Copyright John T. Reed 2013

Barack Obama has not only lost his mojo, he has lost far more. I am reminded of a line from Arthur Miller’s Play Death of a Salesman about salesman Willy Lohman:

You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple spots on your hat and you’re finished.

There appears to be a good chance that the Democrats will lose the Senate in November, and not regain the House. And the noise coming out of the Chicago politics Oval Office mouths of SOBs like John Podesta is, in effect, “To hell with Congress and the polls! We’ll just do everything by regulation and executive order!”

Transactions versus relationships

Obama has never understood the difference between a transaction and a relationship. If you stop at a Denny’s on the Interstate in Kansas during a cross-country drive, and they screw up your sandwich, you complain. That’s a transaction.

A relationship is what you have with your co-workers or your spouse. You must always keep the big picture in mind in a relationship. It’s like a three-legged race. You cannot disregard your partner and do your own thing.

The coxswain thinks he’s a passenger

The proper role of president is also like that of the coxswain in an 8-man-boat rowing competition. Obama acts like he is the sole passenger in a gondola, and he’s pissed that the boat isn’t moving fast enough or gondoleer singing well enough.

Obama sees election day 2012 was his stop at the Kansas Denny’s where he got $20 too much change and now he’s in North Carolina and he ain’t giving the money back. “I won,” he’s fond of saying—after both elections. He also “won” getting Obamacare enacted by the skin of its budget-reconciliation-majority teeth. “It’s the law of the land.”

The president of the United States has a relationship with the people of the United States of America, and with the Congress. It says so right there in the Constitution he has sworn to uphold. But he acts like all he had to do was get elected on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November 2008 and 2012 and that’s it. Everyone in Congress and the country must henceforth do what he says. He won. Debate over. “You must respect my authoritah.”

The conventional wisdom is it is impossible to impeach Obama because the Democrats have the Senate and politicians of both parties are afraid to use the “I” word. If the Democrats get “shellacked” on election day 2014, and appear to be headed for another “shellacking” in 2016 and Obama is executive ordering and regulating with total disregard to the Constitution, the law, the Congress, and the polls, the first black president could also be the first president to be impeached AND convicted. When a rowing team wins, the traditionally throw the coxswain in the river. When the Democrat team loses—BIG—they may throw their coxswain somewhere else—like under the bus.

America’s national presidential election was not a one-off transaction. Obama remaining in office until Inauguration Day 2017, no matter how he behaves, is not “the law of the land.”

John T. Reed