President Barack Obama is relishing the government shutdown after suffering two colossal failures in September at the hands of Democrats, according to conservative commentator George Will.
“The president is rather enjoying this,” Will said on Friday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel. “And if the emblematic statement of the first Obama term was ‘a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,’ this term, defined after just 9 months, is ‘a crisis is a beautiful thing to create.’ To understand his behavior in early October, you have to understand the disaster in September, when he suffered two huge obstructions, both involving core presidential powers — the power to use appointment and the power to use military force.”
“And he suffered both at the hands of Democratic senators,” he continued. “He wanted Larry Summers to head the Fed, the most important appointment he’ll make in the second term. A Democratic Senator stopped him. He wanted the power to threaten or wage a strike against Syria. Democratic Senators disproportionately stopped that. So he needed to change the subject, and this has helped him do it.”
Watch:
Host Bret Baier cited a Fox News poll that showed a majority of Americans considered the government shutdown to be a very serious matter. But Will remained unconvinced that the shutdown personally affected many Americans.
“That poll that shows 53 percent of the country that says this is very serious — that’s almost an aesthetic judgment,” Will said. “Because most of what the federal government does is transfer payments. And the transfer payments keep getting transferred — shuffling money back and forth. So I don’t think 53 percent of the American people are seriously affected by this.”