Posted by
Katy Grimes on Wednesday, April 29, 2009 5:29:56 PM
I recently read a headline: "Obama - The 100 Anxious Days." As insufferable as Obama is, he is also a well-crafted political beast.
The first 100 Days of President Obama is getting more hype than American Idol... but then so did Obama's campaign for President. The media has been campaigning for him so long, that he continues to campaign instead of governing. The correct title should be, "Obama World Tour - 100 Days."
Regardless of how the media fawns over him, covers for him, or continues to campaign for his radical policies, many Americans aren't buying it. I've seen him described as on "intellectual autopilot," relying so heavily on his teleprompter, that his aids are getting jealous.
Criticizing the President for hypocracy, City Journal writer Michael Knox Beran writes about "the candidate of change," "If the president were seriously interested in original thinking about community regeneration, he would take on those on the Left whose cultural iconoclasm continues to undermine the country’s neighborhoods. He would express support for “New Urbanists” like Léon Krier, who seek to revive, at the local level, the cultural tradition of the town square and village green. He would take on the mandarins of the teachers unions, whose progressive policies make it difficult for teachers to hand down to the next generation of Americans the cultural capital that makes a town square possible.
Progressive iconoclasts reject the older culture precisely because it is for them a rival power, an obstacle to their plans to mold a national community under the aegis of the state. A hundred days in, President Obama, though he campaigned on a platform of change, appears committed to the stalest of the old progressive orthodoxies.
Obama is either a egomanical buffoon or more radical than the 20th Century dictators... or perhaps a combination of both.
Charles Murray from the American Enterprise institute writes, "We have a president who, from the time he entered Honolulu’s Punahou School as a teenager, has lived a magical life. Everything has gone right for decades now. Nor are any of his aides crouching beside him in the chariot whispering, “You too are mortal.” On the contrary, if we are to judge by Larry Summers, even his most astute advisers suppress what they know to be true to accommodate Mr. Obama’s wishes.
Down the road, the president’s economic policy will engender a new crisis that, to be met, will require him to reassess his assumptions and to defy his political base — and we haven’t a shard of evidence that he is able to do either of those things. Down the road, a hostile world will require him to make a foreign-policy decision with no good option, only a choice among bad options, in the face of horrific consequences if he is wrong — and we haven’t a shard of evidence that he is able to do that. Worst of all, he will come to those pivotal moments serenely confident that whatever he decides will work out.
How do I think about the Obama presidency as I look ahead? I’m scared stiff."
I think he speaks for most Americans - and now, especially for the moderates who voted for Obama.
Jay Nordlinger of National Review summed Obama up this way: "His wife said that she had never been proud of America until he got politically popular. The president seems to share this mindset. To me, we have had a long hundred days. Only 2,820 days to go."
Obama says he's anti-earmark, but signed a bill with 9,000 earmarks in it.
Obama sks his Cabinet to cut costs in their departments by $100 million -- a whopping .0027%! That's like cutting a $50,000 a year salary by $135.00
Obama "did not know about the Tea Parties."
Obama cozied up to foreign dictators on his World Tour.
Obama took the 2010 National Census from the Department of Commerceand brought it into the White House.
Obama reversed all of President Bush's Executive Orders.
Obama to Republican Congress: "I won," instead of involving them in Stimulus talks.
"For now, Obama's back-pedal on the bipartisanship promise just makes him look insincere. But the real consequences of the mistake will be felt soon enough. As Presidents Bush and Clinton could tell him, congressional majorities do change -- and at some point, Obama will need Republicans on his side. He'd be smart to spend his second 100 days making up for the serious snubs of his first." -- Meghan Clyne (DC-based writer)