Watching the news this week I finally got the right word to describe President Obama: feckless. Obama the Feckless. This epithet has been a long time coming but I finally got the right word.
Throughout history, different epithets have distilled a leader's tenure in power. One thinks of Alexander the Great, William the Conqueror, Richard the Lionhearted, Louis XIV the "Sun King." There has also been Charles the Bald, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Edward the Confessor, Thatcher the "Iron Lady."
Obama will certainly go down as the first black American president, and this is how he will probably be remembered in the history books. But in terms of the actual significance of his leadership and what he substantively has done during his tenure, feckless -- which means "unable or unwilling to do anything," or "lacking the organization necessary to succeed" -- is the only apt word.
John Kennedy once observed that power either stabilizes or destabilizes a person. Power has destabilized President Obama.
As we approach 2012, we need to face the sad fact that Barack Obama is not up to the job. He is too young, too inexperienced, too out of his depth. Bill Clinton was right, Obama was a "fairy tale."
Obama the Feckless. One more bigoted right-winger gone over the edge?
Nope.
I have edited out the sections that would reveal the real perspective of the writer. Both he and I find Obama feckless, but the author is Jim Garrison, one of the gurus of "transformational" politics, aka, high-minded leftism. An ex-priest, Cold War peacenik and now global-warming catastrophist, as well as president of Matthew Fox founded "Wisdom University". For him, the "first black American president's" "inability or unwillingness to get anything done", or his success-destroying "disorganization"* is about not carrying through the massive uberliberal "hope and change" agenda his worshippers awaited: turning rambunctious America into the European Union.
Well, his disorganized flailing around has done a lot of "transformational" damage, economic damage at home, interracial damage, and foreign policy damage. But evidently not enough for these "conscious" types.
Or, it seems, for Cornel West.
Small mercies.
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*Gee, linking his race and these flaws sounds like a coded form of racial stereotyping...maybe I should call David Gregory.
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