Dowd Defines the Real Obama

I love Maureen Dowd. She uses words like howitzers or a flame thrower to mow down the object of her ire. Here's her take on Barack Obama in her latest NY Times opinion piece:

Barack Obama blazed like Luke Skywalker in 2008, but he never learned to channel the Force. And now the Tea Party has run off with his light saber.

The dissonance of his promise and his reality is jarring.

When he had power, he didn’t use it. He wanted to be a “transformational” president like Ronald Reagan, but failed to understand that Reagan’s strategic shows of strength allowed him to keep the whip hand without raising his voice.

And now, just when the high school principal in the Oval has been browbeating Congress to help create jobs, he is once more distracted from that task as he tries to save his own.

He goes to fund-raisers to tell people to stick with him, but he seems to be trying to reassure himself.

...

He thinks he’s doing the right things to crawl out of W.’s mudslide, but he ends up being castigated by the right as a socialist, by the left as a conservative, and by the middle as wobbly.

The one clear-cut, chesty victory that Obama has had may have come too late for beleaguered Americans to much care.

When the president is asked what it felt like to kill Osama, he’s low-key and modest, even though he personally refocused the mission to capture the 9/11 architect after W. dropped the ball.

What I don't like about Obama, one of many things, is that he is too calculated. Here's what Dowd says about his plans to boost his 2012 election:

The White House is also counting on the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal big-screen version of the killing of Bin Laden to counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual. The Sony film by the Oscar-winning pair who made “The Hurt Locker” will no doubt reflect the president’s cool, gutsy decision against shaky odds. Just as Obamaland was hoping, the movie is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, 2012 — perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.

The moviemakers are getting top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration.

It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president’s image to Hollywood when Boal got welcomed to the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon and showed up recently — to the surprise of some military officers — at a C.I.A. ceremony celebrating the hero Seals.

This is the guy who has come down harder on whistle-blowers and leakers than Bush ever did. But when it comes to polishing his image for the 2012 election, throw the rules out the window. Cynical. Wrong. Manipulative.

I just wish he had one-tenth the enthusiasm for getting America out of the rut that he has in sucking up dollars for his re-election and for polishing his image. He needs to focus on the job and stop politicking for 4 more years of mediocrity.