The missing Obama resume
A month ago, I had published at American Thinker a long rumination about the fact that most of the Democratic candidates, whatever else they are, are not responsible adults. Of Obama, I said:
Barack Obama, of course, is a Senator squared. This is a man who has never taken on solo responsibility (although I’ll agree that he had a charmingly eclectic childhood). After a short career as a junior associate at a law firm (a position singularly devoid of primary responsibility), he went on to become a lecturer (an important job, but not a particularly brave or patriarchal one), then an Illinois State Senator and for the past two and half years, he’s been a United States Senator. This is a Peter Pan career, one in which Obama has managed to garner a lot of face time without ever actually assuming responsibility for anything or anybody.
Perhaps others are also starting to figure out that Obama has absolutely no experience, but is merely a man onto whom liberals project their wishes. Thus, John Dickerson, writing at Slate, has an article entitled “Obama’s Achilles Heel,” with the subtitle “What’s he ever done?” As part of a longer article discussion about the relative strengths of Hillary and Obama, Dickerson has this to say about Obama:
What Obama can’t grow on the campaign trail is a different life experience. And Hillary Clinton and her campaign are going to be relentless in raising the experience issue. To fix this problem the Obama team is insisting that Obama has a different kind of what they call “real” experience. They’re running television commercials highlighting his years as a community organizer and state senator. “A lot of people think that Barack Obama was born at the DNC convention in 2004,” says his communications director Robert Gibbs. (That’s probably because the campaign uses the clip so often to promote him.) The ads start with chapter headings for each of the stages of his career and plenty of black-and-white photos to suggest he has had an epic life. On the stump and in debates, Obama is also stressing his past. When he spoke about his urban agenda, he pointed out that poverty was “the cause that led me to a life of public service almost 25 years ago.”
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By claiming a special judgment in foreign policy, Obama exposes himself to uncomfortable follow-ups. He made dramatic claims that Clinton’s conditional views on negotiating with rogue nations meant her approach was merely “Bush-Cheney light,” but Obama had expressed a nearly identical view just before the big spat. He says he wouldn’t be afraid to tell leaders like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hard truths face to face. On what past experience will he draw for these high-wire negotiations? What high pressures has he endured to prepare him for the appealing, but risky, diplomacy he promises? Obama supporters are fond of comparing him to John F. Kennedy, but they have forgotten that Kennedy’s first meeting with Khruschev didn’t go so well and his first foreign-policy adventure, the Bay of Pigs, was a disaster because of the new president’s inexperience and naiveté.
UPDATE: Pay attention to the last words in the quotation above: “his first foreign-policy adventure . . . was a disaster because of the new president’s inexperience and naiveté.” With those words fixed firmly in your mind, go over to this post at the Captain’s Quarters, and read carefully as the Captain slices and dices Obama’s most recent foreign policy proposal, this one about Pakistan. In one second, Obama has gone from being a stupid choice to being a dangerous choice for President.
