History in the making

 

It's "torture" to read about what goes on in this White House. This story by Edward Klein - author of The Amateur - is sure to give you the creeps, the heebie jeebies and a dull ache in the kishkes.

 

On the evening of Tuesday, June 30, 2009 — just five months into his administration — Barack Obama invited a small group of presidential historians to dine with him in the Family Quarters of the White House. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, personally delivered the invitations with a word of caution: the meeting was to remain private and off the record. As a result, the media missed the chance to report on an important event...

.... Judging from Mr. Obama’s questions, one subject was uppermost in his mind: how could he become a “transformational” president and bend the historic trajectory of America’s domestic and foreign policy? 

[....]

In the wake of the shellacking the Democrats took in the midterm elections in 2010, Mr. Obama held a second dinner with the historians, which was devoted to the question of how he could “reconnect with the public.”

A third dinner took place in July 2011, shortly after Mr. Obama and his team botched the budget-deficit negotiations with Congress, and the United States government lost its Triple-A credit rating for the first time in history. It revolved around the theme “the challenge of reelection.”

That fall, I spoke to one of the historians who attended all three of the dinners. We met in a restaurant where we were unlikely to be seen, and our conversation, which lasted for nearly two hours, was conducted under the condition of anonymity. 

[....]

 

This excerpt (purposefully) sets out only the bare skeleton of the fact that these dinners occurred.  For torturous detail and opinion, you'll have to read it all. 

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

I couldn't read Klein's hair-raising article without recalling another false messiah: the megalomaniac Sabbatai Zevi, who -- just because he saw himself as an epochal, world-changing, transformative figure -- brought untold misery to the Jewish people back in the 17th century. Our current false-messiah president is cut from the same cloth -- only he's bringing untold misery to the United States and much of the rest of the world, all because he too sees himself as an epochal, world-changing, transformative figure. One would think that, by now, people around the world would have learned to shun all public figures whose desire it is to "bend the historic trajectory." But that is not the case. As surely as the legions of gullible Jews who fell for the hallucinations of Sabbatai Zevi, legions of Americans fell for the equally Napoleonic hallucinations of Barack Obama. Weird self-worshipping charlatans like Zevi and Obama will no doubt be with us until the end of time. We will never rid ourselves of the misery they bring in their wake until we summon the common sense -- collectively -- to tell them all, at the very beginning of their careers: "Go to hell."

[Elan]

Klein quotes one of the liberal historians who attended the dinners as puzzled that Obama had been a great orator in the campaign but a poor communicator as president. The difference is between lyrical promises of hope and change and trying to convince people with triple-digit IQs that you can take over one-sixth of the economy, ram through unpopular legislation, send deficits and debt into the stratosphere, apologize to adversaries while antagonizing allies, refuse to hold press conferences, golf all the time, and think that your only problem is a failure to communicate.

[Yael]

I'm so glad to be back... among friends:)