Michael Barone: "Obama is Chauncey Gardiner"

Chance? Or maybe Change?

Poor Barry can't catch a break today! Michael Barone:

Conservative critics have taken to comparing him, as you might imagine, with Jimmy Carter. The more cruel among them, like the Weekly Standard's Jay Cost, say the comparison is not to Obama's advantage.

But there is another comparison I think more appropriate for a president who, according to one of his foreign-policy staffers, prefers to "lead from behind." The man I have in mind is Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 movie "Being There."

As you may remember, Gardiner is a clueless gardener who is mistaken for a Washington eminence and becomes a presidential adviser.

Mr. Barone goes on to detail the general cluelessness of the Gardener-in-Chief:

"...while Chauncey Gardiner, in his befuddlement, tried to answer questions squarely, Obama has seemed less interested in the substance of public policy than in framing issues for the next presidential campaign.

That was plainly the case in the decisions on Afghanistan he announced Wednesday night. Regardless of conditions on the ground, the president promised that the last of the surge troops will be removed by September 2012, the month Democrats hold their national convention.

As for Libya, Obama pretends we're not involved in "hostilities" and has been content to "lead from behind." Another sop to the antiwar left.

Sometimes it seems he's president of the AFL-CIO, not the USA. The man who said he wanted to double exports in five years has nothing to say about his National Labor Relations Board appointee's attempt to shut down a $1 billion plant being built by the nation's No. 1 exporter.

And don't forget the enviro types. Obama is releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but his appointees are barring drilling in the Gulf and Alaska and refusing approval for a natural gas pipeline from Canada.

On all these issues Obama seems oddly disengaged, aloof from the hard work of government, hesitant about making choices."

It seems that more an more people are catching onto the generally cluelessness of the Commander-in-Chief. His policies have taken the nation in exactly the wrong direction at a time when leadership was crucial. Those on both the Left and the Right are coming to realize that Barack Obama is an empty suit and that the "Hope and Change" he was peddling in 2008 was just a campaign slogan designed so that he could come down on both sides of every issue.

But, governing is a lot harder than campaigning. Which is why Obama is taking time off from his busy golf game to start campaigning again. Obama may be right in blaming Bush for all the ills of the country today, since Barry seems to have left the White House on "autopilot" ever since "W" moved out.

H/T Memeorandum

Cross posted at LCR, Say Anything.