Obama is a loser at 2013's end: Column

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USATODAY

A lot of people are saying that 2013 was President Obama's worst year. Roll Call headlined, "Subdued Obama Hopes For Better 2014." The Hill reported, "Obama names health care rollout his biggest mistake of dismal year." Most people seem to think it was. But I think it was average, in the manner of the old Soviet joke:

Ivan: So how was your day?

Boris: Average.

Ivan: What do you mean, average?

Boris: Worse than yesterday, better than tomorrow. So, average.

Unless something turns around, Obama's 2013 is likely to be similarly "average": Worse than 2012, but better than 2014.

It's true that Obamacare has been a debacle, wrapped in a catastrophe, shrouded in a disaster. But it's also become clear that it was founded upon a lie: Obama's "if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it" statement was named by PolitiFact its lie of the year for 2013. Many Americans have already learned that their individual plans are being cancelled because they don't live up to Obamacare, causing enough chaos that the Obama administration has had to give certain people a last-minute "waiver" of the mandate that they buy insurance. But many more problems have just been kicked down the road -- into 2014 -- by Obama's unilateral decision. Ironically, the White House and Democrats were, just a couple of months ago, calling Republicans who wanted to delay the mandate anarchists and terrorists, and loudly proclaiming that Obamacare was "the law of the land."

Regardless, the mandate delay doesn't solve problems, it just kicks the can down the road. And, as Bloomberg's Megan McArdle notes, the White House seems to be reacting to short-term political problems, rather than shoring up the system in ways that will make it work better:

However incoherent these fixes may seem, they send two messages, loud and clear. The first is that although liberal pundits may think that the law is a done deal, impossible to repeal, the administration does not believe that. ... This is at best, damage control. Which suggests that the administration is expecting a fair amount of damage.

I think that's right, and the damage will come in 2014. What we've seen so far, most likely, isn't the worst of it.

Then there is the foreign affairs realm, where 2014 also looks to be worse than 2013. The Obamacare debacle did one useful thing for Obama: It drove the Syria debacle off the front pages. But Obama's precipitous decline in the polls didn't start with the Obamacare rollout; he was already slipping from the ineptitude displayed over Syria, where we went from "Syria Must Be Attacked!" to "Never Mind" in the space of three weeks. Obamacare -- and the NSA spying scandals, and the ongoing drip-drip of the IRS and Benghazi scandals -- has only made it worse. Obama is currently less popular than any postwar president except Richard Nixon at this stage in their terms.

Increasingly, Americans see him as a loser. But more importantly, he's perceived by our friends and enemies abroad as weak and preoccupied. The Saudis are livid about our handling of Iran; needless to say, so are the Israelis. The Iranians clearly don't take us seriously, and Vladimir Putin, who outfoxed Obama over Syria, is plainly unimpressed. The combination of distrust by our friends and disrespect from our enemies is a dangerous mix, and comes at an unsettled time that some scholars are comparing to the years before World War I. It's a time when we need better than usual diplomacy, and that does not appear to be in the offing.

All told, it's likely that 2013 won't be Obama's worst year ever. Or, sadly, America's. Happy New Year!

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

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