Obama: Is the president out of touch?

last updated 8 January 2015

“For a smart man, President Obama professes to know very little about a great number of things,” said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. He didn’t know that the bug-ridden Obamacare website had major technical problems until its launch on Oct. 1. He was also apparently “blissfully unaware” that the National Security Agency was bugging the phones of Angela Merkel and other world leaders until this summer. “What did Obama know and when did he know it?” The answer always seems to be, “Not much, and about a minute ago.” Obviously, this law professor turned president is a terrible manager, said FoxNews.com in an editorial. Caught unawares by Benghazi and the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups, constantly leading from behind in foreign affairs—that’s our “bystander president.”

Yes, Obama should have been “riding herd on staff to make damn sure” the health-care website worked, said Michael Tomasky in TheDailyBeast.com. But with Obamacare, “the bigger scandal is on the Republican side.” The GOP did its best to sabotage the Affordable Care Act—refusing to create state exchanges in dozens of states, and blocking the appropriation of funds dedicated to the rollout. Such obstinacy is “almost without precedent in American history.” Obama reportedly did try to ride herd on the staff, said Ron Fournier in NationalJournal.com, repeatedly telling aides that if the website didn’t work properly, “nothing else matters.” Obama’s problem is not that he’s disengaged; it’s that a lot of his aides are doing lousy jobs, and he won’t fire them.

Those aides seem to tell Obama very little, said Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker. The NSA was apparently an “avid listener to Merkel’s mobile since 2002.” So why didn’t Obama discover this until a few months into his second term? Intelligence officials or his staff must have decided to insulate Obama from questionable snooping practices. When Obama first came into office, said Peter Baker in The New York Times, he used to pride himself on knowing “the particulars.” Before ordering more troops to Afghanistan, for example, he asked for three months of seminars on the region. Obviously, no president can monitor all of the sprawling federal government’s activities. But if Obama keeps saying, “I didn’t know,” people will begin to wonder “just how much in charge he really is.”