Is Obama Like Ike? - WSJ.com

Read the original article here.

By JAMES TARANTO^[1]

The New York Times's idea of a conservative is a guy who loves to puff Barack Obama. "I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant," David Brooks told The New Republic^[2] two years ago, reminiscing about an encounter from 2005, when Obama was a newly elected U.S. senator. "And I'm thinking, a) he's going to be president and b) he'll be a very good president."

How's that working out? Pretty well, to go by Brooks's column today^[3]. Obama is the dynamic young John F. Kennedy and the wise old Dwight Eisenhower all rolled into one: "The campaign of 2008 was marked by soaring calls for transformation. Now the administration spends much of its time reacting to events and counseling restraint." Here is an anecdote that, to Brooks's mind, captures Obama's Ikelikeness:

On Friday, President Obama gave a press conference that perfectly captured his current phase. He acknowledged rising gas prices but had no new energy policy to announce. On Libya, he emphasized the need to deliberate carefully our steps ahead but had no road map to propose. On the federal budget fight, he spoke passionately about the need to reach a compromise. But when given the chance to talk about what it might look like, he rose above the fray and vaguely counseled balance and moderation.

"Prudence is always a nice trait in a leader, especially in the face of a thorny problem like Libya," Brooks writes. But is it really prudent to stand idly while a vicious dictator reasserts power--especially when the president blustered just a week and a half ago that Moammar Gadhafi "must go^[4]"?

Far from likening his prudence to Ike's, we'd say Obama's passivity is a worrying flaw. Actually, we'd put it a lot more strongly than that. We just borrowed the language in this paragraph's topic sentence from Brooks's column--from the penultimate sentence, meaning only people who didn't get bored by Brooks's cheerleading (or who get paid to read this stuff, as we do) go to it.

Actually, though, "passivity" doesn't quite tell the whole story. Obama is passive about the big things that really matter: the Middle East crisis, the ballooning national debt. He was manically active--JFK-like, in Brooks's taxonomy--when he had a Democratic Congress that was willing to pass ruinous left-wing legislation. Now that voters have placed a check on his power, he still has his manic side, but it's devoted to comparatively trivial matters:

On Saturday, the day after his no-news conference on Libya, he delivered an address to the nation^[5] in which, according to the White House website, he "pays homage to former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, commends the great strides that have been made to create a more equal American society, and reaffirms his resolve to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act."

On Sunday he penned an op-ed piece for Tucson's Arizona Daily Star^[6] calling for "at least . . . the beginning of a new discussion on how we can keep America safe for all our people"--which is Obamaspeak for stricter gun-control laws.

Today, notes National Review's Jim Geraghty^[7], quoting Politico's Mike Allen, he "will tape interviews from the Map Room with KOAT Albuquerque, KDKA Pittsburgh and WVEC Hampton Roads on education reform and the need to fix No Child Left Behind." He also "is taping his NCAA [basketball] picks today, and they'll be revealed tomorrow on ESPN."

Forbes^[8] reports that this weekend, amid crises in the Middle East and Japan, Obama will travel overseas--to Brazil.

And this past Saturday, ABC News^[9] reported, "for the second week in a row, the most powerful man in the world stepped away from the White House to hit the golf course."

Maybe Brooks is on to something. After all, Eisenhower was a golfer too.