Click here to add text
Click here to add text

Click here to add text
Click here to add text

So goes the title of a headline – not in a conservative paper, but in the Guardian. The subtitle is

The disappointment with Barack Obama is tangible – on climate change and financial reform Europe leads while the US lags

Something we don’t get to hear much here, but it seems Europe went for some measure of regulation of their financial institutions and are recovering better now. here, Only Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg – prosper. There’s an interesting quote on deregulation

recent quote by President Obama questioning the need for supporting Europe’s proposals. “Why is it,” he asked during a recent interview, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or [American] football players?”

This article was prompted by Obama’s bestest speech on climate change at the UN. On this front, the world is equally unimpressed

Its biggest achievement so far has been a disappointment. President Obama signed an executive order to increase US motor vehicle mileage standards – but only to a level that will push fuel efficiency by 2020 to a level that European and Japanese cars reached several years ago, and even China has already achieved.

The word is finally getting “not ready on day one”

Beyond Obama’s oratorical skills, which excited not only American voters but people all over the world, he is mostly untested as a politician. His previous experience was only a few years in the US Senate and a few years more as a state senatorA sinking feeling is arising among many that President Obama may not be up to the task, that he may not possess the artful skills needed to accomplish even his own goals.

To be sure, the Guardian also blames our skewed political system – and they are good observations. But Obama started this with control of Congress and managed to retain only control of …prime-time TV.

Seems Obama has accomplished postpartisanship abroad, because the Telegraph agrees with The Guardian, albeit with a more polite headline

President Barack Obama is beginning to look out of his depth

and pretty much asks the same questions

Mr Obama has tactics a plenty – calm and patient engagement with unpleasant regimes, finding common interests, appealing to shared values – but where is the strategy? What, exactly, did “Change you can believe in” – the hallmark slogan of his campaign – actually mean?

Remarkably, they even see through the cluelessness of the right wing “socialist” meme

The President’s domestic critics who accuse him of being the sinister wielder of a socialist master-plan are wide of the mark. The man who has run nothing more demanding than the Harvard Law Review is beginning to look out of his depth in the world’s top job. His credibility is seeping away, and it will require concrete achievements rather than more soaring oratory to recover it.

There is however one feature Jr.jr excells at – just like the other incompetent whose policies he is continuing: governing out spite. In a fluff piece about his appearances on every program of the food channel there’s this striking paragraph

He personally decided not to go on “Paula’s Home Cooking,” because according to White House sources, the Georgia-based Paula Deen’s cooking was not healthy enough, and her demographic skewed to the same demographic as Fox News. According to one very high-ranking source, “We are going to screw her just like we screwed Fox News.”

Wow! I am not a fan of Fox News by any measure, but this is too reminiscent of W being overheard screaming:

“Screw Saddam! He’s going down!”

I guess I am glad Obama’s pettiness is still, well, on petty targets.

Advertisement