Jay Cost on campaigning while pretending to be governing

This President, who was recently ranked as the eighth most intelligent President of all time (just behind of John Adams, co-author of the Declaration of Independence, and four spots ahead of George Washington, who successfully repelled an invasion by the greatest military power the world had ever seen to that point), seems unaware of the concept of irony. There is no other way to explain why he would say this after having become the first President to engage in a permanent electoral campaign:

We shouldn't be campaigning all the time. There is a time to campaign and there is a time to govern. What we've tried to do over the last 20 months is to govern. On health care or financial reform, right now we have a big debate about how to get small businesses more credit because they generate the jobs. When you feel as if every single initiative that we're doing is subject to Washington politics instead of is this good for the country, that can be frustrating.

The fact that he uttered these words on The View, a show politicians only frequent when they are desperately trolling for votes, makes it all the more remarkable.

President Obama's vanity is fast becoming a problem for the Democratic Party.

Obama's political values rooted in Chicago's Daly machne: "Who gets what, when and how?"

"If you want to understand the political agenda of Barack Obama, forget Alinsky, stop calling Obama a "socialist," and start thinking of Barack Obama as a guy who received his political baptism, not from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, but from the Chicago machine.

Chicago politics is not about ideology. It is about, "Who Gets What, When, and How," to quote the inimitable Harold D. Laswell, one of the outstanding political theorists of the last century.

The sine qua non of Chicago politics is power, getting it and keeping it. Everything else is incidental. Even corruption is a byproduct of power and is functional only if it enables you to stay in power.

In Chicago politics, you don't make waves, you don't back losers, and you "don't talk to nobody nobody sent." Chicago politics is always about hierarchy and centralization.

Chicago politics is also parochial. In the City of Neighborhoods, ethnic consciousness is strong. An Irish machine, for years, ran a Polish city by making sure that the Poles got a big piece of the pie. There is seldom a perception of a common good. There is the amalgamation of different ethnic interests. In Chicago, the whole is clearly the sum of its parts, and the lubricants for the parts are political spoils.

If you want to understand Obama's health care policy, you need to start where Obama starts. You need to start with Chicago. You need to look at constituent interests."

(snip)

"...building a new power base resulting from the mobilization of the political and economic periphery requires redefining the nation's health problems as the nation's health catastrophe.

Health reform is Chicago politics on a national level. Welcome to the city."

Getting elected as a "charismatic demagogue" is one thing; governing requires skills Obama lacks

"What happens when the thing a president knows best is a set of tactics designed to take power from the "haves"? When the most highly prized info a president ever garnered could be summed up as nothing better than gaming an electoral system with ACORN pay-for-registration schemes?

What happens when a president is very skilled in deceptively cloaking these less-than-altruistic means in rhetorical "moral garments" and his lies finally start catching up with him, destroying his credibility? When a president has never actually run anything successfully, not even his own paper route or a PTA meeting or a small town's city council?

What happens when power-grab tactics, taught by a rabble-rousing revolutionary, suddenly catapult a charismatic demagogue into the highest power-perch in the world?

Well, then, Barack Obama's big, fat governance failure happens."