From Thursday night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On President Obama’s press conference on Thursday:
It seemed rather odd — a cross between Alexander Haig and Jimmy Carter. Because the first point he emphasized is ‘I’m in charge here,’ which reminded me of Al Haig. When Reagan was shot, he stood up in the White House and said, ‘I’m in charge here.’ Of course he wasn’t. And really, Obama isn’t in charge. I mean in theory he is, but it’s really out of his hands. This is all happening undersea.
And then he went on and said — he gave that anecdote about Malia knocking on his door in the morning and asking if the hole in the ocean had been capped, which reminded me of Jimmy Carter, the famous statement he made in his debate with Reagan in which he said he had spoken with his daughter Amy, at the time age 12, and asked her what was the most important issue to her, and she said nuclear weapons — which earned the president ridicule up to and including Election Day.…
Look, overall, it was an odd press conference. Why would he hold it over an event that’s really out of his control and for which he’s getting a lot of hits? My calculation is perhaps he’s a gambler. He was told that there was a two-thirds chance of this top kill working, and if it works we’ll know in a day or two, and he’s going to look good. And if it doesn’t, he’s getting hit anyway, so why not have a presser on this and say ‘I’m in charge’?
On Obama’s taking a neutral position on the boycotts of Arizona, saying: “I’m the president of the United States, I don’t endorse boycotts. Or not endorse boycotts. That’s something that the private citizens can make a decision about”:
When I heard him say: “I’m the president of the United States, I don’t endorse boycotts,” I thought he’d stop there. And if he had I would have said, why did he say “I’m the president”? He would have said ‘I’m the president of all the United States and I don’t want to see one state, pitted against another, one community boycotting another and conducting economic war on another.’
And that would have harkened to the old Obama, the Obama of 2004 who captured the imagination of a nation when he said: We are not red states, blue states, we’re the United States of America — that transcendent figure he promised us he would be.
Well, that guy was put away a long good time ago.
And Obama then added ‘I also don’t endorse [not boycotting].’ So he said if you want to [boycott], that’s okay.
As president he could honestly have said: I’m against the law, I’ll challenge it in court. The court is where we decide disputes among our communities, not in attacks on each other.