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President Obama Should Stick To Reading From The Script. For The Time Being At Least

October 31, 2009

Obama 5 Adam Lovejoy writes: I do not know about you, but I often wonder: does President Barack Obama realise what he has gotten himself into? It was all very nice giving promises during the Democratic primaries and not really expecting anything to come out of it, being an outsider and all that, but it’s a completely different thing now, once he ended up in the White House, with all the difficult issues confronting him.

You might be wondering: why is it that I feel this way? Well, for several reasons, actually. First of all, I’m really disappointed with the way President Obama seems to be under the control of his spin doctors, seemingly afraid to say anything that might land him in trouble. Like it happened so often to Bill Clinton in his early years as President. (People tend to forget that Mr Clinton was a walking disaster in his first term in the White House, having been governor of an irrelevant state before that and lacking any sort of experience.) President Obama has become notorious for reading from the prepared script and his habit of relying on teleprompters has become the subject of jokes around the world. It is bizarre to watch him turn his head from right to left and back to right all the time, as if he is watching a tennis match. It actually smacks of deep inner insecurity and too much dependence on his aides and speech writers.

And, secondly, what I find discouraging about Mr Obama is his indecisiveness in taking crucial policy decisions. Take the current stalemate regarding Afghanistan: the reluctance to come up with a plan on how to proceed in Afghanistan demonstrates that the President and his advisors do not have a clear idea of how to go on about it. This dithering is all the more dangerous because it sends the wrong sort of signal to the people on the ground in Afghanistan, resulting in the situation there getting even worse. Having given top priority to the war in Afghanistan during his campaign, President Obama cannot endlessly weigh his option and play for time, hoping for some miracle to happen. You either do what you promised to do or pull your troops out.

And if you look at the wider picture around Afghanistan you would see that the current Administration has in effect widened the conflict substantially, by dragging the Pakistani government into the war with the Taliban. The way things are developing now, it would not be inconceivable if the conflict spreads further in the region, just like it happened in Vietnam in the 1960s where eventually several countries in Indochina were dragged into the war.

It’s not really clear how foreign policy is run generally in America at the moment. It sometimes seems that the current Administration is simply reacting to events, having no plan of action for next month, or even next week. How is Washington going to deal with Iraq that is sliding into a new cycle of violence and is looking at the prospect of a civil war, once American troops leave? And what about the Israeli Palestinian conflict that seems to be getting worse, with President Obama’s new bold peace initiative getting stuck somewhere between the State Department and the White House. And what about North Korea and its nuclear arsenal? Not to mention the shameful appeasement of communist China that is becoming deeply embarrassing to watch.

And thirdly, what I find disappointing about President Obama, is the reliance of his Administration on gimmicks. The whole affair with closing the Guantanamo prison is, quite frankly, a gimmick and nothing more. Just like championing the idea of ridding the world of all nuclear weapons.

And then there is the economy. We now hear that the recession has ended in the US, all thanks to the wise policies of the Obama Administration. Who in his right mind would fall for this sort of spin? The growth of the GDP by 3.5 per cent in the third quarter of this year was made possible by a huge injection of public money. And once this money dries up, the so-called recovery will be wiped out as quickly as it got into the official statistics. So what will President Obama be saying when it’s back to recession time again? Blame it on the rest of the world that did not follow the great American example?

But purely on a human level I was most of all disappointed with President Obama for the way he accepted that Nobel Peace Prize. The fact that he was nominated for the prize eleven days after he was sworn in to office spoke volumes. I for one did not accept his explanation that he knew nothing about it up to the very last moment. But even if it was so, he should have handled the whole matter differently and insisted that he would share the prize with the top five contenders. Yet, he is going through with this charade and is flying to Norway to accept the prize. How sad is that?

I might be proven wrong about Mr Obama. He might well still surprise us all. But at the moment it does not look good for him. For the time he’d better stick to reading from the script, I suppose.

– End –

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