President Barack Obama’s response to the controversy over his birth certificate proved that he has lost his way, columnist John Podhoretz writes in the
New York Post. Podhoretz compares the administration with the New York Mets’ 1962 season, when they lost three times as many games as they’d won, prompting manager Casey Stengel’s famous line, "Can't anybody here play this game?"
Convening a news conference featuring a president complaining about “carnival barkers” was a sloppy PR move at best, the columnist writes. At worst, it swept under the carpet the important issues of the day, notably his hiring of David Petraeus to lead the CIA. It also made him look like a less important news figure than potential GOP candidate Donald Trump, whose New Hampshire news conference preceded Obama’s.
“He allowed himself to become a supporting player in someone else's reality-TV show by whining about how he could only get the time of day from the broadcast gods by talking about his birth certificate,” Podhoretz writes.
The columnist, alluding to Trump’s famous line on his reality show “The Apprentice,” doesn’t see much of the audacious hope the president sold himself on just a few years ago.
“Those who hope for Obama's re-election have good reason to be alarmed at the way the sure-footed political instincts he showed in 2008 have so profoundly deserted him in the course of his presidency. Because that might lead to his firing at the hands of the electorate.”
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