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United States News Title: From a Liberal Hag: Obama's failure to lead Even the Butter Cow at the Iowa State Fair is not enough to sweeten the mood. Three years ago, Barack Obama's unlikely presidential dream was given wings by rapturous Iowans — young, old and in-between — who saw in the fresh-faced, silky-voiced black senator a chance to leap past the bellicose, rancorous Bush years into a modern, competitive future where we once more had luster in the world. "We are choosing hope over fear," Obama told a delirious crowd of 3,000 here the night he won the Iowa caucuses. But fear has garroted hope as America reels from the latest humiliating blows on the economy and in Afghanistan. The politician who came across as a redeemer in 2008 is now in need of redemption himself. Faced with a country keening for reassurance and reinvention, Obama seems at a loss. Regarding his political skills, he turns out to be the odd case of a pragmatist who can't learn from his mistakes and adapt. Many of his Democratic supporters here, who once waited hours in line just to catch a glimpse of The One, are disillusioned. "We just wish he'd be more of a fighter," said one influential Democrat with a grimace. Another agreed: "You can't blame him for everything. I just wish he would come across more forceful at times, but that is not the dude's style. Detached hurts you when things are sour. You need some of Clinton's 'I feel your pain' compassion." The president has been spectacularly unable to fill the leadership void in Washington. Obama's response to the Standard & Poor's downgrade and to the Chinook helicopter tragedy was once more too little, too late. It was just like his belated, ineffectual response on the BP oil spill and his reaction to the would-be Christmas Day bomber; it took him three days on vacation in Hawaii to speak about the terrorist incident when the country was scared about national security, and then he spent the next week callously shuttling from the podium to the golf course. Michele Bachmann has been riding around Iowa in her bus, with Elvis music and her name emblazoned 25 times on the outside, mocking Obama for going to Camp David last weekend and burrowing in while the country was roiling. His inability to grab a microphone and spontaneously assuage Americans' fears is strange. If the U.S. servicemen had died on a Monday, he wouldn't have waited until Wednesday to talk about it. He doesn't like the bully pulpit, just the professor's lectern. After failing to interrupt his Camp David weekend to address the country on one of its worst days in history, he tacked on his condolences for the soldiers' fam- ilies to his economic pep talk, in what had to be the most inept oratorical segue of his presidency. He long ago should have gone out into the country to talk to Americans in person and come up with a concrete plan that people could print out from the White House website and study. Hasn't he learned how dangerous it is to delegate to Congress? His withholding and reactive nature has made him seem strangely irrelevant in Washington, trapped by his own temperament. He doesn't lead, and he doesn't understand why we don't feel led. Speaking from the State Dining Room of the White House, he advised America it was still "a triple-A country" like some cerebral soccer coach urging the kids to win one for the London Interbank Offered Rate. With traders hearing nothing new, just boilerplate about "common sense and compromise" on deficit reduction, the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted this week before rebounding. Obama has spent a lifetime creating his persona — superior, wise, above all parties and interests, all-seeing, calm, unflappable. But Obama's assumption that you can rise above ascribing villainous motives has caused him to waste huge chunks of his first term seeking bipartisanship from Republicans who were playing him for a dupe. And it has led to Americans regarding the nation's capital as a place of all villains and no heroes.
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#1. To: no gnu taxes (#0)
Maybe he should ... quit heroin go back to --- smoking crack cocaine !
If you ... don't use exclamation points --- you should't be typeing ! Commas - semicolons are for girlie boys !
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