If you haven't read Michael Lewis' profile of President Barack Obama just released in Vanity Fair, you must. It's oddly, perfectly timely right now, focusing on Obama's decision to intervene in Libya to prevent a massacre. From the piece:
The other aspect of his job I have trouble getting comfortable with is its bizarre emotional demands. In the span of a few hours, a president will go from celebrating the Super Bowl champions to running meetings on how to fix the financial system, to watching people on TV make up stuff about him, to listening to members of Congress explain why they can’t support a reasonable idea simply because he, the president, is for it, to sitting down with the parents of a young soldier recently killed in action.
Can you imagine Mitt Romney handling anything like a day resembling this one?
One more quote, again from Vanity Fair:
On March 15 the president had a typically full schedule. Already he’d met with his national-security advisers, given a series of TV interviews on the No Child Left Behind law, lunched with his vice president, celebrated the winners of an Intel high-school science competition, and spent a good chunk of time alone in the Oval Office with a child suffering from an incurable disease, whose final wish had been to meet the president.... Twenty-five minutes after he’d given the world his March Madness (basketball) tournament picks Obama walked down to the Situation Room. He’d been there just the day before, to hold his first meeting to discuss how to kill Osama bin Laden.
Two days in the life of an American President.
I see this today, thinking of how Mitt Romney has behaved, and I think, in no way is this man qualified to be President.
The other big thing about the profile: it's about Obama deciding to intervene in Libya in March of 2011. It was the Arab Spring. Libya was in an uproar, trying to overturn a long-time dictator, Muammar Qaddafi.
Qaddafi would not go easily. He had an army of his own marching toward Benghazi swearing he was going to massacre its people. As Vanity Fair tells the story, Obama's own people did not want to intervene. There was no political upside and a big potential downside.
But a dictator was going to massacre his own people, and Obama had the capacity to stop it without committing a ton of American resources or getting involved long-term. He called allies to see if they'd step in afterward and take charge, and then he sent American bombers to stop Qaddafi. (People were outraged first that he'd done nothing and almost immediately turned on a dime and were outraged that he had done something.)
It worked except for one thing: an American plane shot down, the pilot safe but his navigator landing in Libya, lost for a time. Libyans find him, call someone who knows someone in the US diplomatic corps, who can call someone to come get him. They take the pilot to a hotel, protect him, find him a doctor and before turning him over safe to the Americans, the pilot is stunned to find women from all over the city bringing him flowers and Libyans giving him a round of applause.
“I’m not sure what I was expecting in Libya,” the American airman says, “but I was not expecting a round of applause.”
This is what happened as US Ambassador Chris Stevens was sent to Libya. This is why Libyans cheered and brought flowers to the US airman who bombed their own country. It's why Libyans stand outside and show homemade signs to Americans today saying Chris Stevens was their friend.
It's this climate that President Obama has created in Libya -- still unstable, but headed toward being a strong friend to the US.
It's this that Mitt Romney fumbled so carelessly, so stupidly into in the last 24 hours and fucked up so dickishly.
No way in hell is this man ready to be President.
(Please see this excellent video of Chris Stevens introducing himself to the people of Libya. And this excellent diary of what it felt like todayto, I assume, work at the State Department)