Lessons from the Campaign
Way back in 1992, when some of us old hands told everybody that Bill Clinton's bimbo eruptions reveled a shocking lack of character, all of you liberals said it didn't mean a thing. His affairs were a private matter, it had nothing to do with how he would govern. Well, I'm not going to spend time listing all the scandals of the Clinton administration (or even the stuff he's done since leaving office) because I don't have all day to sit here and write super long posts like Limis does. It's sufficient to say that not only did he do all the stuff we predicted he would, but he also did the exact same things, i.e. messing with an intern, that he'd done before. Talk about never learning.
So what you say? Clinton's old news now. That's true but the lesson remains. During King Hussein Obama I's campaign we learned that Barry wasn't always the best judge of character. In the spring, we found out that Barry sat in Reverend Wright's church for 20 years and he never figured out that he was an anti-American, reactionary hate monger. In the summer, Barry stupidly picked a former Fannie Mae executive, Jim Johnson, to lead his vice presidential search team only weeks before Fannie Mae would collapse. Of course, Barry and his liberal partisans could never reconcile how on the one hand Barry had been warning everybody about the coming mortgage meltdown and why on the other hand he would pick somebody for such an important position who was knee deep in the whole mess. And once again Barry, the master judge of character, was shocked when he found out this thoroughly corrupt man had been the beneficiary of millions of dollars in below market interest loans from Countrywide Mortgage, a company Barry had repeatedly criticized on the campaign trial.
And in the late summer came the coupe-de-grace, the pick of Joe Biden as his vice presidential candidate. Biden's reputation as a blow-hard with a loose mouth has been earned over years of gaffes, most notably his blow up over his plagiarism of British politician's Neil Kinnock's speeches during Biden's mercifully short Presidential campaign 20 years before. But Barry didn't have to go back that far. During the primary, Bullet Joe had fired off a timeless classic about Obama being acceptable to the American public because he was "clean." But none of these things disturbed our future King's slumbers. He foolishly picked this human maleprop and then spent the whole fall explaining away or running from his stupid comments. Who will ever forget Biden saying that because Obama had no experience in foreign policy, he was going to be tested within six months by a major crisis but don't worry, at first you'll think Obama's doing the wrong thing but it will work out in the end. Made my want to run right out and cast my vote for the Big O.
Well the past is the past and now we're stuck with him. And what have we seen so far? Three high level nominees have been forced to withdraw their names from consideration for their jobs for a variety of offenses (Richardson - pay to play corruption investigation, Daschle - taxes, Killefer - taxes) and three have been embarrassments (Clinton - conflict of interests, see Bill above, Geithner - taxes, Lynn - defense lobbyist). At the rate he's going, the King will only need a semi-circle table because there won't be enough people to sit around a round table.
Obama loves to fashion himself another Lincoln, even going so far as to read Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, Teams of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, to help him pick his cabinet. He should have read about another transplanted Illinois president, Ulysses S. Grant. Although personally honest and never accused of wrong-doing, Grant's presidential administration was ruined by numerous corrupt cabinet officers. Like our current ruler, Grant was a poor judge of character and foolishly trusted these people despite numerous reports of their wrong-doing. Most historians view Grant's administration as one our nations worst. So far, it looks like there might be room at the bottom of the presidential rankings for the Obama administration in a few years.
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