Obama’s No JFK

It breaks my heart to seriously consider and in fact strongly suspect that Barack Obama peaked as a campaigner, and that he just doesn’t have the guts to stand up like Harry Truman or Theodore Roosevelt and fight the big-money pigs (Republicans, corporates) who have cajoled and berated this country in a pit of special-interest slime and quicksand — a pit that fewer and fewer people believe we have any chance of digging ourselves out of.


Presidents Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy

There is no sicker joke these days that the concept of bipartisanship with Republicans, and yet Obama actually called for this in last night’s State of the Union address. He’s becoming a rank embarassment. I honestly believe he’s just about finished.

Courage is a funny thing. You can talk about it all you want, but when the moment comes you need to find it within and use it. You need to grim up and look the other guy in the face and say “that’s enough” and “back off or I will deliver consequences.” And some people just don’t have that fibre, that constitution. Either Obama feels he has to be mellow and accomodating at all costs because he can’t be an angry African-American, or he’s just naturally wimpy when it comes to the tough stuff. Either way a necessary Presidential character element just doesn’t seem to be there.

In a column last Sunday titled “After The Massachusetts Massacre,” Frank Rich compared Obama’s dealings with the avaricious corporates and their paid legislative whores to John F. Kennedy‘s response to U.S. Steel’s Roger Blough after the latter announced a $6 a ton price hike in April 1962.

“Last year [Obama] pointedly studied J.F.K.’s decision-making process on Vietnam while seeking the way forward in Afghanistan,” Rich wrote. “In the end, he didn’t emulate his predecessor and escalated the war. We’ll see how that turns out. Meanwhile, Obama might look at another pivotal moment in the Kennedy presidency — and this time heed the example.

“The incident unfolded in April 1962 — some 15 months into the new president’s term — when J.F.K. was infuriated by the U.S. Steel chairman’s decision to break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages). Kennedy was no radical. He hailed from the American elite — like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.

“Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to ‘fight’ unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book ‘President Kennedy,’ reporters were left ‘literally gasping.’

“The young president called out big steel for threatening ‘economic recovery and stability’ while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at ‘a high point in popular support.’

“Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.”

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33 thoughts on “Obama’s No JFK”

  1. I have very mixed feelings about Hillary Clinton, but I think it’s safe to say if she were president, she would have thrown many more elbows and played a lot rougher to push through healthcare reform. How that approach would have worked, who knows.

    But shit, she’d probably have let us down in myriad other ways. I’m beginning to feel there’s something in the modern democratic party’s DNA that makes them born to lose, even when they win…

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  2. Part of me hopes that this is part of a larger political calculation – Obama realizing that great presidents are measured in years, not months.

    But I have to agree, Jeff – his Accountant-in-Chief demeanor is a huge disappointment. I am drawn to a cerebral approach as much as anyone, but at some point you have to smack these bitch-republicans down and say enough. Fight the fight you supposedly believe in, political implications be damned.

    I’m so tired of speeches. I want results.

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  3. Jeff, I doubt many will come to you for political advice. You were one of the few bloggers I read who was completely snookered and taken with John Edwards until it became blindly obvious to everyone what a complete two-face he was.

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  4. This will shock you, Jeff, but I think you are too harse on Obama. He is a man deeply in over his head. Inexperieced, groomed for greatness, he was elected at perhaps the most challenging moment in our nations history since the Civil War. His leftist ivory-tower ideology is at odds not only with most of the country, but with a minority of his own party. Coupled with a firm GOP opposition, he doesn’t have the votes, and his charisma has cracked. People at home have noticed the empty rhetoric, the uptilted jaw, the contempt for the taxpayers. His only hope was to go Full-Clinton and triangulate. His ego and his Koz base wouldn’t allow it. One term and out.

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  5. Wells, are you aware that JFK was so moderate that his beliefs on taxation and the economy were actually just used verbatim in an ad for Scott Brown?

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  6. I’d say Obama has been much more bold than JFK. This knee jerk liberal disapointment in Obama is getting super old – Huffington Post is becoming unbearable.

    If Obama had no courage, he wouldn’t have even bothered with health care reform this year. That’s what the moderates and the corporate Dems wanted.

    If the senate health care bill passes, at least thirty million people will have health care. Couple that with the stimulus bill, and he will have accomplished much more than JFK did in his first year and a half.

    Enough with the bed wetting.

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  7. I don’t understand what people were expecting from this guy. His entire campaign was backed and financed by Wall Street. The Defense Industry (and its attendant bevy of contractors) is arguably the biggest and most lucrative industry we have (War is not a drug; it’s a business), so pulling the plug on our misadventures in the Middle East would be tantamount to actual suicide, as we have a Military whose ideological foundation is rooted is hardcore Christianity. He’s a corporate shill and apologist, just like every President. The problem with this country isn’t the politicians anymore; it’s the People, who believe every single bit of propaganda that is spoon fed to them. “Hope.” “Change.” Buzzwords that mean nothing, mantras for the braindead. The politicians are just doing what they are supposed to be doing, which is keep the money flowing into a very small stream and erecting a fence around that stream so that no one can have a drink. The American People need to educate themselves about their own country and go from there.

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  8. Obama is not, in my understanding, escalating the war in Afghanistan. He is temporarily increasing troop levels before beginning a gradual drawdown ala Iraq. There was really no other choice for him there. The involvement was already considerably deeper than JFK’s involvement in Vietnam. Obama should call the most egregious financial sector offenders by name and shame them; he should also fight to get back some more of the money that these companies were loaned.

    But, on the whole, you’re being unfair. JFK was more than willing to coddle Southern Democrat Segregationists at the beginning of his term as President; he was also pushing for an expanded nuclear arsenal, something Obama is trying to reverse. Did Obama do enough in his first year? No. They wasted a lot of time and political capital on a stimulus program that was far too unfocused and decentralized to have the intended effect, then they wasted even more time on health care because they had outsourced the writing of the legislation to an unpopular and politicall disparate Congress. I firmly believe the political capital that he bled on those two issues was the reason that Climate Change legislation was ultimately unable to get past the Senate. He punted on DADT, which shoudl have been a no-brainer. Repealing DOMA was always going to be tougher.

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  9. Harry Truman or Theodore Roosevelt

    I’m not going to disagree with much of what you wrote, save for the bit about Truman and Roosevelt.

    You have the luxury of time, perspective, and more importantly, condensing their two administrations into several sentences. Obama is in the moment, working as the most exposed, scrutinized, talked-about President in the most media-crazed society ever. It’s easy to criticize his every move as compared to the highlights of men who served before you were born. Even if you were living at the time of TR, you wouldn’t have 1/1000th the access and visibility that we have of Obama, and would have much less occasion to criticize him for the way he set about getting things done. Unlike today, you only the saw the sausage, you never saw it being made.

    Ok, one more issue … greed knows no politics. The sooner you stop railing against phantom enemies, you’ll have much more success convincing others of your views.

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  10. The speech last night was too long. When the republicans were not applauding, Obama should have turned to them and just glared. That would have been good. Today on tv I see that Hillary is not interested in being sec. of state for two terms, if Obama got re-elected. I think she is going to run;NotImpressed, you’re right, Hillary would have played hardball and she would have got results, but she might fail at other things. Did you see the generals sitting there, no emotion, when Obama talked about don’t ask/don’t tell? And the supreme court, right in the front row, when he took them to task about that awful decision they made? In spirte of this, who do the reupblicans have? Palin? Huckabee? Maybe Romney, I don’t know.

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  12. I’m often embarrassed by my fellow liberals and this is one of those times. You realize you’re playing right into the hands of the left and that this kind of thinking is going to result in a fucking republican in four years? Do you further realize that supporters of Hillary Clinton said that if Obama gets in it’s going to be Carter Redux? This kind of attitude is just plain wrong. You campaigned for him, you voted for him – don’t kick him when he’s down; stand by your man or shut up for the rest of us who don’t want regime change in four more years.

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  16. Phreaker – the underlying issue here is incompetence on behalf of the democrats. they have congress, senate, and the presidency and cant seem to get anything done…. or what they do get done is seriously watered down/corporate sponsored, that it makes no difference who is in control of the government.

    America is a sinking ship… and its capitalist system is a pyramid scheme, anyone with half a brain should leave the country and live out the rest of their lives in peace away from the corrupt evil heartless country we all currently live in.

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  17. You gotta believe that JKennedy was killed because he was so determined in his beliefs. And I’m starting to get on Jeff’s wagon with him….I think Obama is trying to be too nice and politics of today and the issues ot today do not have room for “niceness”.

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  18. knock yourself out, nightheat….

    send us a postcard

    (where are planning on going, BTW?)

    Chicago48…. uh, JFK was killed by an attention-seeking, narcissistic, America-hating, embittered failure nutcase who wanted to prove something…. No, that doesn’t make for a good Oliver Stone treatment but it is, alas, the truth….

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  20. Maybe I’m just totally sick of partisan warfare and therefore haven’t listened to a speech in a long time, but what I heard yesterday was a pleasant surprise. It was, least occasionally, moving, confident, and convincing. Perhaps I only paid attention at the few effective and passionate parts of the address.

    President Clinton always impressed me with how effectively he could shred a Republican talking point with wit and intelligence. He wouldn’t get nasty, or personal, or defensive, or whiny – he would just get right to the point, explaining why he believed in a certain policy decision and why he thought his opponents ideas would lead us down the right path. I saw just a little of that last night out of President Obama, but I’ve seen NONE of that from any other Democrat in years.

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  23. @nightheat

    Don’t reference Nazis in relation to anything, you don’t know what a Nazi is apparently and you’re borderline(ah screw it) completely retarded.

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  25. Jeff: To be fair, Obama’s willing to negotiate with Iran, while JFK was ready to nuke Cuba and the Soviets. Not to mention that he seems more eager to at least do something about health care, while Kennedy was more willing to hand off the Civil Rights bills to his successor.

    moviesquad: “You were one of the few bloggers I read who was completely snookered and taken with John Edwards until it became blindly obvious to everyone what a complete two-face he was.”

    Yes, because he totally supported Edwards during the 2008 run. Oh, wait!

    “His leftist ivory-tower ideology is at odds not only with most of the country, ”

    If that were the case, Blanche Lincoln’s voters wouldn’t be for a public option.

    “the contempt for the taxpayers”

    That’s weird. Oregon seems to support his tax idea.

    mccool: You have a point. Truman had the goodwill from FDR and the nuking of Japanese civilians to help his political career. But he still blew it all on the Korea thing, the steel thing, and probably HUAC.

    And Roosevelt had the illegal occupation of Cuba and the Philippines on his side. Obama’s only capital has been “anyone but Bush and the GOP”, so he’s got more work cut out for him.

    Phreaker: I think the problem is Obama’s yes-men are kicking *us* when *we’re* down.

    Travis: “JFK was killed by an attention-seeking, narcissistic, America-hating, embittered failure nutcase who wanted to prove something….”

    You mean J. Edgar Hoover?

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  26. Funny, everybody gets nervous about Obama except Obama himself. His tough, cool, unflappable good-nature and clarity of purpose were on splendid display during his state of the union address, and his astonishing off-the-cuff handling of 140 hostile preening Republicans yesterday (January 29th) offers proof positive to any skeptic that the man is a genius, has guts galore and is in absolute command of his next move.

    Obama is the Stanley Kubrick of US Presidents. A steady eye, goes at his own pace, and (as Stanley K was fond of telling his producer & creative partner James B. Harris) “If a gaffer on the catwalk has a better idea than I do, I’d be a fool not to use it.” Obama is about whatever works best — and if it takes 93 takes to get the money shot on health care, he’s going to go 93 takes, nervous onlookers be damned.

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