As President Barack Obama’s approval rating reaches new lows with seemingly every tracking poll, the question of how he is going to win re-election is a high priority for the president and his administration. However, based on Thursday night’s address to a joint session of Congress, it appears Obama could be attempting to mimic former President Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign against a “do-nothing Congress.”
But on this weekend’s broadcast of “Inside Washington,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer was doubtful that would be an effective strategy because the so-called independents that voted for him in 2008 are realizing he isn’t all that he was marketed to be.
“[B]arack Obama is no Harry Truman,” Krauthammer said. It’s not that complicated. Obama is over his head. He is a great orator. He came out of nowhere. He dazzled America. He [has] never run anything. He never actually enacted anything even in the legislature. He hadn’t run a state. He hadn’t run a city. He hadn’t run a business. He is running the biggest enterprise in the world and he has not succeeded. And that is why all of these independents, all of those who believed in a soaring rhetoric, including probably a couple who swooned in the aisles as he spoke in 2008, are now waking up and realizing he is a mortal who is in over his head.”
Colby King, also a columnist for The Washington Post, protested Krauthammer’s analysis and said it was inspired by a “dislike for Obama.”
“I think your dislike for Obama is getting in the way of sound analysis of the situation,” King replied. “Week after week after, it is a personalized attack. And now you are saying, ‘he is stupid.’”
But according to Krauthammer, King was just taking the easy way out by not confronting Krauthammer’s critique, but attacking him instead.
“He is a great orator, he is a very smart man and would be a good professor,” Krauthammer said. “But run the United States, he can’t. That’s analysis, Colby. And I would like to hear an argument that actually answers the analysis and not an ad hominem on your part.”