The words cut like a knife. “What the hell are we paying you for?” Gov. Chris Christie asked of President Obama.
The New Jersey Republican has a gift for getting to the heart of things, and his broadside against the president over the debt bomb is Exhibit A. His assertion, framed as a question, makes the case against Obama better than anything heard from the actual candidates.
Christie’s decision not to run remains a disappointment, but he is a valuable player who can help sharpen the fuzzy aim of Mitt Romney, the man he supports. Christie’s consistent theme is that Obama has defaulted on the responsibility to provide presidential leadership during a national crisis.
On Monday, the GOP heavyweight called Obama “a bystander in the Oval Office” for ducking the congressional committee charged with finding $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions over 10 years.
“I was angry this weekend, listening to the spin coming out of the administration about the failure of the super committee, and that the president knew it was doomed for failure, so he didn’t get involved,” Christie said. “Well, then, what the hell are we paying you for? ‘It’s doomed for failure so I’m not getting involved?’ Well, what have you been doing, exactly?”
The questions are rhetorical in that we know what the president has been doing and why. He plays golf and campaigns. Governing is beneath him.
He doesn’t talk much to members of Congress or his own Cabinet. They’re beneath him.
His connection to the public consists of speeches before large crowds, and he ducks behind the curtain and into the security bubble as soon as he finishes. The people are beneath him.
Warped by a sense of entitlement and self-aggrandizement, Obama refuses to take responsibility for finding practical solutions to problems. He prefers the glory of transformation rather than the roll-the-sleeves-up work of reform.
When he can’t get his way, he appoints a czar and ignores Congress. Democracy is beneath him.
He could have brokered a deficit deal, but doing so would have demolished his campaign slogan that Republicans are to blame for everything. Any deal would give him ownership of the results, and end the fiction that politics are beneath him.
In fact, he’s all politics, all the time. His idea of bipartisanship is that everybody agrees with him.
He’s so bad at the job that the frequent comparisons to Jimmy Carter are unfair to Carter. The former peanut farmer was a terrible president, but he was at least sincere in his starchy disdain for the country.
Obama professes to really, really like America. He just wants to change everything about it.
And when the country says no thanks, he goes off script and the smears come out. We’re “soft” and “lazy” and “bitter” and “cling” to God and guns.
Much ink has been spilled trying to figure out what went wrong after such a brilliant, history-making campaign got him to the White House. Obama smashed the Clinton machine and dispatched John McCain without breaking a sweat. Mount Rushmore was waiting.
But his first day in office marked the peak, and it’s been all downhill since. Deadenders, after blaming George W. Bush, Senate Republicans and the Tea Party, were forced to turn on their own, especially the economic advisers who are gone, Larry Summers and Peter Orszag. They were the problems.
But there are no hiding places in the Oval Office and, after three years, it’s clear who the problem is.
The campaign of 2008 looked brilliant because campaigns showcase Obama’s one real talent — blaming someone else for blocking the way to Utopia.
On that basis, he got the job. But now we know the terrible truth: Actually being president is beneath him, too.
Liberal dose of Quinn
Only in New York could two common-sense policies of Mayor Bloomberg be blasted as cruel and inhuman. One already requires fingerprints for those getting food stamps, and the other is a plan to require homeless adults to prove they have no place else to go before they get a bed in a shelter. The measures aim at preventing fraud and limiting taxpayer generosity to those who need it.
Yet the mayor is under attack on both fronts, and leading the charge is Council Speaker Christine Quinn. She and Bloomy usually are joined at the hip, so her burst of independence is telling.
To compete in the race to replace Bloomberg in two years, Quinn obviously feels the need to prove her liberal bona fides. A distortion of the facts also helps.
She jumped on a claim by an advocacy group that the finger-imaging requirement for food stamps has scared 30,000 New Yorkers away from applying.
“That’s $55.4 million of federal money we’re not getting in New York City to support people — money they would then spend at the supermarket or at the bodega,” Quinn said last month.
Her come-and-get-it attitude conveniently ignores the fact that 500,000 New Yorkers joined the food-stamp rolls in the last three years, bringing the city total to a whopping 1.8 million. She also ignores the requirement that many government workers, including those in the Department of Education, must be fingerprinted before they can be hired. Does she find that cruel?
The proposed shelter policy is also a no-brainer. On hold because of a Legal Aid Society suit, it would apply the same rules to single adults that have governed families seeking shelter since 1996. There are nearly 8,700 singles in the shelters.
“It’s not unreasonable to ask someone for basic information before they get a public benefit that costs $3,000 a month,” Seth Diamond, the commissioner of homeless services, told me yesterday. He recalled the advocacy scare stories when Mayor Rudy Giuliani first required families to prove the shelter was their only option.
“They said women and children would be living on the subways and streets,” Diamond said. “It never happened.”
Of course not, but facts don’t stand a chance when a pol is hungry.
New Pole position
Hell has frozen over. Speaking in Berlin, the Polish foreign minister begged Germany to save Europe. “Nobody else can do it,” Radoslaw Sikorski declared. “I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity. You have become Europe’s indispensable nation.”
Lives on the line
In recent days, two different TV commercials have promised that “live operators” are standing by. Well, they’re definitely better than dead ones.
Cain losing count
Herman Cain either has a woman problem, or his five accusers are liars.
Even more intriguing is the possibility his 9-9-9 mantra was a clue about his private life we missed. Perhaps the numbers have nothing to do with taxes!