Is Obama Bored and Contemplating Resignation, or are His Critics Bored, and Contemplating Resignation?

By Nicholas Stix

Updated at 11:48 p.m., on Saturday, January 30, 2010

Larry Auster and my VDARE colleague Paul Nachman are saying, and Byron York is suggesting, in the latter’s new column, that the John Doe calling himself “Barack Obama” is bored with the presidency, and may call it a day at the end of his first term—if not sooner.

In “Has Obama become bored with being president?,” York tells of Obama’s history of being dissatisfied with one powerful job after another, based on its having too little power to effect the changes he seeks.

He won in 2004, but the Senate proved unsatisfying, too. By mid-2006, Majority Leader Harry Reid “sensed his frustration and impatience, had heard rumblings that Obama was already angling to head back home and take a shot at the Illinois governorship,” write Mark Halperin and John Heilemann in the new book Game Change. Reid knew “Obama simply wasn’t cut out to be a Senate lifer.”

According to the book, the majority leader invited Obama to his office for a talk. “You’re not going to go anyplace here,” Reid told Obama. “I know that you don’t like it, doing what you’re doing.” Reid suggested Obama run for president. Obama had been a senator for all of 18 months at the time. Soon after, he was off and running.

What drove Obama was not just ambition, although he is certainly ambitious. As he became frustrated in each job, Obama concluded that the problem was not having the power to do the things he wanted to do. So he sought a more powerful position.

Today he is in the most powerful position in the world. Yet he has spent a year struggling, and failing, to enact far-reaching makeovers of the American economy. So now, even in the Oval Office, there are signs that the old dissatisfaction is creeping back in.

At a Jan. 17 Martin Luther King Day event at Washington’s Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, Obama brought up the fact that many people see him as almost preternaturally calm. “I have a confession to make,” Obama said. “There are times I’m not so calm ... when progress seems too slow ... when it feels like all these efforts are for naught, and change is so painfully slow in coming, and I have to confront my own doubts.”

Obama said it to be inspirational, but the fact is, in the past, that’s when he looked for a new job.

A few days later, ABC’s Diane Sawyer asked whether Obama would sometimes “sit and confront your own doubts.”

“Yes,” the president said.

“Ever in the middle of all that’s coming did you think maybe one term is enough?” Sawyer asked.

Obama answered haltingly. “You know, I -- I would say that when I -- the one thing I’m clear about is that I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.”

Many observers have remarked that, even when dealing with the most momentous issues facing the country, Obama has seemed oddly removed from the hands-on work of making policy. Maybe they’re noticing the same thing Harry Reid did. The president’s dissatisfaction is shining through; perhaps he’s not really cut out for -- or up to -- the job.

In the State of the Union address, Obama declared, ‘I don’t quit.’ And of course, there’s no danger he would just up and quit the presidency. But throughout his life, his reaction to frustration has been to look for a bigger job. What does he do now?

I don’t know what to make of “Obama’s” statement to Diane Sawyer, but the usually sharp (for a Republican) York made a huge mistake, in putting so much stock in Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s Harry Reid story. Halperin and Heilemann blew it—or did they?; I don’t know Heilemann, but Halperin is a man of the Left—in presuming the truth of the script by “Obama’s” Svengali, David Axelrod, according to which “Obama” started his presidential campaign from scratch, in January, 2007. If you’ll believe anything Axelrod says, I’ve got a great deal for you on a slightly used bridge.

As Jonathan Kaufman already reported in the April 21, 2008 Wall Street Journal, in “For Obama, Chicago Days Honed Tactics,” “Obama” already had his organization on the ground in Iowa, the first caucus state, in 2004, before he had even been elected U.S. senator in Illinois.

Mr. Obama sailed to victory [in 2004]. By the end of the campaign, his aides were sending workers into Iowa, the first Presidential caucus state, to begin developing contacts among Democrats there, according to Al Kindle, an Obama campaign aid at the time.

The story Axelrod conjured up much later, and which the socialist MSM uncritically regurgitated was, like so much about “Obama,” a fairy tale. Therefore, the Harry Reid story which Halperin, Heilemann, and York all misinterpreted, is irrelevant, and merely expressed Reid’s vain hope that he had somehow influenced history.

The Reid story and the “not enough power” factor are the pillars of the “he’s bored and will not seek re-election,” or might even resign theory. With the Reid pillar collapsed, let’s look at the “not enough power” pillar.

As “Obama” emphasized in his first ghost-written autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he “very carefully” chose with whom he consorted with, and who he read in college.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.” (Dreams, 100)

These people were totalitarians who scorned limitations on their power. And after college and law school, as an over 20-year-long devotee of Black Liberation Theology, “Obama” has undiminished contempt for constitutional limits on his power. One of the mildest statements by the founder of BLT—not to be confused with the noble bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich—James H. Cone, is “Blacks do not have to live according to white rules.”

For “Obama,” the solution to frustration with limits on his power is not to be found in seeking another job (Secretary General of the U.N.?), but in dashing away such limits, suspending the Constitution, and making himself ruler for life, perhaps with a different title than “President.”

Auster and quite a few Republicans assume that Obamacare is dead, and with it, “Obama.” They also assume that, because the affirmative action president is used to getting everything handed to him on a silver platter, that when things get rough, he’ll bail out. That is a misunderstanding of black psychology, in general, and of the “Obamas,” in particular. Typically, when black affirmative action babies do not get their way, they cry “racism” and sue. And whatever is going on in “Obama’s” head, Madame Michelle and Svengali Axelrod will not permit him to surrender one foot of captured land.

“Obama’s” enemies are celebrating prematurely. Republicans and conservatives have a history of declaring victory over the Left, and quitting the fight. Their enemies’ complacency and cowardice are the “Obamas’” best friends, and will guarantee the latter additional chances to destroy America—what’s left of her.