One of the great frustrations for me - and many others that I know - with the Obama presidency is that we thought we were voting for someone who would be a leader. Instead of the leader we had hoped for, we got a generally spineless follower who is all about pretty statements and zero action. To make matters worse, Obama continues to reach out to those who would not only bite his hand, but would preferably see him driven from office as an utter failure. Even Pavlov's dog figured out reality more rapidly than our faux fierce advocate int the White House. The irony is, of course, that the GOP is in many ways - other than formulating anti-Democrat and anti-liberal slogans - in total disarray and the party base is a case of the inmates now being in control of the asylum. Even Lindsay Graham, a/k/a the Palmetto Queen, sees to viable 2012 GOP presidential candidate among the current field of would be candidates. Making the GOP effort more difficult is the fact that to secure the votes needed in a primary from the GOP base, a candidate must espouse views that may well make them radioactive to the larger electorate. Frank Rich in his column in the New York Times looks at the lay of the land and asks whether or not Obama will seize the opportunity at hand. Sadly, based on his past obtuseness, I suspect the answer is "NO." Here are column highlights:*
THE G.O.P. has already reached its praying-for-a-miracle phase — hoping some neo-Reagan will emerge to usurp the tired field. Trump! Thune! T-Paw! Christie! Jeb Bush! Soon it’ll be time for another Fred Thompson or Rudy groundswell. But hardly had CPAC folded its tent than a new Public Policy Polling survey revealed where the Republican base’s heart truly remains — despite the new civility and the temporary moratorium on the term “job-killing.” The poll found that 51 percent of G.O.P. primary voters don’t believe that the president was born in America and that only 28 percent do. (For another 21 percent, the jury is still out, as it presumably is on evolution as well.)
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The party leadership is no less cowed by that majority today than it was pre-Tucson. That’s why John Boehner, appearing on “Meet the Press” last weekend, stonewalled David Gregory’s repeated queries asking him to close the door on the “birther” nonsense. (“It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think,” Boehner said.) The power of the G.O.P.’s hard-core base may also yet deliver a Palin comeback no matter what the rest of the country thinks of her. In the CNN poll nearly two weeks after Tucson, Republicans still gave her a 70 percent favorable approval rating, just behind Huckabee (72 percent) and ahead of Romney (64 percent).
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An opposition this adrift from reality — whether about Obama’s birth certificate, history unfolding in the Middle East or the consequences of a federal or state government shutdown — is a paper tiger. It’s a golden chance for the president to seize the moment. What we don’t know is if he sees it that way. As we’ve learned from his track record both in the 2008 campaign and in the White House, he sometimes coasts at these junctures or lapses into a pro forma bipartisanship that amounts, for all practical purposes, to inertia.
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Obama’s outspokenness about the labor battle in Wisconsin offers a glimmer of hope that he might lead the fight for what many Americans, not just Democrats, care about — from job creation to an energy plan to an attack on the deficit that brackets the high-end Bush-era tax cuts with serious Medicare/Medicaid reform and further strengthening of the health care law. Will he do so? The answer to that question is at least as mysterious as the identity of whatever candidate the desperate G.O.P. finds to run against him.
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