{"id":7783,"date":"2010-11-16T17:27:46","date_gmt":"2010-11-16T22:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=7783"},"modified":"2010-11-16T17:28:12","modified_gmt":"2010-11-16T22:28:12","slug":"obama-air-guitarist-in-chief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/7783\/obama-air-guitarist-in-chief\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama: Air Guitarist in Chief"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every so often, someone captures the proverbial lightning in a bottle.\u00a0 Today, it was Wall Street Journal<\/em> columnist Bret Stephens and his commentary<\/a> entitled “Obama’s Air Guitar.” Stephens’s weekly commentaries are always a must-read, but today’s perfectly portrays the growing sense among the American electorate, more sober observers and now world leaders that Barack Obama is simply in over his head:<\/p>\n

His administration has now been chastised or belittled by everyone from the Supreme Leader of Iran to the finance minister of Germany to the president of France to the dictator of Syria.\u00a0 What does it mean for global order when the world figures out that the U.S. president is someone who’s willing to take no for an answer?\u00a0 The answer is that the United States becomes Europe.\u00a0 Except on a handful of topics, like trade and foreign aid, the foreign policy of the European Union, and that of most of its constituent states, amounts to a kind of diplomatic air guitar: furious motion, considerable imagination, but neither sound nor effect.\u00a0 When a European leader issues a stern demarche toward, say, Burma or Russia, nobody notices. And nobody cares.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since he first began flirting with a White House campaign, Obama has long created the impression that he considers the presidency a video game, or a pickup game of hoops with himself at point guard taking a three-pointer on every possession.\u00a0 But now we have a description that perhaps captures the Age of Obama better than any other to date:\u00a0 Obama as air guitarist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every so often, someone captures the proverbial lightning in a bottle.\u00a0 Today, it was Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens and his commentary entitled “Obama’s Air Guitar.” Stephens’s weekly commentaries are always a must-read, but today’s perfectly portrays the growing sense among the American electorate, more sober observers and now world leaders that Barack Obama […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,2095,24,2096,14,28],"class_list":["post-7783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-barack-obama","tag-bret-stephens","tag-obama","tag-obamas-air-guitar","tag-president-obama","tag-tea-party"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7783"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7786,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7783\/revisions\/7786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}