Posted by
Bill Crawford on Tuesday, June 16, 2009 8:50:17 PM
Obama is certainly a creature of habit. Like the Clinton White House, he stays verbally engaged. He won't let others write his history a la George W.
And so every time Kim Il Jung does something even more stupid, Obama must respond, as if to prove that he is on top of things in foriegn policy. When they launch another multi-stage missile or threaten another nuke deployment, what can he possibly add? The U.N. Security Council has already blowharded a really, really strict behavior condemnation that implores them to......do whatever the heck they want, I guess.
And unless Obama is prepared to use our military to step any of that up a notch, he should shut the hell up. Otherwise, he should just post a wall note on his Facebook account, stating flatly that there is nothing that he can do.
I lamented Bush's silence in the latter part of his second term. He didn't seem to see the need to correct the record that was being written for him in the daily papers and on so many bumper stickers. The bumper stickers are still out there- he was a war monger, and as stupid and disengaged as his conservative supporters were. The repetition of it all stuck with so many swing voters who ended up voting for Obama last year.
So we jump back to the other extreme: somebody who doesn't know how to shut up, even when it is to his (diplomatic) advantage. I think Bill Clinton grew up with it, knowing that if he said anything damaging, he could simply keep talking until it went away, was forgotten or actually corrected. I'm still trying to figure out what runs Obama. He, too, may be so used to talking about whatever he wants and being the smartest guy in the room that he is still getting used to what an incredible fish bowl his job is. Every time you talk, a hundred historians and a million bloggers are fact checking you in real time.