Obama - President is Lost

Let's go back to that "teachable moment." It was proclaimed by Barack Obama after he said that police in Cambridge, Mass., had acted "stupidly" in arresting Henry Louis Gates for essentially being black in his own house. It has been a month now, and the one sure thing we have learned in this extended teachable moment is about Obama himself. He can't teach.

This is clear when it comes to two of the major challenges confronting his administration: health care reform and the war in Afghanistan. Both are losing popular support. Increasingly, Americans are becoming convinced that Afghanistan will cost lots of lives and health care reform will cost lots of money -- and both will have paltry payoffs or none at all. Teacher, please explain.

Obama cannot -- or, to be both fair and precise, he has not yet been able to. This is because of an insufficiency I have noted previously -- his distinct coolness, an above-the-fray mien that does not communicate empathy. If you recall, for instance, that teachable moment about Gates, you will remember it was about racial profiling and such. Commentators galore jumped right in and in some cases -- Glenn Beck comes to mind -- proved they were whores for controversy, but Obama himself stayed above the fray. Class was in session but he was not.

Pity. For this teachable moment, Obama might have recalled an incident out of his own past when, perchance, he was racially profiled -- stopped, frisked or something for being a black man, particularly a young black man. He might have recounted an anecdote that offered us all a glimmer of what it is like to wear your skin color -- but not your two Ivy League degrees, book contract, etc. -- on your face so that you feel the opprobrium and suspicion of police officers and the averted glance of trembling white ladies. No. He did nothing of the sort.

So Obama did not teach about the Gates incident and he is not teaching about health insurance. Some of his trouble is procedural -- turning over health care reform to Congress, a parliamentary Okefenokee Swamp in which reform bogs down, finally rots and emits noxious gases. Some of this has to do with the unavoidable complexity of any legislation. But some of it has to do with the inability of the president to simply say what he wants and why that's good for us. The failure here is twofold: the message and the messenger. - RCP Story