Obama needs to figure out that he’s president, not place holder

Charles Krauthammer goes on full throttle attack against Barack Obama based on Obama’s endless, weasely whining that everything that’s gone wrong with the first nine months of his presidency is all Bush’s fault.  The central focus of this whining, of course, is Afghanistan, which candidate Obama claimed was the necessary war and which candidate Obama complained was the war Bush ignored.  Candidate Obama also promised that he would take immediately action on Afghanistan and fix it.  But now with his feet in the Oval Office, suddenly it’s not President Obama’s problem any more — because it’s all Bush’s fault:

Is there anything he hasn’t blamed George W. Bush for?

The economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad — everything but swine flu.

It’s as if Obama’s presidency hasn’t really started. He’s still taking inventory of the Bush years. Just this Monday, he referred to “long years of drift” in Afghanistan in order to, I suppose, explain away his own, well, yearlong drift on Afghanistan.

This compulsion to attack his predecessor is as stale as it is unseemly. Obama was elected a year ago. He became commander in chief two months later. He then solemnly announced his own “comprehensive new strategy” for Afghanistan seven months ago. And it was not an off-the-cuff decision.

Given the non-stop whining and blaming, it’s sometimes hard to remember that Obama desperately wanted, and battled hard, to take on Bush’s job.  For a year and a half, he promised voters — left, right and center — that, with his transformative, nay, God–like* powers, he would resolve those problems instantly and definitively.  Apparently boasting about solving things is not the same as actually solving them.  Indeed, even the ability to offer legitimate criticisms is not the same as the ability to solve problems.  I’m famous for being able to take things apart, but singularly lack the ability to put them back together again.

The fact is that all candidates make abstract promises and then, if elected, have to deal with concrete realities.  All candidates discover that there may be a chasm between those promises and the realities.  Only Obama, though, is so childish and narcissistic that he is unable to accept that he’s in charge now, and that the realities are his problem. Placing blame is no longer a job for the President. It’s just one for the history books. (And if it’s any comfort to Obama, with the plethora of Leftist history professors, he’ll come out on top in there.)

________________________

*Have you ever noticed that Leftists really want a God?  The traditional ones aren’t good enough for them, so they go out and create their own.  I have to say that, if I were making up a God, I wouldn’t pick a jug-eared skinny guy who doesn’t like women and tends to engage in trash talk.  (And that’s entirely separate from my profound disagreements with his policies and values.)