Late to the Party
Posted on October 1, 2014
"President Barack Obama" by Official White House Photo by Pete Souza - P120612PS-0463 (direct link). Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
If the President were to plan and throw a surprise party for his wife, Michelle, he would be late to it.
This Administration is always late to the party.
His team knew that his health care website was not ready for prime time before they unveiled it. But instead of postponing the start date, they let it crash.
They were late to the website fixing party.
When it became clear that the Southern border was faced with a crush of new immigrants from Central America, the Obama Administration initially did nothing. They waited for it to become a real crisis, where it dominated the headlines for months, making it impossible for Congress to deal with broader immigration reform.
They were late to the Southern border surge party.
When ISIS started forming up, coalescing Sunni insurgents and attracting recruits from around the globe, Team Obama looked the other way. Who knows what they were focused on, but the intelligence experts within the Administration tried to warn the President.
Instead of heeding their warnings, Mr. Obama chose to throw them under the bus, well after the crisis had reached full bloom, after the journalists got their heads chopped off, after the extremists executed and butchered hundreds of soldiers loyal to Bashir Assad.
As usual, Mr. Obama was late to the Stop Isis party.
Ebola has been a slow-moving car accident. We can all see it. The news reports have been voluminous. Now Ebola is in America. Public health officials have been warning us for more than a year that this could happen. But the President only started moving on containing this threat a month or so ago.
Mr. Obama was once again late for another party, this one to stop Ebola before it strikes America.
The President has a lot on his plate. He has to travel the country giving campaign speeches. He has to raise money from big Hollywood donors. He has to dine at the finest restaurants in New York City. And of course he has to play a lot of golf.
It would be nice if he could scale back some of the extracurricular activities and stop being late to all of these parties.
It would also be nice if this Administration could take effective action before a crisis becomes a crisis.
That’s what a good President would do.