The Antagonist-In-Chief

In this week's "Health Reform Summit", the President was supposed to be a moderator between the Democrats and Republicans of Congress. In that role, I would think it was his job to build consensus between the two parties so that some kind of common ground on health care reform could be found. But, instead, the American public saw Obama as some kind of petty politician, an antagonist, and not the "leader" who would bring the two sides together.

He would rudely cut off any Republicans if he so much as objected to a single point that they were trying make. As a result, the Democrats got the bulk of the talking time in front of the cameras and the Republicans got the dregs. You could literally see the irritation on Obama's face when the Republicans brought up facts about ObamaCare that he knew would not "not" sit well with the American people. He acted like a king ruling over what he seemed to think was "his" court; using slap-downs as much as possible to channel the direction of the "Summit" in his direction.

To me, Obama showed his lack of management skills. Any, lower tiered manager in business would be better experienced at "team building", establishing synergy, and directing "brainstorming sessions" than was exhibited by the President. The "Summit", itself, showed how partisan he is and how his Democratic colleges have no intention of working with Republicans. It is obvious that the Democrats were intent on using the "Summit" as theater and are still intent on ramming health care through. Being quite familiar with the health care bills in Congress, I saw numerous attempts by Obama to distort the facts about the separate legislation that was passed in each of the Houses. This either showed that Obama was unfamiliar with the details of those bills or that, more than likely, he was intentionally using false facts -- in front of those national cameras -- in an attempt to protect what is very ugly and very bad about either of those bills in Congress.

I think it was a P.R. disaster.