The President of Empty Gestures Does It again — His Voluntary 5 Percent Pay Cut Is Supposed to Make Us Feel that He Is on Our Side — Instead, He Looks Like the Self-Involved Manipulator that He Characteristically Is — and a Paragraph about Getting What We Deserve

05 April 2013

President Obama’s professional performance combines the manipulative power of empty gestures with risk-avoiding political cowardice

For example, his most recent ploy:

President Obama plans to give up 5 percent of his salary this year to draw attention to the financial sacrifice of more than 1 million federal employees who will be furloughed by automatic spending cuts starting in less than three weeks, the White House said Wednesday.

The man’s rich. He lives and travels for free. His presidential salary is $400,000. Five percent of that is $20,000.

Is he going to miss the money?

Contrast the President’s ludicrous example in shared suffering with a real one

One of my friends is a retirement aged, furloughed (and very competent) federal nurse. She doesn’t make much money. The furlough has reduced her income by $1,000 a month. She’s scrambling to make ends meet.

There are thousands like her, all over the country.

And that group doesn’t even include the even less socioeconomically advantaged, who had depended in part on now sequester-trimmed federal programs.

An empty presidential gesture, where action would have been preferable

The President knew darn well what the budget sequester agreement for 2013 was going to do. Instead of unpersuasively equating its coming results with Absolute Armageddon, he should have worked to fine tune the budget cuts, so that palpable people-harm would have been avoided.

But that would have been too much like Leadership for his morally-aimless, politically spineless self.

Instead, President Obama preferred to call the Republicans’ bluff on the sequester, in hopes that his political power would be elevated. It wasn’t. And we are in pretty much the same stalled political position that we were before. But with a new crop of crapped-on people carrying the brunt of genuine suffering.

It is always politically easiest for these rich “guys” to screw the powerless.

In this regard, columnist Charles Krauthammer has the President’s self-involved number

Mr. Krauthammer — who is usually just as angry with political narcissists as I am, but for different reasons — took a sadly perceptive position in regard to President Obama on Fox News, yesterday:

Krauthammer’s comment came after National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg predicted that the Senate vote President Obama insisted the Newtown families and other victims of gun violence “deserve” in his State of the Union address will now likely not happen.

When Krauthammer quietly uttered, “All he wants now is the money,” the discussion stopped cold with a short bit of silence from everyone before Chris Wallace jumped in.

“You don’t really mean that?” Wallace asked.

Krauthammer asserted that even if the bill includes broader background checks, it “won’t make a difference.”

He continued, “Knowing all that, he is out there now exploring it as an issue. He is not going to get the solution he wanted, so he will make an issue.”

“And that’s the way he operates. He does it on immigration. He does it on a lot of stuff. If you can’t win on a solution or get your way, you turn it into cash. He is excellent at turning stuff into cash.”

Note

The pertinent segment of the Fox video clip is embedded in a Huffington Post story, here.

The moral? — Contempt should fall on those who deserve it — but Reality demands that we look at ourselves before bestowing it

Professionally, I place the President in the contempt-worthy group. Anyone with the power of position that he possesses, who does not use it with even a modicum of beneficent spine — and then grandstands emptily and manipulatively about his missed opportunities — deserves a position on one of Dante’s metaphorical Circles of Hell.

President Obama’s performance in office reveals an excess of self-aggrandizing political skill, combined with a disappointing absence of moral purpose, professional honor, and rudimentary courage.

BUT, as I have written before — for example, here and here — perhaps this sad mix of qualities was necessitated by the realities of the limitations on personal advancement that our bigoted cultured placed on him. His skill set, and its necessarily mated inability to commit to anything that actually requires us (as a People) to change, were almost certainly an outgrowth of our own deficiencies as a fair-minded and equitable culture.

We got what we deserved. A “black” guy acting just as miserably and selfishly as many of the white guys, who preceded him in office. Which, I suppose, one can take to mean that color is only skin deep. Or some other equally meaningless, unhelpful aphorism.

PeteFree.com

The President of Empty Gestures Does It again — His Voluntary 5 Percent Pay Cut Is Supposed to Make Us Feel that He Is on Our Side — Instead, He Looks Like the Self-Involved Manipulator that He Characteristically Is — and a Paragraph about Getting What We Deserve