Does Obama Recognize the Real World?

The second term of Barack Obama is coming unglued. The president is increasingly occupied with terrorism, politics, and disaster. After Boston's deadly terrorist bombs Monday, Obama lost a fight in the Senate for gun control measures he had personally championed. He also was the target, along with a US Senator, of letters that showed traces of poisonous ricin, and faced the Thursday news of a powerful fertilizer plant explosion that devastated a small Texas town. In addition, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, one of the health reform law’s chief authors, says he’s worried about a “huge train wreck coming down” if the Obama administration doesn’t improve its public outreach about Obamacare. Baucus, a Montana Democrat who is up for reelection in 2014, sharply criticized the administration’s outreach efforts in a budget hearing on Wednesday. He told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that people and businesses “have no idea what to do, what to expect” from the law....I am concerned that not every state, including Montana, will have an insurance marketplace established in time.” And we need to add to this presidential disaster list the ongoing concern among Americans that Obama is failing to control events in the Middle East, specifically in Syria and Iran, and that his efforts to bring North Korea to the negotiating table have failed. ~~~~~ Dear readers, it may be that the very groups that have tried to lionize Obama and protect him from criticism - namely, the media and his own counsellors - have done him the greatest disservice. Washington politics is high powered, compressed into short up-and-down informal evaluations, and it is both a team and an individual activity. Barack Obama has been protected and sheltered from most of this by his own personality and lack of practical political experience, and also by those who have excused or failed to even criticize his missteps. The consequence is that the President believes everything he thinks or wants to do is right. He thinks a large majority of Americans always agree with him. He thinks he can have whatever he wants. It will, if it has not already, destroy his ability to lead, to act with reason and to evaluate his ideas and plans against reality. It is a dangerous situation for America and for the world - and it may be too late to repair the damage before a new President is elected in 2016.