If you are as frustrated, or should I say as outraged, as I am with our president’s inability to face up to foreign crises and deal with them swiftly and confidently, you need only look at the amateurs advising him.
Just as the lack of business experience among his advisors on economic policy resulted in one of the slowest recoveries in history, the president has surrounded himself with amateurs as he dithers on foreign policy issues.
Speechwriter Ben Rhodes is a close advisor to President Obama on foreign policy. (Saul Loeb/Agence France Presse-Getty Images)
President Obama, the ultimate campaigner, consults with former and current speech writers and political strategists to determine political consequences of decisions. They are foreign policy neophytes and are responsible for his “leading from behind” positions on issues. Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel recently referred to them as “political hacks.” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, is one. “Ben Rhodes is the voice – and a lot of the brains – of President Obama’s foreign policy,” according to the New Republic. While credited with writing most of Obama’s key foreign policy speeches, including his Cairo address, the New Republic appropriately questioned, “What is a speechwriter doing making global strategy … and crafting policy?”
Mary Harf is one of the amateurs at the State Department.
Behind the scenes, President Obama not only depends on former media people for political advice, but counts on them to develop the spin. The Atlantic claims as many as 24 former media representatives have joined the Obama administration.
At the State Department, two more political hacks, Jen Psaki and her assistant, Mary Harf, brief the media on international issues. Psaki worked on the re-election campaigns of Sen. Tom Harkin and Tom Vilsack before joining John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. She later served as President Obama’s 2008 campaign traveling press secretary. During the president’s 2012 campaign, Harf helped craft his national security strategy.
State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki couldn’t give AP reporter Matt Lee an accomplishment of Hillary Clinton. (CNN photo)
Psaki, who in April could not identify a single achievement of Hillary Clinton’s State Department for AP reporter Matt Lee, opened Thursday’s State Department press conference with routine announcements, including an audit of the Afghan election, rather than the downing of the Malaysian airliner.
While Fox’s Shepard Smith called this “highly inappropriate,” Gen. Barry McCaffery, appearing on NBC, expressed astonishment with “the inability of the State Department to say anything sensible about the situation.”
Jen Psaki was more interested in tweeting a note to a friend about a White House colleague the night of the airliner downing, according to blogger Pat Dollard.
During the evening the day the airliner was shot down, as the State Department was supposedly involved in determining if any Americans were aboard, Pat Dollard blogged that Psaki was tweeting a friend about a piece written in the Washington Post by former Obama deputy chief of staff for operations, “Great piece by former colleague Alyssa Mastromonaco who defines smart, savvy and fashionable.”
But even our Secretary of State John Kerry can always be counted on to say something untoward. “I always get a little uptight when I hear politicians say how exceptional we are,” said Kerry during an appearance in Vienna, Austria. And we know the president agrees with him.
Is it any wonder that 80 percent of voters think the U.S. is losing some of its standing in the world? It’s amateur time in Washington.
