Chip Bok's Bokbluster

The NYT has called President Obama the bystander president because he’s deluged by events that seem to have nothing to do with him – unless they’re good. Like the U.S. oil boom which he fought against tooth and nail and now takes credit for.

Here’s a Dana Milbank Washington Post column pondering the problem.

Bystander Protector

Obama is fond of Czars. Could Valerie Jarrett be his protective Rasputin? John Fund thinks so. He quotes her appraisal of the president:

“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Says Fund, “As a court flatterer of that caliber it’s no surprise that Jarrett has outlasted almost everyone who was in Obama’s original White House team”