MOSAIC
All the President’s Blunders
by Michael Doran
December 23, 2015

…This conception of Obama as a hesitant man without a clear vision was popular in Washington at the beginning of the president’s second term, but it has steadily given way to a very different view: that the president is large and in charge. An important shift in public perception took place in November 2013 when the journalist Glenn Thrush, writing in Politico, revealed that the president, with the help of a very small coterie of White House aides, was neutering his senior cabinet officials. In Thrush’s reconstruction, the climax of the story took place in August 2013, when the president reversed his decision to bomb Syria without consulting either Secretary of State John Kerry or Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. Over the last two years, countless additional reports have corroborated Thrush’s depiction of a centralized White House. All three of Obama’s former secretaries of defense have testified that he micromanages the bureaucracy on key issues—Syria being primary among them.  READ MORE