Mark Mardell Defends The President

The BBC’s US President editor (“North America editor” is not an appropriate title, as he reports exclusively on the President and the US politics surrounding Him) has noticed that the President’s popularity and job approval has been at something of a low ebb.  Naturally, concerned that his audience might be worried, Mardell leaps to His defense.  Under the time-honored journalistic pretext of posing a question, he proceeds to give you the answer.  He’s got a defense for every single criticism of the President.

Is President Obama a good leader?

When President Obama was elected he seemed like a different kind of leader.

Only to those caught up in the cult of personality foisted on us by a complicit media.  Mardell himself came to the US as one of those true believers, excited by the possibilities.  He knows he was wrong then, but goes through a series of intellectual contortions to prove to himself otherwise.

Not just the first black man in the White House but a new sort of American president: thoughtful, reflective and determined to represent all of his country.

Again, only those caught up in the worship believed this for a moment.

Now, a year away from the next presidential election many people question what sort of leader he has turned out to be.

Many of you may question His leadership, but Mardell is here to set you straight.

One unkind critic said that he seemed like a 50-year-old man who has just got his first proper job, that he has had no experience of running any organisation and it shows in his management of the White House.

Unkind?  How about “honest”?  He is a 50-year old man who has had no experience of running any organization, and this is His first really challenging job.  What would a “kind” critic say, anyway?  Still, let’s hear some real criticism.

Republicans are of course the harshest critics. Ed Rogers, a veteran of the George H W Bush and Reagan White House told me: “I think Obama is not a very effective leader.

“I think he is a thinker and a ditherer to a fault. I think his leadership style does not lend itself to crisp decision making.

Those familiar with Mardell’s coverage of (for) the President will know this is one of the criticisms which most angers him.  No surprise that this is how he sets it up.

“I get the impression he anguishes before a decision, and even worse for a president, he anguishes after a decision. So, his team never has certainty.
“They never know if the other side is back in appealing to the president, they never know if they have gotten clear, certain decisions.

“And at the end of the day being president is about making decisions and sticking with them.”

Think about that for a second, before reading Mardell’s defense.

Of course in part Mr Obama’s initial appeal was that he did consider the facts, carefully and dispassionately.

That’s not what Rogers is saying at all.  Mardell is misrepresenting things.  The criticism isn’t that He is thoughtful and wanted to contemplate all the facts, but that He kept changing His tune afterward.   Try not to laugh too hard about the “dispassionately” BS.  Mardell obviously doesn’t get it, so starts his defense in earnest:

He was seen as the diametric opposite of his predecessor, President George W Bush, in the popular imagination a cowboy president who shot from the hip, trusting his first gut instinct.

Mr Obama, on the other hand, likes to get down with the details.

Remember, the criticism isn’t about whether or not the President considers the details, but whether or not He is capable of  making a firm decision.  Only Mardell still thinks this is about why it seems to take Him so long to make one.  We all know this isn’t true, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The US President editor then gives us an anecdote from Jared Bernstein, a former adviser to the Vice President, who heaps praise on the President for being so deeply concerned and interested in real detail.  This is, of course, how Mardell shows you that He is so very different from that tiresome cowboy.

In order to drive this point home, we’re told that the President actually saved the US economy.

He makes the point that Mr Obama was faced with an immense challenge and says he stopped the economy going off the edge of a cliff.

Never mind that the initial round of TARP bailouts was begun before He took office, and that He kept Bush’s finance team essentially intact to continue that progress.  Praise Him!  Then back to the defense.

However, he accepts there is a perception of dithering:

“The guy has an amazing capacity to assimilate a lot of information. He really likes to solve a problem pragmatically – but from a perspective of being as well informed as he can be.

“He certainly doesn’t reach snap decisions. He is a pretty deliberative guy, but you put the facts in front of him he will reach a conclusion pretty quickly.”

Hmm. How does reaching a conclusion “pretty quickly” give the appearance of dithering?  In the case of going to war against Libya, for example, it turns out that the President wasn’t dithering so much as He actually didn’t want to do it at all.  He thought light sanctions and hard, Paddington-like stares were working, and had to be shown that it wasn’t before He gave the green light.  It’s why Hillary Clinton has said that she won’t be working for Him if He gets a second term.  Yes, I know the BBC never told you about that.

“I think what looks like excessive deliberation has more to do with the politics. The president might come to a decision on economic policy pretty quickly, but then you’ve got to navigate this Congress and that is a fairly tough equation, getting through all those road blocks.”

“This Congress”?  You mean the one with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and a Democrat-controlled Senate?  Or the totally Democrat-controlled Congress He had for the first two years which rammed through ObamaCare and Stimulus via backroom deals and end runs around the opposition?  You know, the one that Mardell called a “Golden Age”? What a load of garbage.  But Mardell thinks you’re all too stupid to remember that, and continues his “Trapped in a world He never made” defense.

But the president has to be a navigator, or at least know people who are.

Mr Obama does not seem to have a strategy for dealing with the sausage factory that is Congress. It has perhaps been his worst failure.

Seriously?  What about the billions thrown down the green jobs toilet, mostly to His Democrat moneymen?  What about the failure of the $1 trillion-plus Stimulus?

True, he not only got through economic packages which admirers would say saved the country, he also in the end got a healthcare package that has long been a dream of Democrats.

Mardell knows he can’t give the President too much credit for that because, as I said above, that was mostly the doing of the Democrat leadership when they controlled both the House and the Senate.  But now it’s time to pretend to criticize Him from the Left.

But it was so diminished that it offended his own side while enraging the right and helping the Tea Party to get off the ground.

Hello: the Tea Party movement was well “off the ground” by April 15, 2009, almost a year before ObamaCare was signed into law.  How can Mardell still get this wrong? And it can’t have been too much of an offense to supporters at the time, judging from the way the BBC lauded it.

The trail of sometimes grubby compromises that led to a deal made him look part of a Washington he said he had come to fix.

Yeah, that’s much worse than the fact that the President is the recipient of more money from the finance industry than all the Republican candidates combined, or that the CEO of GE is His Jobs Czar, or that He gave more than half a trillion dollars to a green energy boondoggle because it was backed by one of His moneymen.  But I digress.

Perhaps even more importantly it led to an unclear proposal that left many Americans confused and worried that it would leave them worse off.

Oh, God, we’re back to the Narrative that people don’t like ObamaCare only if they don’t understand it properly.

Mr Obama seems to lack the sort of special political skills you need to make sausages (Bismarck said you don’t want to know how sausages or laws are made).

It certainly doesn’t help when practically the first words out of His mouth as President when trying to work a deal with Republicans was “I won“.  There’s a difference between not having certain political skills and being an arrogant asshole.

He’s obviously not a thug nor, more oddly, a charmer.

“More oddly”?  Why does Mardell say that?

Undoubtedly he has buckets of charisma.

Oh, right.  Silly me.

Mardell then goes on to say that the President hasn’t been much good at reaching across the aisle, and – bizarrely – that not even “charming bully” Rahm Emmanuel could get both sides to work together.  To my surprise, though, he does acknowledge that critics on the Left don’t want Him to compromise at all.  Hey, what happened to all that Republican intransigence?  Never mind that, of course, as this is about how the President feels pressure from the Left to stay on course, and that’s why He’s not such a bridge-builder.  As always, Mardell has a defense ready for any charge.

He then moves on to the next section.

What made Mr Obama a unique political phenomenon was that he, quite literally, wrote his own story.

Er, no.  The media did that.  His book was promoted far and wide by them, and they didn’t even spend a tiny fraction of the effort checking into His past that they did on Sarah Palin.  More than anything else, though, it was cos He is black.  Let’s face it, that was the number one selling point.  No white neophyte politician with a vague background of association with questionable characters would have been catapulted to stardom in such fashion.

So Mardell is wondering what happened, how the bloom came off the rose.

Yet this master storyteller appears to have lost control of the narrative in office.

Uh-oh, please, not this again.

Some may think this is post-modern claptrap or simply a silly way to look at politics.

But part of being a leader, and especially an American president, is telling people in very clear terms what is going on, why it’s going on and what should happen next.

Mr Obama himself has said the best solutions to the economic crisis may not be the best story.

Damn.  If you don’t agree, it’s because the message hasn’t been made clear to you enough.  This is seriously wrong.  The President has been absolutely clear on all of His policies, and on all of His various messages.  Nobody doubts what He wants to happen or thinks is going on.  But Mardell still, after all this time, thinks that if we don’t think He’s doing a bang-up job, it’s only because He hasn’t made the Gospel clear to us yet.  Does anyone here think His Plan For Us hasn’t been made crystal clear over and over again?  And here comes more defense:

The plot twists of real life get in the way of a simple tale. The president – and just about everyone else – thought the economy would be showing stronger signs of recovery by now.

No, not everybody thought that.  Why else would the Tea Party movement have transformed the face of the House?  Lots of people knew things weren’t going to go well.  Now, why would we think that?

But the author of a critical book about the president’s handing of the economic crisis, Ron Suskind, says the disconnect is the problem.

“Even if the words of a leader are not along the lines of what people want if they match his deeds people say ‘Well, I may not agree with him, he’s a straight shooter’ and that gets you confidence points.

“Mr Obama has had trouble because of his brilliance at soaring rhetoric – inspirational rhetoric.

Wait….what?

“And often the caution that has abided his deeds, a kind of split-the-middle-let’s-find-some-middle-ground, even if there is not much coherence to it, a half of this and a little of that, often does not make sound, dramatic policy. “

Name me one big speech where the President wasn’t scolding His opponents.  This is Beltway BS.  The general public doesn’t think this way.  We’ve heard His message, and found it wanting.  Suskind, by the way, is not an impartial observer.  He’s an Obamessiah supporter who wrote an entire book shifting blame for the economy away from Him.  Even far-Left ideologue and JournoList founder Ezra Klein, who wrote the review I’ve linked to, can see that.  But Mardell isn’t going to tell you.  He, like Suskind, wants the President to go back to the “Yes We Can” stuff.

“When you are president, people always need to know what you would do if you were a dictator. What you would do. Not what’s possible or the realities of Congress or the limits on your authority.

“What would you do if you were dictator? People don’t know that about Obama. And that’s a problem. A weakness. And stylistically it is going to be hard for him to get that back.”

This is a joke, right?  Who here doesn’t know how that would go?  Any excuse to distract people from wondering about His competence.  And that’s the key here: a lack of competence.

Everything in Mardell’s piece is about blaming factors beyond the President’s control, or how people get the wrong idea because He doesn’t fit the typical Washington mold. As I said earlier, trapped in a world He never made.  In other words, not really His fault.  Don’t question His competence.

Mardell and Suskind both still think He’s brilliant, and potentially a great leader.  He’s already shown that He isn’t, but they can’t see it.  If He fails, it won’t be His fault. Mardell’s doing a whole series of this stuff this week, hoping for more Hope, and I’m not sure I can stomach it.

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23 Responses to Mark Mardell Defends The President

  1. Umbongo says:

    DP

    Your usual excellent stuff.  It fascinates and appals me that nobody in the MSM – you know, the ones who are paid to do what you do for free – does this filleting of Mardell and the whole Obama fanclub at the BBC offices in the US.  OK. Oborne has the odd go but his strictures are, somehow, rather fuzzily focused and, of course, James Delingpole (online and very occasionally in print) blasts the BBC’s propagandising for the warmists.  However, there’s mainly silence elsewhere.

    Coming back to Mardell: he, in one overweight person, encapsulates BBC news and current affairs: namely bias and crap reporting.

       0 likes

    • noggin says:

      too true, mardell he looks like he REALLY IS full of sh-t…literally.

      think it was mark steyn

      “Obamas like a third rate childrens conjurer whose all out o tricks”

      can you see the jobs yet, wheres the multi trillion dollar debt gone…..wheres the half trillion just to pay the interest this year
      then….on the debt ceiling pass this bill now, when theres no bill…and no money to pay for it
      then, just like krusty the clown, a big toothy grin, thankyou and goodnight,(pssss…keep the car running)

      its an Obamanation thats what it is.

         0 likes

  2. Neil Turner says:

    For those of you who have any doubt whatsoever that O’bama is not a charlatan, I suggest you read Mark Steyn’s thoughts in “After America”. Obama has never had a proper job. He is the ultimate secular-Islamo-humanist. He hates Israel, despises Britain. It’s easy to see why the Beeb loves him so

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  3. D B says:

    Unkind?  How about “honest”?  Heh.

    the author of a critical book (says)…”Mr Obama has had trouble because of his brilliance at soaring rhetoric – inspirational rhetoric.” Ouch! How can Obama hope to recover from such harsh criticism?

    Another thorough fisking, DP.

       0 likes

  4. George R says:

    Not on BBC-Democrat Mardell’s recommended reading list:

    Pamela Geller & Robert Spencer,

    “The Post American Presidency” (2010)

    [Excerpts here]:

    http://www.amazon.com/Post-American-Presidency-Obama-Administrations-America/dp/B004J8HWWI/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320428071&sr=1-2#reader_B004J8HWWI

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    • George R says:

      Revelations for BBC-Democrat Mardell about his Messiah –

      GLENN BECK, discusses with Dinesh D’souza,  Obama’s ideology –  
       
       
       (youtube clips):  
       
      Part 1  
       


       
       
       
      Part 2  
       


         0 likes

  5. Grant says:

    David P,
    I was just about to write “what a superb filleting of the useless Mardell “, then I read Umbongo’s post which says it all ! 

       0 likes

  6. john in cheshire says:

    Why does Mardell and socialists in general have to keep going on about obama’s race? I don’t see normal people raising it in discussions. obama is not liked because he’s not good at his job. But then as has been said by many others before, it’s the Democrats who have the history of being racist, so perhaps they are exhibiting a guilt complex in the only way they know – by projecting their own foibles onto their opponents.

       0 likes

    • Grant says:

      And , of course, lardbrain Mardell keeps perpetuating the myth that Obama is “black”.  We only ever hear about his black ,father but not his white mother.  Mardell and his
      fellow-travelling Lefties are racist and sexist.

         0 likes

      • Mailman says:

        His skin colour is black BUT he has had a white upbriging NOT to mention that he isnt descended from “black African American” stock.

        Cain, on the other hand, if elected would indeed be the first TRUE black American elected to office.

        Mailman

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  7. George R says:

    GLENN BECK’S ‘The Blaze’:

    “Why Did President Obama Give the Islamist Turkish Prime Minister a Hug?”

    http://www.theblaze.com/stories/why-did-president-obama-give-the-islamist-turkish-prime-minister-a-hug/

       0 likes

  8. Louis Robinson says:

    Hillary Clinton said it right: “Obama is an empty vessel into which a nation is pouring its hopes.” But you can fool some of the people some of the time and amopn those include Mark Mardell.

    David, you and I share a deep distrust of President Obama. Having read both his “autobiographies” and the various books about him by people like Dinesh D’Souza and Stanley Kurtz I find him a manipulative radical leftist. With some notable exceptions, people are afraid to confront him. Even right-wing pundits don’t like saying dissing him – prefacing their remarks with “I find him charming and like him a lot.” Poppycock.

    But here’s the real issue: it is not Mark Mardell’s job to defend the President of the United States whoever he is, It is his job to probe and analyse and like all good journalists, err on the side of skepticism. But Mardell carries Obama’s water: 

    When delivering a lacklustre speech Mardell simpers: “Mr Obama is good only when he has to be, and today felt more like a practice run than anything else. 
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/change-links/message/92553

    In May Mardell’s hero was “gutsy”
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markmardell/2011/05/obama_rides_wave_of_gutsiness.html

    And a few hours ago, he is again excused with “President Obama inherited this; he didn’t invent it.”
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15586726

    If there is frustration on our part it is because Mardell and the BBC’s United States Bureau WILL NOT represent the views of the political right fairly – or at all. 

    Keep up the good work David Preiser.  Invaluable.

       0 likes

    • David Preiser (USA) says:

      I don’t want Mardell or the BBC to represent the views of the Right.  Or the Left.  I want him and them to report the facts and quit spinning and editorializing and misrepresenting and censoring and lying.

         0 likes

      • Louis Robinson says:

        But my point is if he adds the right wing view to the left view he usually reflects he will end up with a balanced view. (Though I know from 30 years of interviewing on the radio that is not always the case.)

           0 likes

        • David Preiser (USA) says:

          I see what you mean, Louis, but Mardell thinks he did provide space for opposing views.  Although he obviously had a ready defense, even if misguided, for each criticism.

             0 likes

    • googleborg says:

      Hillary Clinton said it right: “Obama is an empty vessel into which a nation is pouring its hopes.”

      where did she say that?

         0 likes

  9. Cassandra King says:

    Mardell is in love, in love with a dream. He wants to believe it so much it warps his perspective on reality. A romantic vision of the intelectually superior leftist progresive US president taking over from the ugly right wing conservative of his imagination. A made up fantasy construct, if Obama did not exist the left would invent him.

    Kennedy reborn, the young vital populist and popular president that will change America from the grasping right wing capitalist free market ideal to a socialist progressive idyll. ‘I have a dream’ complex writ large, a romantic view perfectly attuned to Mardells political views. The right are knuckle dragging slope headed cigar chomping mill owners just itching to eat some poor kidz.

    In the imagination, the infantile imagination of an idealist who sees others as they wish them to appear, that of the spoof stage villain, a childs view of the world. The common thread is one of intelectual supremacy of the left, the left is superior, deeper, idealistic and a higher form of humanity whereas the right are driven by selfishness, reactionary and motivated by base instincts unable to comprehend the supposed superior nature of progressive socialism.

    The right is the past, a past that the likes of Mardell believe is destined to be left behind like tribalism or canibalism or burning witches. In fact it is socialism/leftist progressive values that will be discarded, their creed is the intelectual failure, the inherrent structural defect, the inbuilt stresses and contradictions that will cause socialism to fail. And in the end it will be free market capitalism that will prevail. The Marxist left used to be the future once, now they are the dinosaur dead weight, they just have not noticed it yet.

       0 likes

  10. Grant says:

    Cassie,
    ” A child’s view of the world ”  sums up Leftism perfectly.

       0 likes

  11. ltwf1964 says:

    lardarse is a fantasist

    mind you his political fanatsies are bad enough

    i don’t even want to contemplate any other kind of fantasies that may be bouncing of the walls of that head with the microbrain inside

       0 likes

  12. John Anderson says:

    On From Our Own Correspondent just now – Mardell is delivering a nice snide hatchet job on Herman Cain.  Somehow fails to mention that a lot of support has been rallying around Cain since the vague allegations were made.

       0 likes

  13. Mailman says:

    Well, Mardell would have achieved exactly the same if his entire article was “I love you, Mr President”.

    Or maybe they could just title his articles “Love notes to my beloved”?

    Mailman

       0 likes