Barack Obama Doodler-In-Chief

"Americans coming together" is a theme of this week's Democratic National Convention. People stop to look at a mural by artist Shepard Fairey on Monday, September 3. Image Credit: CNN/Zoran Milich

Barack Obama Doodler-In-Chief

This article published in the New York Times is just priceless. If anyone reads this article titled "The Competitor in Chief — Obama Plays To Win, In Politics and Everything Else" and questions the President as to the factual nature of this article, one may find out that this is a man many people just could not warm up to.

The article opens up with this following paragraph; As Election Day approaches, President Obama is sharing a few important things about himself. He has mentioned more than once in recent weeks that he cooks “a really mean chili.” He has impressive musical pitch, he told an Iowa audience. He is “a surprisingly good pool player,” he informed an interviewer — not to mention (though he does) a doodler of unusual skill.

Where was this article in 2008 during the run up to the last presidential election? Oh yes ... this article was where the actual colleagues, friends, teachers, and grades achieved by Barack Obama during his college years were stored!

This article from Forbes, which analyses the New York Times front page article, serves as great reading while filling time between speakers who stand up and talk at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina over the next three days. If the speakers do not make you realize we have operated under the wrong leadership over these last three and a half years ... this article will.

This excerpted and edited from Forbes -

New York Times Proves Clint Eastwood Correct -- Obama Is Lousy CEO
BY  Rich Karlgaard, Forbes Staff - 9/03/2012 @ 12:34PM

A New York Times front page story today — New York Times! — might have killed President Obama’s re-election hopes.

The story is called “The Competitor in Chief — Obama Plays To Win, In Politics and Everything Else.” It is devastating.

With such a title, and from such a friendly organ, at first I thought Jodi Kantor’s piece would be a collection of Obama’s greatest political wins: His rapid rise in Illinois, his win over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the passage of health care, and so on.

But the NYT piece is not about any of that. Rather, it is a deep look into the two outstanding flaws in Obama’s executive leadership:

1. How he vastly overrates his capabilities:

     But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies, said Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, adding that the same thing happened to his former boss. “There’s a reinforcing quality,” he said, a tendency for presidents to think, I’m the best at this.

2. How he spends extraordinary amounts of time and energy to compete in — trivialities.

    For someone dealing with the world’s weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits. He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores. He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who do not concentrate risk a reprimand (“You’re not playing, you’re just gambling,” he once told Arun Chaudhary, his former videographer).

    His idea of birthday relaxation is competing in an Olympic-style athletic tournament with friends, keeping close score. The 2009 version ended with a bowling event. Guess who won, despite his history of embarrassingly low scores? The president, it turned out, had been practicing in the White House alley.

Kantor’s piece is full of examples of Obama’s odd need to (a) dominate his peers in everything from bowling, cards, golf, basketball, and golf (104 times in his presidency). Bear in mind, Obama doesn’t just robustly compete. The leader of the free world spends many hours practicing these trivial pursuits behind the scenes. Combine this weirdly wasted time with a consistent overestimation of his capabilities, and the result is, according to NYT’s Kantor:

    He may not always be as good at everything as he thinks, including politics. While Mr. Obama has given himself high grades for his tenure in the White House — including a “solid B-plus” for his first year — many voters don’t agree, citing everything from his handling of the economy to his unfulfilled pledge that he would be able to unite Washington to his claim that he would achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.

    Those were not the only times Mr. Obama may have overestimated himself: he has also had a habit of warning new hires that he would be able to do their jobs better than they could.

    “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Though he never ran a large organization before becoming president, he initially dismissed internal concerns about management and ended up with a fictionalized White House and a fuzzier decision-making process than many top aides wanted.

Kantor’s portrait of Obama is stunning. It paints a picture of a CEO who is unfocused and lost.

Imagine, for a minute, that you are on the board of directors of a company. You have a CEO who is not meeting his numbers and who is suffering a declining popularity with his customers. You want to help this CEO recover, but then you learn he doesn’t want your help. He is smarter than you and eager to tell you this. Confidence or misplaced arrogance? You’re not sure at first. If the company was performing well, you’d ignore it. But the company is performing poorly, so you can’t.

With some digging, you learn, to your horror, that the troubled CEO spends a lot of time on — what the hell? — bowling? Golf? Three point shots? While the company is going south?

What do you do? You fire that CEO. Clint Eastwood was right. You let the guy go.
[Reference Here]

With the "Debt Clock" streaming past $16 Billion dollars during the Democratic National Convention, with over 1/3 of this amount added by this Doodler-In-Chief in only four years, some decisions just seem simpler to make, during this Carter's Second Term, than others when the light of truth shines upon them.

Let 'im go.


** Article first published as Barack Obama Doodler-In-Chief on Technorati **

Face Plant At The DNC In Denver

The podium stage of the Democratic National Convention at the Pepsi Center basketball arena in Denver. Image Credit: DNC

Face Plant At The DNC In Denver

The first night of the Democratic National Convention being held at the Pepsi Center in Denver, where the Democrat Party faithful gather to pick a candidate team and form an action platform to run on in the election of the leader of our nation come November, did little to put forward a clear message of what changes to our present situation they plan to pursue.

Very little substance on the current policies was discussed very little mention of the campaign they will be competing in against, and very little in the way of issues confronted or defined by those who took to the podium to address the gathered crowd.

What did happen was that several people who were not on the presidential ticket gained a bunch of facetime during a primetime broadcast moment. The biggest highlights of the evening came upon the appearances by Senator Ted Kennedy, who is suffering from and battling case of brain cancer, and Michelle Obama, who suffers from a perception of a series of speeches that left the impression that she did not like life in America.

Both appearances were successful in that they helped to pull at the emotions of the people who were in the hall and those viewing on broadcast television and the major cable news outlets.

Senator Edward Kennedy speaks at the Democratic National Convention on August 25, 2008. Image Credit: Jackson Solway

Senator Ted Kennedy at, 76, has been at every Democratic convention but two in the past 48 years, was introduced by his niece, Carolyn Kennedy Schlossberg who gave in her introduction a video tribute to the life and accomplishments of her uncle and brother to the late John F. Kennedy. The video tribute was well produced but it always puzzles us, here at MAXINE, why anything associated with Ted Kennedy always tend to feature backgrounds and scenes of water.

The Senator mentioned his work on healthcare and reviewed other legislative agendas he was involved in over his years while serving in the Senate … he reaffirmed his support of Barack Obama, but to be truthful, little was accomplished to affirm the specifics of the “Change” and “Hope” the Democrat Party appears to be putting forward as their campaign message. There was no message.

Michelle Obama, wife of the presumptive candidate of the Democrat Party for President of the United States also appeared at the podium and after her presentation, was later joined on stage with her two daughters and via video feed, Barack Obama himself. All very touching.

Barack Obama greets his family via on stage at the Democratic National Convention after Michelle Obama addressed delegates August 25, 2008. Image Credit: DemConvention

By all accounts, Barack’s wife gave an awfully good speech at the Democratic National Convention here Monday night. While Senator Obama can sometimes soar off into the clouds, Michelle tended to keep things down to earth. She still has some trouble convincing those who have listened to her speeches that she loves America as it is.

Michelle said, “Barack stood up that day, and spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about "The world as it is" and "The world as it should be." And he said that all too often, we accept the distance between the two, and settle for the world as it is — even when it doesn't reflect our values and aspirations.”

What values and aspirations are those? Are they the values put forth in the founding documents of our country, or are they values and aspirations of a different archtypes found elsewhere in the world?

Michelle went on, “But he reminded us that we know what our world should look like. We know what fairness and justice and opportunity look like. And he urged us to believe in ourselves — to find the strength within ourselves to strive for the world as it should be. And isn't that the great American story?

It's the story of men and women gathered in churches and union halls, in town squares and high school gyms — people who stood up and marched and risked everything they had — refusing to settle, determined to mold our future into the shape of our ideals.”

To be truthful, they were fighting for American ideals laid out in the Constitution back then … but what are the ideals you (and Barack) wanting to mold America into now?

“And as I tuck that little girl and her little sister into bed at night, I think about how one day, they'll have families of their own. And one day, they — and your sons and daughters — will tell their own children about what we did together in this election.
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How this time, in this great country — where a girl from the South Side of Chicago can go to college and law school, and the son of a single mother from Hawaii can go all the way to the White House — we committed ourselves to building the world as it should be.”
Reference Here>>

What ... an angry socialist paradise?

The first of four nights of the Democrat National Convention was a parade of faces in the review of a Cult-Of-Personality.

If the George Soros led wing of the Democrat Party were trying to frame the party platform, brush up and polish the political brand as one that we should vote for, they failed.

Basically, what the Democrat Party was able to pull off last night was a primetime “Face Plant!” ... and we all thought the Beijing Olympics were over.