Darryl PaulsonDemocrats love Harry Truman, the president of the common man, and his “the buck stops here” philosophy. He took personal responsibility for what happened during his tenure.
Fifty years later, Democrats have another president, Barack Obama, whose philosophy is apparently “I never saw the buck. It wasn’t until several days later, when I read about it in the New York Times, that I realized the buck crossed my desk.”
On one issue after another, all of which have created problems for the president and fellow Democrats, his standard response is “I didn’t know.” Doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence that the administration knows what is happening.
On the “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, Mika Brzezinski hosted a segment called “Implausible Deniability,” describing all of the issues where the president was “out-of-the-loop.”
When asked about “Fast and Furious,” the federal program where undercover agents turned over rifles to drug runners that were then used to kill federal agents, Obama responded that he learned about the program from media sources.
When asked about the disastrous roll-out of Obamacare, Secretary of Health and Human Services Katherine Sebelius said that the president was not informed there were problems until two or three days after the site was launched.
When asked by the media when the president learned that the Internal Revenue Service was investigating conservative political organizations, especially those associated with the Tea Party, Press Secretary Jay Carney responded that the president found out about it from media representatives.
When asked when the president learned about the Justice Department subpoenaing the phone logs and notes of Associated Press reporters during the conduct of a leak investigation, Carney again responded that the president knew nothing about it until informed by the media.
These responses from Carney have happened so often that The New Yorker ran a cartoon with Carney giving a press briefing and saying, “Nobody hopes that the president didn’t know anything about this more than he does.”
In the past two weeks, two new issues have emerged which raise questions about how much the president knows what is happening in his own administration.
The discovery that the National Security Agency was spying on as many as 30 heads-of-state, including Angela Merkel of Germany, once again resulted in the president saying he had no knowledge that the spying was taking place.
Finally, the horrendous roll-out of Obamacare created a unique problem for the president. This time he actually knew what was happening. He just forgot to inform the American public.
According to Lisa Myers of NBC News, Obama knew several years ago that at least 14 million Americans would lose their private insurance and then face “sticker shock” when forced to buy policies on the exchanges. As one blogger succinctly put it, “Obama lied, my health plan died.”
Despite repeated assurances from the president that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” and “if you like your doctors, you can keep them,” millions of Americans are finding out this is not true.
Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, hardly known as a bastion of conservatism, gave Obama a “4 Pinocchio” rating in his Fact-Checker column for deceiving the American public.
Jay Leno said the president merely played “trick or treat” with the American public. Obama “tricked” us into believing that the government would provide fair “treatment” under Obamacare.
Forty years ago during the Senate Watergate hearings, Sen. Howard Baker asked the pivotal question: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”
The answer to Baker’s question for Obama is that the president knew nothing and, what he did learn, was not until several days after the problem emerged.
President Obama often jokes about his big ears. Perhaps he should worry more about his nose. It is big and getting bigger with each passing day.
