posted November 24, 2013 12:52 PM            

What's up with Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States?

Often a president at around this stage of his second term is beset with scandal, but that's not really the case with Obama; even the Benghazi imbroglio may be fading following disclosures suggesting the case against the administration may be a lot less potent than earlier believed. No one seems to be supping at the public trough, or having a headline-ringing affair.

Yet this administration seems to be drowning. And while the speech at Gettysburg that the president didn't make may be a sin of omission -- involving words he didn't speak -- the Obama presidency seems to be floundering in sins of commission involving its own flood of words.

The words, for example, that said Americans could keep the health care plans they had. The words that asserted the president didn't know his world-leader colleagues were being bugged. The words that argued Israel had little to fear with negotiations with Iran.

But it's not only the words. It's the impression that Russia played the peacemaker in the Middle East, a role we're not accustomed to seeing, and the impression that France is the hard-liner in the conversations with Iran, unusual given the way the words "France" and "appeasement" are ordinarily employed in any sentence that also includes the words "crisis" and "negotiations."

The country just completed a fortnight-long immersion in sadness and solemnity over the death of a president who adjusted the nation's horizons, even as some of his critics thought he was (as Eleanor Roosevelt once put it, bitingly) more profile than courage. This is a critique that Obama might find particularly cutting.

John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama belong to different generations and govern in vastly different times. But the lesson from Kennedy is that he learned lessons.

Today almost everyone acknowledges that the 35th president was breathtakingly unprepared for the White House. An ingenue in foreign policy, a captive of cliches in domestic policy, he stumbled at the Bay of Pigs (four words that almost always are followed by the fifth word, "fiasco"), was humbled at Vienna in his meeting with Nikita Khrushchev ("He savaged me," Kennedy admitted, chillingly), and yet he recovered to avoid nuclear catastrophe the next year during the Cuban Missile Crisis -- and perhaps to approach greatness in his last hundred days.

Maybe it started with this, three sentences delivered to James Reston shortly after the meeting with the Soviet leader: "I've got two problems," Kennedy told The New York Times newsman. "First, to figure out why he did it, and in such a hostile way. And second, to figure out what we can do about it."

Published this year, "JFK's Last Hundred Days," by Thurston Clarke, carried this subtitle: "The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President." Historians will be debating a century from now whether Kennedy was a great president, but there is little question that in his last year he was a man transformed.

He came to grips with the moral imperatives of the Cold War, finally. He confronted the moral emptiness of mutual assured destruction in nuclear confrontations with the Soviet Union, finally. And in Berlin he used a remarkable speech to harness the enduring and alluring power of freedom, finally.

"(J)ust as ambition and realpolitik had characterized his congressional career and early White House years," Clarke wrote, "morality and emotion tempered his ambitions during his last hundred days."

Obama has conquered the morality part, though many Republicans believe his health care overhaul is at base immoral, or at least a departure from the American free-marketplace heritage. As for the emotion part, it's the Democrats who find him wanting. They wonder what happened to the brave words and the intuitive, charged connection with Americans of all ages and races that marked his 2008 campaign and have been elusive since his inauguration.

His battle to preserve his health care initiative, which extended into the government shutdown of this autumn, is where he stuck his emotional sword in the ground. He knew that protecting Obamacare was in effect preserving the Obama legacy, and he was prepared to fight for it.

For generations, every graduate of the elite French military academy at Saint-Cyr was familiar with this doctrine of Napoleon: Give me six hours' control of the Strait of Dover and I will gain mastery of the world. Obama sensed the contemporary domestic analogue: Give the GOP rebels control of the health care debate and they will gain mastery of American politics for the rest of the Obama years.

And then, fresh from his triumph in the shutdown showdown, everything collapsed. It became impossible to repress this question, or to answer it:

If the political figure who used the Internet with brilliant efficiency and to remarkable effect couldn't produce a simple website to perform what the president said was a simple procedure, then how would Washington handle the more difficult task of insuring good care for the sick when lives were at stake?

The website became the Strait of Dover of American domestic politics, and Obama and his forces have been retreating back into the white cliffs of failure for nearly a month. Despite the president's remarks Tuesday about rebranding the effort, they are still there.

One bad month does not a disastrous presidency make, but the challenge for Obama is to clear away the shadow of failure that seems stuck over his White House.

posted November 24, 2013 01:20 PM            

Kennedy was at least as maligned by the right as Obama ... The missile crisis was seen as sheer foolhardiness just as negotiating with Iran is...the fact that he created a world where the PTB agreed not to use those nukes through that "foolishness" is a part of his legacy.