dithering, cannot undo four years of catastrophic decision-making and non-decision making.
While it is politically beneficial to be there to help Christie and New Jersey, nothing will be fixed on his watch, and if re-elected next week Christie and the people of New Jersey had better beware of trying to collect on those promises anytime soon.
Ask other Republicans who needed help; Gov Bob McDonnell in Virginia over the earthquake, the entire Midwest during the drought, Nashville during the flood, Joplin after the tornado, Gov Bobby Jindell over the BP oil spill (Obama & Co made that environmental mess manifestly much worst, not to mention insuring it would not happen again by shutting down almost all the jobs down there).
I doubt people will forget. I doubt people will look at Obama’s pre-Christmas halo as the transformation of a good man who finally gets it. What they will see is a pose for holy pictures for some soon-to-be-hired biographer, a special chapter dedicated to how Obama tried to calm the angry seas and save the east coast but it just wasn’t enough.
Like the mess George Bush left him, it was just more than Barack Obama could handle.
