GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — As you enter this city of 58,566 two hours from the Colorado-Utah border you can swear you almost see facial images in the red rock and gorges carved and gouged by Mother Nature. This is Colorado, with hundreds of clay stone caves, where caving is popular.
Wait, that face on the stone near a cave. Isn’t it Barack Obama’s?
Whoever would have thought that Obama, who was widely perceived in 2008 as someone who could strengthen the country’s center, could turn out to be someone who has seemingly weakened it. In an era when both parties’ political bases often reject compromise, Obama has given the great American tradition of honorable compromise a dirtier name. Obama now has the image of someone with a political backbone as firm as mashed potatoes. Dramatically shifting gears has indeed happened before in politics and Obama can aggressively go on the offensive going into 2012.
But today there is a nearly universal perception that Obama has been in more caves than Fred and Wilma Flintstone. Ignore his words and lofty sounding speeches. This guy can be rolled. That doesn’t bode well not just for his re-election, but for his second term if he is elected.
The 2011 incarnation of Obama doesn’t resemble Colorado’s Cutthroat Trout as much as its Yellow Perch. Unfair? It is a growing consensus among a wide variety of old media and new media pundits seemingly confirmed by the recent controversy over Obama’s dispute with House Speaker John Boehner over Obama’s request to give a speech to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 7 and Boehner’s insistence of the 8th. This ended in Obama agreeing to Boehner’s date of Sept. 8.
“It shows they have no fear of the president. In fact, nobody right now politically has fear of this president — at all,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough noted on his show. “And as Machiavelli said: ‘It’s better to be feared than loved.’…It’s almost as if the President of the United States [is]….irrelevant to the political process in Washington. It’s starting to seem a bit like March, April of 1995 when Bill Clinton had to go out to a press conference and remind Americans he was still relevant because the Constitution said he was relevant….”
Comedy genius Mel Brooks, when asked by Newsweek, said of Obama: “You got to be so damn tough to get what you want, and he’s not that kind of guy.” This was perhaps the first time Mel Brooks understated anything.
I bet the late Mahatma Gandhi is looking down on this, screaming: “For God’s sake Obama, start smacking some heads and kicking some political butt!”
Obama raised huge expectations and fears in 2008.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.