Ted Bromund: Obama’s leadership is devaluing the West, and we will all pay the penalty

Managing programmes, proposing bills and dealing with the legislature is the price of winning last time, and the stuff of victory next time. President Barack Obama is failing on the small stuff, and it is dragging his administration down in a big way.

Early last month, Obama wanted to address a joint session of Congress to propose yet another stimulus plan for America’s staggering economy, and his own collapsing poll ratings. But Congress was not in session, and so could not issue the necessary invitation.

Nor did Obama’s handlers realise that the Republican candidates had already scheduled a debate on his preferred night, or that they failed to allow enough time for the security sweep of the Capitol. Is this minor stuff? Only if you get it right. When Obama did finally address Congress on September 8, he called on them – 16 times – to “pass this bill.” But there was no bill, because the White House had not drafted one. The “American Jobs Acts” was a name, nothing more.

An enterprising Republican congressman from Texas, Louis Gohmert, noticed this and snagged the name for himself with a bill to repeal the corporate income tax. The President’s bill did not show up until five days later. Is this minor stuff? Only if you think making speeches is governing.

Obama says he supports US free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. He even went so far as to claim that “the only thing preventing us from passing these bills is the refusal by some in Congress to put country ahead of party”.

But when a reporter pointed out that the administration has never sent the trade bills to Congress, White House spokesman Josh Earnest sputtered: “Have we not sent them over? I mean, look, clearly the legislative mechanics are something that I’m not intimately steeped in.”

This is the government that argues it can effectively spend trillions of dollars? And is this minor stuff? Only if you don’t mind looking like an idiot.

The administration’s approach to Congress is a mystery. They avoided the mistake that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton made, which was to show up in Washington and radiate arrogance by ordering Democratic representatives around.

Instead, they showed up radiating arrogance with the assumption that since Obama was popular, it didn’t much matter what Congress did.

Thus, the Democratic leadership got to draft the initial stimulus bill and the Obamacare health plan, both of which are now millstones around the White House’s neck. Stimulus spending has made “shovel ready” projects a joke that even Obama has laughed at, and the White House has already issued almost 2,000 waivers of its own healthcare law, one fifth of which in May went to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s district.

That’s the kind of mess you get into if you don’t attend to the everyday work of governing. You get laws that are badly drafted and which no one, not even their supposed supporters, ends up believing in.

On foreign policy, too, the administration has gone its own way. That is understandable, to an extent, because the President is ultimately responsible for America’s foreign policy. But the administration’s approach to the Libyan War, where it energetically pursued an endorsement by the UN Security Council but could not be bothered to seek the support of Congress, was deeply damaging.

Most Democrats would have supported Obama because he is their president, and quite a few Republicans would have supported Obama because he is the Commander in Chief. By refusing to work through Congress, he unnecessarily alienated potential friends on both sides of the aisle, a failure that was redeemed only by the Gaddafi regime’s collapse last month.

Obama’s fumbling approach threatens to define him politically as a man in over his head. If that label settles on him, as it did on Carter, he will never shake it off. The battle the White House is fighting now is not to fix the American economy. It is to rescue the President’s reputation as a leader possessed of the ability to govern.

That is the reason for the frenzy of plans, speeches and proposals flowing from the White House, each more off the cuff than the last. It is the same reason why European leaders have kicked the Greek can down the road again and again. Their goal is not to address the problem. It is to try to convince onlookers they are addressing the problem.

But the incompetence of Obama and the European leaders no longer stands on its own. On both sides of the Atlantic, it has become part of the economic crisis. Businesses and banks are frightened to invest and lend because they do not know what will happen next. Some of this uncertainty flows from the fact that in a global economy, it is hard to be sure of anything. But some of it flows from the uncertainty that the leaders of the West are creating.

This is a lesson we should have learned from the Great Depression, where Roosevelt’s business-bashing took a calamity and made it worse by deepening the investing crisis of confidence.

What the West needs now is a competent hand on the rudder, a captain who does not worry the crew by setting a new course every other day. What it is getting is leadership that insists with flighty certainty that we can tax and borrow our way back to prosperity.

The price of this is not just more pointless debt and more wasted spending. It is a devaluation of the euro, of America’s credit rating, and of the standing of our leaders, domestically and around the world. In 2012, Obama may well pay the price for that.

Unfortunately, he will not be the only one doing the paying.