Obama looks small on foreign policy and inept at home

Michael Goodwin:

Anybody wanting to lampoon the Obama presidency is out of luck — there is no way to top the real thing. From being outmaneuvered by Russia to erasing red lines in Syria and getting snubbed by Iran, September was the cruelest month.

That’s only half the bad news. For as small as the president looked abroad, he looked downright childish at home.

He is following his failure to negotiate successfully on the world stage with a refusal to negotiate at all at home. His message to Republicans on both the debt ceiling and ObamaCare is the same: nyet, nyet.

Call him confused about who the enemy is.

The dynamic is startling. The more the world pushes Barack Obama around, the more he pushes back at home. It reminds me of a Mort Sahl joke from the Cold War: Every time the Soviets lock up an American, we retaliate by locking up an American.

And so Vladimir Putin and his evil spawn in Syria and Iran can mess with Obama all day long, but House Speaker John Boehner can’t get the time of day from him.

Our president is Caesar here and Chamberlain there. That is the real Obama Doctrine.

It’s no way to run a superpower, but then that is the point. It is inconceivable that Obama is as incompetent as he looks.

It has to be intentional.

Seen that way, the method to his madness is frighteningly clear. His abdication of global leadership is a direct corollary to his continuing expansion of the domestic state apparatus. No matter the world crisis, it takes a back seat, if it’s even allowed on the bus.

The stirring rhetoric about Assad being the new Hitler after he used chemical weapons came and went as though it was just a misunderstanding. In a flash, we became his partner in pretending that he’s going to surrender those weapons. Maybe the Butcher of Damascus will put a puppy under every Christmas tree, too.

Iran’s mad mullahs must get a hoot out of toying with our president. They kill our soldiers, export terrorism and threaten to nuke Israel, and our response is to grovel for talks. Obama plays the Washington Generals to their Harlem Globetrotters.

Back at home, each day brings more debt, more regulations on industry and more crackdowns on American institutions and individuals that buck the administration. Last week alone, coal-fired plants and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon both learned that Obama is their boss, and don’t forget it.

The ObamaCare mess is especially telling. Most Americans still don’t want it and although there are obvious problems with key elements, Obama refuses to consider legislative changes.
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The not so great one keeps shrinking and shirking responsibility abroad and is incapable of negotiating compromise at home.  I suspect that his refusal to deal with Republicans is a cover for the fact that he is just totally inept when it comes to the art of the deal.  From his fiasco in Iraq which has led to a return of sectarian violence to his inability to deal with the fact that the Republicans control the purse strings because of their majority in the House Obama just has no ability to get to yes.