Looking back, it defies all logic that Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. How did a man with such a flimsy resume, with so many questions about his past, and — most of all — a man with no real management skills or experience, get elected to the world’s most demanding management job?
A topflight scholar? Although he refused to release transcripts of his grades at Columbia, all indications are his grade were mediocre — a 2.6 GPA according to one source — and his SAT scores were somewhere around 1,100 (the “dumb” George W. Bush earned a 1,206). As president of the Harvard Law Review he never once published a scholarly paper.
A sterling character? He was friends with a still-unrepentant terrorist, Bill Ayers, who co-founded the Weather Underground, which bombed several buildings in the 1960s – 1970s, including the Pentagon, to protest the Vietnam War. Obama also belonged to a church whose pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, preached inflammatory anti-American sermons, and once preached, “God Damn America!” Imagine a white candidate for president having close ties to a known terrorist, or to a white supremacist preacher spouting racial epithets.
A first-rate intellect? It’s amazing how many gaffes he has uttered, including, during his first presidential campaign, “I have now been in 57 states — have one to go.” But my favorite is the analogy he used to argue for his government-run healthcare, Obamacare. “UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right?” he said. “It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.” UPS and FedEx are privately run companies. It’s the Post Office that’s government-run.
An impressive job resume? After a stint as a “community organizer,” he was elected to the Illinois Senate, where he voted “Present,” rather than “Yea” or “Nay,” nearly 130 times. He was then elected to the U.S. Senate, where he spent more time plotting his campaign for president than he did serving his Illinois constituents. More to the point, he never worked in the private sector, meaning he never ran a business, never met a payroll, never worried about operational efficiency or innovation. In short, prior to his election as president, he never assumed responsibility for anything — he never actually managed anything — other than his many election campaigns. This is the man we thought could manage the world’s largest economy and our national security?
The scholar Norman Podhoretz believes Obama’s election is the result of an “affirmative action” mindset, in which he was held to a different standard based on his race. If so, perhaps a review of our faith in affirmative-action is overdue. A recent Gallup poll has Obama’s approval rating at 38 percent, and a recent CNN Poll shows Romney beating Obama in a re-election rematch 53 – 44 percent.
