Barack Obama Hasn't Come Up With One Original Idea Yet

NYPost.com:

Just before Labor Day, controversy erupted over President Obama’s garb at a presidential press conference — should he or should he not have worn a light tan summer suit when talking about ISIS? That was beside the point.

The issue isn’t the weight or color of his suit. The issue is that the suit is empty.

With almost six years of the Obama administration under our collective belts, the time has come to acknowledge a painful truth: This is an astoundingly idea-free presidency.

At that press conference, Obama stunned the world by saying, out loud and openly, that “we don’t have a strategy yet” on how to deal with ISIS. No president before him had ever said such a thing out loud, and for good reason: Having a strategy is the president’s job.

In the parlance of the universities where Obama spent so much of his time before 2004, when it came to a terror army running rampant through Iraq and beheading Americans, Obama was admitting he hadn’t done the reading, needed an extension on the paper, had to take an “incomplete.”

Well, there was no one there to grant him his incomplete — which is why, two weeks later, he found it necessary to give a nationally televised address to inform the American people and the world that, hey, guess what, he’d come up with a strategy at last. It involved sending arms to the very same Syrian rebels, which just happened to be a policy he had derided only a month earlier as “a fantasy.”

This maddening directionlessness was also on display in the American response to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza in July — which would involve statements of support for Israel, followed by statements of anger about Israel’s conduct, which would be followed by more statements of support for Israel, and then word that the administration had delayed a standard-issue arms replenishment for Israel as punishment for its bad behavior.

This kind of policy and public-relations whiplash also characterizes the White House’s behavior when it comes to the failures of the Secret Service, with Obama press secretary one day saying the USSS’s director had the president’s full confidence and the next day announcing her resignation as though it had been what the president wished for all along.

And, of course, there’s the handling of the Ebola patient in Dallas, with the administration so desirous of not causing a panic that it spent several days misinforming Americans about whom the patient had come in contact with, how many people there had been, how many plane flights he’d been on, and so forth.

This inconstancy is the result of the administration’s elevation of cool and calm above all other qualities — leadership qualities like urgency, firmness, focus and determination.

The hard truth is that the Harvard Law Review editor and University of Chicago professor with two bestselling books to his name can’t formulate a policy to save his life, can’t oversee the implementation of the policies his administration has put in place and can’t adapt or rejigger them in a convincing way to take account of changing conditions.

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