New York Times Proves Clint Eastwood Correct -- Obama Is Lousy CEO
Forbes:
h/t to Deonia Copeland
A Sunday New York Times front page story — New York Times! — might have killed President Obama’s re-election hopes.
The story is called “The Competitor in Chief — Obama Plays To Win, In Politics and Everything Else.” It is devastating.
With such a title, and from such a friendly organ, at first I thought Jodi Kantor’s piece would be a collection of Obama’s greatest political wins: His rapid rise in Illinois, his win over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the passage of health care, and so on.
But the NYT piece is not about any of that. Rather, it is a deep look into the two outstanding flaws in Obama’s executive leadership:
1. How he vastly overrates his capabilities:
But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies, said Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, adding that the same thing happened to his former boss. “There’s a reinforcing quality,” he said, a tendency for presidents to think, I’m the best at this.
2. How he spends extraordinary amounts of time and energy to compete in — trivialities.
“For someone dealing with the world’s weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits. He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores. He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who do not concentrate risk a reprimand (“You’re not playing, you’re just gambling,” he once told Arun Chaudhary, his former videographer).
His idea of birthday relaxation is competing in an Olympic-style athletic tournament with friends, keeping close score. The 2009 version ended with a bowling event. Guess who won, despite his history of embarrassingly low scores? The president, it turned out, had been practicing in the White House alley.
Kantor’s piece is full of examples of Obama’s odd need to dominate his peers in everything from bowling, cards, golf, basketball, and golf (104 times in his presidency). Bear in mind, Obama doesn’t just robustly compete. The leader of the free world spends many hours practicing these trivial pursuits behind the scenes. Combine this weirdly wasted time with a consistent overestimation of his capabilities, and the result is, according to NYT’s Kantor:
He may not always be as good at everything as he thinks, including politics. While Mr.
“Obama has given himself high grades for his tenure in the White House — including a “solid B-plus” for his first year — many voters don’t agree, citing everything from his handling of the economy to his unfulfilled pledge that he would be able to unite Washington to his claim that he would achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Those were not the only times Mr. Obama may have overestimated himself: he has also had a habit of warning new hires that he would be able to do their jobs better than they could.
“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”
Though he never ran a large organization before becoming president, he initially dismissed internal concerns about management and ended up with a factionalized White House and a fuzzier decision-making process than many top aides wanted.
Kantor’s portrait of Obama is stunning. It paints a picture of a CEO who is unfocused and lost.
Imagine, for a minute, that you are on the board of directors of a company. You have a CEO who is not meeting his numbers and who is suffering a declining popularity with his customers. You want to help this CEO recover, but then you learn he doesn’t want your help. He is smarter than you and eager to tell you this. Confidence or misplaced arrogance? You’re not sure at first. If the company was performing well, you’d ignore it. But the company is performing poorly, so you can’t.
With some digging, you learn, to your horror, that the troubled CEO spends a lot of time on — what the hell? — bowling? Golf? Three point shots? While the company is going south?
What do you do? You fire that CEO. Clint Eastwood was right. You let the guy go.
The Empty Chair Is Losing
American Thinker:
President Obama is headed to defeat in November, and it won't be close. Forget about the polls, and forget about the cadre of delusional Democrats who can't stop telling us how great and successful the last three and a half years have been. Slick Willy can shill all he likes, but seriously, he's preaching to the choir, because the only ones believing his shtick are bought and paid for sycophants, crony capitalists, and members of the mainstream media.
Can you think of a single person who didn't vote for Barack Obama in 2008 but will vote for him this time around? Yet it is easy to find former minions admitting to the dissolution of their belief in the primacy of the "one." These people will not vote for him again -- and they are legion.
Pols like Bill Clinton say what they have to say, and election polls are often designed to say what the designers want them to say. But Americans, ever the social creatures they are, remembering the hopes and dreams they had for a better world in 2008 -- and the hopes and dreams they have today for a better tomorrow -- are reluctant to tell someone taking a poll that they don't like Barack Obama. It doesn't matter how well a case can be made against the man's disastrous and disgraceful leadership; guilt can often preclude telling a stranger they plan to vote against the black guy -- especially today, when all opposition to the president is framed as racist.
Yet, at some point, that curtain closes in the voting booth, and a decision has to be made as to which candidate is better for voters, their children, and the future of America.
When watching the news or any of the president's campaign speeches, it is easy to get the message that Barack Obama is way ahead and can't lose. His successes are portrayed as many and significant, although he needs another term because much still needs to be done. After all, the Republicans have stymied his every selfless effort these last three and a half years, and "we can't go back."
He did his best, and there was nothing more he could have done to improve what was an unprecedented (everything with Barack is unprecedented) decline in economic activity. Didn't Obama call the downturn the "great recession?" The misery the nation feels now is an illusion -- or else, they tell us, it is simply the "new normal."
But usually in mainstream media world, all is well -- and Americans should pay no attention to the price of gasoline, or the unavailability of financing for mortgages or business investment, or the price of groceries and the dearth of jobs. Who needs a job when they have Barack Obama?
The media, Obama, and his adulators have become the "check is in the mail" bloc. Things are better; we just haven't noticed.
Yet there are no real accomplishments, which would be bad enough if it stopped there, but in actuality, everything is much worse since many trusted the "one" in 2008 to solve all the ills of the nation and humanity. All he has done during his tenure is torture the economy into submission with poor decisions, bad legislation, overregulation, and threats of onerous taxation.
It's been said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of Americans, but it is also true that no one ever got rich continually assuming that Americans were idiots. You see, just when a demigod like Barack is convinced he has demagogued his way into the hearts and minds of the electorate, the nation wakes up, and a deafening "thud" can be heard as he falls back down to earth.
Seniors see the true danger to Medicare comes from ObamaCare, a legislative nightmare. Obamacare strips $716 billion from Medicare, and as a result, seniors in states like Florida will make their voices heard this Election Day.
Workers and commuters see the price of gasoline as a function of Barack's desire to be the one who breaks America's dependency on fossil fuels. Yet like everything Obama does, he seeks to do it backwards. Because he can't make alternative energy cheap enough to overwhelm fossil fuels as the main source of energy in America, he chooses to make fossil fuels so expensive that his green energy dreams seem cheap by comparison. Gasoline at $4 a gallon and necessarily skyrocketing electric bills are the "new normal." Didn't you know?
If people's lives have to be destroyed to usher in this new era, then, so be it. They should be grateful that the destruction of their hopes and dreams is in service of the greater Barack Obama good. History books will not remember the individual whose life was ruined today, but they will certainly remember Obama as the man who saved humanity from what might have happened in a hundred years. And isn't that what's important?
Small business understands that Obama built this. They understand this so well that there are trillions of dollars sitting on the sidelines awaiting his departure next January. They may have supported him in 2008, but does anyone think business owners, long demonized by Barack and minions, are going to vote for Mr. Obama again? No, they will run kicking and screaming to the polls to vote for anyone but the man who has destroyed their incomes and futures, and those of their children.
States with a culture of coal mining are also running away from Barack. After all, miners have families, and killing King Coal has not only hurt the interests of America and Americans, but slain the future of an industry long important to the nation's prosperity. Who needs cheap energy anyway?
The United Coal Miners Union sat out the Democrat National Convention. Although they didn't jump ship, they weren't about to support the moron killing coal jobs while making electricity more expensive and ceding energy independence in the process. I suspect that Obama will get few miner votes this election.
I believe that the administration's war on coal and the slow realization that the EPA's future plan for war on fracking have already won Ohio and Pennsylvania for Mitt Romney, despite what the polls say. A union member working in the fossil fuel industry is never going to admit to supporting a Republican, yet he still wants to feed his family and send his kids to college...and maybe someday even retire. Four more years of Barack, and he won't even have a job.
At the Democrat National Convention, John Kerry said Americans should "ask Osama bin Laden if he's better off now than he was four years ago."
The answer would be "no," just as it is for most Americans, because Obama is killing us. Bin Laden at least has the luxury of being dead; the job is finished.
For us, Obama needs another 4 years.
On November 6, 2012, Americans will flock to the polls to ensure that Barack Obama does not get another term to finish the job he started, and the empty chair will lose in a landslide.
For anyone who thought that Clint Eastwood had lost it at the Republican National Convention with his chair routine… carrying on a conversation with President Barack Obama (represented by an empty chair).
Clint knew exactly what he was doing… Here is the only known portrait of Karl Marx… with the Barack Obama Chair.
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