George Will on President Obama the other day:
Obama, a floundering naif who thinks ATMs aggravate unemployment, is bewildered by a national tragedy of shattered dreams, decaying workforce skills and forgone wealth creation.
Sullivan notes:
...this "floundering naif" has handled since arriving in the Oval Office: the worst recession since the 1930s, a mass revolt in the Arab world, a nuclear threat from Iran, two wars we had lost or were losing, a debt that, even if he had done nothing, would have been record-breaking, a global and domestic economy in the midst of tectonic changes.
Too many Republicans are only capable of seeing caricatures and simplified stereotypes. President Obama is young, thin and brainy. Hmm. So he must be a naive weakling. He's an unserious little boy, they think. Reality be damned -- it's conveniently overlooked that he presided over the deaths of Bin Laden and Qaddafi, while also passing groundbreaking legislation that will reform healthcare, banking, Wall Street and the economy as we know it, while also holding together a nation that's recovering from a cataclysmic recession. Yeah, he's such a child. I bet Very Serious McCain would have handled everything with laser precision and steady calm, right?
Anyone who doesn't understand what this president has achieved simply doesn't understand the tight spot in which America was trapped, the near-destruction that was overcome, and the effort that's required to roll back a full 30 years of Reaganomics. The last three years weren't just a blip on the economic, domestic or international EKG like the hostage crisis or the Dot-Com bubble burst. President Obama inherited a nation on the brink of a nightmare and he successfully pulled us back before it smashed into all of us. Yes, it will take a while to recover from a recession that deep, and we'll all endure the near impact, but it could have been worse -- much worse. And he managed to handle everything while also doing his best to make a case for liberalism during an era of unprecedented division and ideological animosity.
Floundering naif?
Fuck off.