By Victor Davis Hanson, Townhall.com
Administration meltdowns are hardly novel. In almost every
presidency there comes a moment when sheer chaos takes hold, whether
self-induced or as a result of an outside crisis.
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| AP |
Vietnam had effectively destroyed Lyndon Johnson by 1967. Watergate
unraveled the Richard Nixon administration, as the disgraced president
resigned in the face of certain impeachment. Gerald Ford could not whip
inflation and was not re-elected. One-termer Jimmy Carter was undone by
the Iranian hostage crisis and skyrocketing oil prices.
For a time, it seemed that Ronald Reagan's second term might not
survive the Iran-Contra scandal. George H.W. Bush could not be
re-elected after he broke his promise not to raise taxes and Ross Perot
entered the 1992 race. The popular Bill Clinton was impeached over the
Monica Lewinsky affair and limped out of office tainted. The insurgency
in Iraq and the fallout from Hurricane Katrina crashed for good the
once-high poll ratings of George W. Bush.
The Obama administration over the last month has seemed on the verge of one of these presidential meltdowns.
An open mic caught the president promising Russian President Dmitry
Medvedev that he would be more flexible after the election -- as if
Obama might grant concessions that would be unpalatable if known to the
general public before November. That embarrassment followed an earlier
hot-mic put-down of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year.
The president also unwisely attacked the Supreme Court as it
deliberated the constitutionality of Obamacare. He needlessly referred
to the justices as "unelected" and wrongly claimed that that they had
little precedent to overturn laws that dealt with commerce. The gaffe
about the court and its history was doubly embarrassing because Obama
has often reminded the public that he used to teach constitutional law.
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