Brother Obama's Traveling Salvation Show

One of the most irritating things about Barack Obama is that he is perfectly willing to excoriate his political opponents for using the same tactics he favors. You may have noticed that he's been traveling across the country this week, using his big plane and his big megaphone, to campaign for gun control. At one stop he said the following:

President Obama criticized the proposed filibuster during a campaign-style event at the University of Hartford in Connecticut about 45 miles from the elementary school where 20 first-graders were shot and killed in December.

“Some back in Washington are already floating the idea that they might use political stunts,” said Obama, who was introduced by Nicole Hockley, whose son, Dylan, was one of the victims. “They’re not just saying they’ll vote ‘no’ on ideas that almost all Americans support. They’re saying they won’t allow any votes on them at all.”

Many in the crowd responded by chanting: “We want a vote.”

So, apparently flying around the country and conducting political rallies of this sort isn't a stunt. The ever-perceptive John Hayward offers the proper response:

How dare these Republicans attempt a political stunt! Don’t they know only Obama is allowed to stage those? Obama’s little dramatic productions come at substantial taxpayer expense, since not only have the President and his immense retinue been flying around the country to hold campaign rallies, but he’s flying eleven family members of the Sandy Hook Elementary School victims back to Washington aboard Air Force One so they can lobby for new gun control laws. With all due respect to these grieving parents, how can that avoid classification as a “stunt?” Shouldn’t this legislation face sober deliberation, and stand on its own legal and logical merits?

Of course not. If sober deliberation is used, the legislation fails, so ginning up emotion is the ticket. It's not surprising, though -- as we've noted countless times before, Obama's genius lies in the stagecraft of the political campaign and not in the give-and-take of negotiations, especially in Washington. All this has been amply documented, of course, and we've seen it repeatedly this year as we lurch from one crisis to the next.

Every president has a bully pulpit and they all use it with varying degrees of success, but at some point a president needs to move beyond this sort of thing. I don't see any evidence that Obama is capable of that.