Wednesday, August 03, 2016

Barack needs to learn to be above the fray

Barack Obama is the sitting US president.  He's decided to campaign for Hillary Clinton.


That's not unique, they belong to the same party.


What is different is he doesn't seem to grasp the line.

He can sing her praises, he can urge people to vote for her.

But as a sitting president not running for re-election, he's not supposed to engage in attacks.

He's coming dangerously close to abuse of office with his remarks about the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.


barack the starlet




Maybe he thinks all bets are off after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg interjected herself into the election?

(She has since rightly noted she should have kept those thoughts to herself.)

But he's on the line if he hasn't already crossed it.

He may not be aware of what he's doing.

It might be part of his long standing habit of making everything about him.


That annoying feature's been noted repeatedly during his two terms as president.  For example, from 2012, Emily Yoffe's "Today We Are Gathered … To Hear More About Me" (SLATE).


Someone needs to tell Barack Obama -- it must get particularly confusing this time of year -- that his own birth is not Year One, the date around which all other events are understood. His much-noted, self-referential tic was on cringe-worthy display Friday when the president gave his eulogy for the late Sen. Daniel Inouye, who served in Congress for half a century representing Obama’s birth state of Hawaii.


Inouye was a Japanese-American war hero (he lost an arm in World War II, destroying his dream of becoming a surgeon), and as a senator he served on the Watergate committee, helped rewrite our intelligence charter after scandals, and was chairman of the Senate committee that investigated the Iran-Contra affair. It’s the kind of material any eulogist could use to give a moving sense of the man and his accomplishment. But President Barack Obama’s remarks at Inouye’s funeral service were a bizarre twirl around his own personal Kodak carousel.




He needs to realize he is a sitting president and start conducting himself in that manner.

His thoughts on the Republican candidate are not needed.

This is an election and he can fully support Hillary Clinton without slamming or even referring to Donald Trump.