In a year in which he hammered through a deal that infuses $150 billion into the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and his feckless handling of Iraq and Syria allowed the murderous and utterly un”contained” Islamic State to expand its influence and slaughter innocents, President Barack Obama was bestowed the great honor of being the GQ “Man of the Year.”
The obsequious write-up by leftist sports pundit Bill Simmons portrays Obama as a talented athlete outplaying the competition in what, in the end, is nothing but a political game. “If Clinton acted like someone who ran Capitol Records,” writes Simmons, “Obama—both the person and the president—carries himself like Roger Federer, a merciless competitor who keeps coming and coming, only there’s a serenity about him that disarms just about everyone.”
Noting that Obama compared himself during the interview to star quarterback Aaron Rodgers, Simmons says “he wasn’t bragging,” because in Simmons’ and GQ’s perspective, Obama is a man with no equal, able to “keep his focus downfield despite all the chaos happening in front of him.”
“That’s Obama’s enduring quality, and (to borrow another sports term) this has been his ‘career year,'” writes Simmons.
As The Weekly Standard highlights, perhaps the most notable moment is Obama’s admission of his own “arrogance,” namely during his first two years in office. But don’t be fooled: rather than a rare example of humility from the president, he used the admission as a chance to show how self-reflective and (further) enlightened he had become—and how dense the American people are . Obama made the comment when musing about the one thing he would’ve told himself back in 2008:
OBAMA: “You’re going to be busy.” Coming in, we were going through an unprecedented economic upheaval, combined with an upheaval in the Middle East that we hadn’t seen in our lifetimes. There was going to be a huge amount of disruption. I would probably tell myself to communicate more effectively early on than I did. We ran a great campaign. It wasn’t as great as it seems in retrospect—there’s always rose-colored glasses but there’s no doubt that we captured the country’s imagination. And somehow in those first two years, I think a certain arrogance crept in, in the sense of thinking as long as we get the policy ready, we didn’t have to sell it.
Obama then made sure to note that all of the pushback from the public in his first two years—which resulted in a landslide victory for Republicans in 2010—could be blamed entirely on not holding the hands of the American people enough:
OBAMA: One thing I learned through some tough election cycles: You can’t separate good policy from the need to bring the American people along and make sure that they know why you’re doing what you’re doing. And that’s particularly true now in this new communications era. I think that we were ahead of the curve in 2008 in social media and the Internet and digital communications. When we came into office, instead of taking some of those lessons, we suddenly adapted ourselves to the White House press room and structures that had been built back in the 1940s and ’50s. As a consequence of those missteps early, we got the policies right, and that’s why the economy now has grown for five and a half straight years, six years, and why unemployment rates have gone from 10 percent to 5.1 percent. But there was a lot of political pain along the way that might not have been necessary.
This is certainly not the first time Obama has attempted to explain away the massive pushback on his policies at the polls on “communications” lapses—a patently absurd excuse for a President of the United States who was widely popular at the time and had at his beck and call the Democrats’ “ultimate super PAC,” the mainstream media, to push his policies.
Image (via AP): “President Barack Obama tosses a football as he welcomes the NCAA College Football Playoff National Champion Ohio State Buckeyes, Monday, April 20, 2015, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington.”