ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The
past seven brutal days will go down as one of the worst weeks in history for a
sitting president. It certainly has been, without any doubt, the worst week yet
for President Obama.
Somehow,
Mr. Obama managed to embarrass himselfabroad, humiliate himself here at home,
see his credentials for being elected so severely undermined that it raises
startling questions about whether he should have been elected in the first place
— let alone be re-elected later this year.
Consider:
•
Last Friday, Mr. Obama wandered into the killing of Trayvon
Martin. Aided by his ignorance of the situation, knee-jerk prejudices
and tendency toward racial profiling, Mr. Obama played a heavy hand in elevating
a tragic situation in which a teenager was killed into a full-blown hot race
fight. Americans,
he admonished, need to do some “soul-searching.” And then, utterly inexplicably,
he veered off into this bizarre tangent about how he and the poor dead kid look
so much alike they could be father and son. It was election-year race-pandering
gone horribly wrong.
•
By the start of this week, Mr. Obama had fled town and was racing to the other
side of the planet just as the Supreme
Court was taking up the potentially-embarrassing matter of Obamacare.
While in South
Korea he was caught on a hidden mic negotiating with the president of
our longest-standing rival on how to sellAmerica and her allies down the river
once he gets past the next election.
•
Meanwhile, back at home, the Supreme
Court took up the single most important achievement of Mr. Obama’s
presidency and, boy, was it embarrassing. The great constitutional law
professor, it turns out, may not quite be the wizard he told us he
was. By
most accounts, Mr. Obama and his stuttering lawyers were all but laughed out of
the courthouse. They were even stumbling over softball questions lobbed by Mr.
Obama’s own hand-picked justices.
•
Mr. Obama closed his week pulling off a nearly unimaginable feat: He managed to
totally and completely unify the nastily-fighting Democrats and Republicans in
Congress. Late Wednesday night, they unanimously voted — 414 to zip — to reject
the budget Mr. Obama had presented, leaving him not even a thin lily’s blade to
hide behind.
So,
in one week, Mr. Obama got caught whispering promises to our enemy, incited a
race war, raised serious questions about his understanding of the Constitution,
and then got smacked down over his proposed budget that was so wildly reckless
that even Democrats in Congress could not support it.
It
was as if you lumped Hurricane Katrina and the Abu Ghraib abuses into one week
for George W.
Bush. And added on top of that the time he oddly groped German
Chancellor Angela Merkel and got caught cursing on a hot
mic.
Even
then, it wouldn’t be as bad as Mr. Obama’s week. You would probably also have to
toss in the time Mr.
Bush’s father threw up into the lap of Japan’s prime minister. Only
then might we be approaching how bad a week it was for Mr.
Obama.
Not
that you will see any trace of embarrassment in the face of Mr. Obama. He has
mastered the high political art of shamelessness, wearing it smugly and cockily.
Kind of like a hoodie.
•
Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com.
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