Soccer Dad

We're not worthy

Mark Whitaker explains why President Obama has seemed so ... ordinary ... during his first year in office.

As a candidate for president, that disciplined, linear, conciliatory approach to life helped Barack Obama defeat the fractious campaigns of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. It was exactly the right temperament to help Americans avert a fiscal and emotional meltdown in the early days of the financial crisis.

But as the French say, we all have the faults of our virtues. In President Obama's case, the highly organized defenses he developed as a result of his dysfunctional childhood may have left him ill-prepared to confront the more unruly forces of cynicism, egotism and self-interest that hold sway in Washington, on Wall Street and on the world stage.

Indeed. It's not President Obama's fault. He was an unsullied naif who wandered into snake infested swamp that's Washington.

And that would mean that we are unworthy of having such a refined, unsullied and selfless president.

And that would be a fiction.

President Obama isn't trying to bring a new kind of politics to Washington, he's bringing the Chicago way to the capital. It's hardball politics not some new concilliatory lofty "new politics." Look at Barack Obama's first race.

As a community organizer, he had helped register thousands of voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers.

The move denied each of them, including incumbent Alice Palmer, a longtime Chicago activist, a place on the ballot. It cleared the way for Obama to run unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district.

"That was Chicago politics," said John Kass, a veteran Chicago Tribune columnist. "Knock out your opposition, challenge their petitions, destroy your enemy, right? It is how Barack Obama destroyed his enemies back in 1996 that conflicts with his message today. He may have gotten his start registering thousands of voters. But in that first race, he made sure voters had just one choice."

The message of "new politics" that President Obama rode to the White House was at odds with his record that received too little scrutiny by our watchdog media.

Nor should President Obama have been uncomfortable dealing with egos, after all this is the man who used "I" 38 times in his Nobel acceptance speech.

Until now, Barack Obama has received too little scrutiny for his bullying approach to politics. He has now had a major legislative success in both houses of Congress, cynically bought with tax payers money. Contrary to Whitaker, President Obama hasn't been made ordinary by Washington, rather he's raised the cynical dealing in Washington to new, extraordinary heights.

Oh, by the way, Mr. Whitaker is the Washington Bureau chief for NBC news. I doubt we'll be seeing much in the way of critical scrutiny of the President's dealings or past on NBC.