Obama's Overcompensation

by Dennis Green

Barrack Hussein Obama was elected President of the U.S. primarily because he was not perceived as an “experienced” old political hack. He defeated Hillary and McCain precisely because both of them were seen as yesterday’s leftovers, either recycled from previous administrations or past campaigns. We wanted “Change You Can Believe In” and by that we meant, definitely not the usual suspects.

After eight years of Bush, we desperately wanted real change.

But the first thing Obama did was appoint Rahm Emmanuel his Chief of Staff, an old Chicago political hack who had served as Bill Clinton’s advisor way back in the ‘90s. Then he appointed Hillary Clinton his Secretary of State, kept Bush’s Secretary of Defense, and kept Bernanke and other financial wizards on his team who had overseen if not facilitated the economic collapse of 2008.

He kept Petreus on as General overseeing both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and promoted General Stanley McChrystal to oversee the Afghan campaign, a man who had led a team of assassins in earlier U.S. military efforts, and who lied about Pat Tillman’s killing by friendly fire. No wonder they just got us deeper into the quagmire.

So what’s going on?

My sense is that Obama, feeling so inexperienced, and having been taken to task for his lack of experience by both Hillary and McCain, did what is so human — he overcompensated. He surrounded himself with all the usual suspects and tired old, worn-out hacks. I’m surprised he didn’t find a role for John McCain in his cabinet too. And for all we know, maybe he did.

But in doing all that, he betrayed exactly what we elected him for, his freshness, his virginity, his relatively unspoiled nature. Yes, he was from Harvard, and from Chicago, but he wasn’t yet tainted by D.C. And in that regard he was the sort of candidate that Jimmy Carter was, and Ronald Reagan, and even Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — the outsider.

All four of those men had served as governors of their respective states before coming to the White House, but had not served a decade or more in Congress, let alone, like Hillary, lived and worked in that domicile before. After Nixon, after Carter’s disappointing failures, after Bush One and after Clinton, we had turned to the H.R.O.’s — the “Highly Regarded Outsiders.”

My friend and mentor of many years, Herb Stansbury, a marketing genius and also a “business cartoonist,” (his “Smart Chart” appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle for many years…), once drew a cartoon for me I still have framed on my office wall. It reads, “Green, you’re not an Insider…but you are a Highly Regarded Outsider.” And that was precisely why he made me his sidekick, his spy in so many meetings we attended together.

I was not, like him and his associates, a member of the Bohemian Club, La Taverna, the Claremont Club, the Golden Bears, so when he needed an outsider perspective, he could count on me. And that’s how we thought we would be able to count on Obama. But he didn’t, apparently, trust his own instincts, even though they got him as far as they have.

So now we’ve got the usual gridlock, the usual stalemates, politics as usual. And we shouldn’t really be surprised. We don’t elect a president, we elect a team. And Obama’s team has given him some very bad advice. And let us all badly down.

©2010 Dennis Green