R. EMMETT TYRRELL: Obama’s lack of achievement

OPINION:

This week I am filing a world exclusive. Remember you read it here first.

For years I have maintained a team of investigators sedulously trailing our president. They have studied pictures of him. They have inquired of photographers and camera crews who employ both still and video cameras to cover the president. My investigators have interviewed White House journalists, occasionally White House employees, and, of course, White House visitors even tourists. All have been asked the same question: “Have you ever seen the president’s shadow?”

Every interviewee who would answer the question has confirmed my suspicion. They have not seen President Barack Obama’s shadow. The reason for this curious phenomenon is that he casts no shadow. Despite all the power at his command he roams the world leaving no shadow. The sun may shine down upon him. A wall of floodlights may illuminate him. Yet beyond his neat and well-tailored physique he leaves no shadow, no silhouette, nothing. Zilch, as they say. He is that insubstantial. He is a community organizer. He is not a president.

Gertrude Stein is famous for saying “There is no there there.” Well, with Mr. Obama things get worse. There is no shadow there. Our 44th president will go down in history as the first American president who left the White House leaving nothing but a vast diapasonal sigh of relief across the nation. Even some of his supporters will be relieved when he is gone.

Oh there will be wreckage. Our healthcare system, once the ideal of the world, is in ruins. Fragments of legislation clutter the landscape such as Dodd-Frank. The national debt was dangerously high when he entered office; now it has more than doubled — if not tripled, according to Rand Paul. Yet nothing substantial or constructive has been achieved. A year after President Obama vacates the White House almost any Republican president working with the Republican Congress will have cleaned up the mess — except for the debt. That will take longer. In foreign policy things may be even worse. A nuclear Iran will have to be dealt with. When the President without a shadow leaves office after withdrawing American power from every corner of the world, Americans will see how dangerous a community activist can be in the White House.

So the President will leave wreckage, but he is not going to leave a shadow. He has not got one.

Now reportedly he has been trying to sabotage Hillary Rodham Clinton’s run for the presidency. He has sent Valerie Jarrett out to leak damaging information about her. Hillary apparently sent and received classified information on her personal server whose backup was a toilet in Colorado. She committed various misdemeanors and felonies. Well, Mr. Shadowless President, you have got to do better than that with a slippery lady like Hillary.

President Obama seems to realize this, and so last week he came up with a candidate of his own, Vice President Joe Biden. At a press conference the President’s spokesman, the amusingly named Josh Earnest, was asked about the spreading rumors that Mr. Biden was going to enter the race. Mr. Earnest’s response was: “The president has indicated that his view that decision that he made, I guess seven years ago now, to add Joe Biden to the ticket as his running mate was the smartest decision that he has ever made in politics [italics added]. And I think that should give you some sense into the president’s view into Vice President’s aptitude for the top job [italics added once again].”

Asked further by reporter Jonathan Karl if the “President would support Vice President Biden if he were to run? And this is obviously, you know, a better decision than the secretary of state that he chose [Hillary].” Earnest answered: “Yeah, it was.” No italics necessary.

Now with her polls sinking across the nation, and voters indicating to the Quinnipiac poll that they associate her name with words such as “dishonest,” “liar,” and “untrustworthy,” this is about the best news Hillary has had in months. President Obama, the president who casts no shadow, is endorsing Joe Biden to be his successor. Nothing to worry about with a Biden candidacy, right Hillary? Now all Mrs. Clinton has to worry about is Donald Trump and a dozen or so other Republican candidates. For Hillary things are looking up.

But remember you first read it here. President Obama casts no shadow!

• R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is editor-in-chief of The American Spectator. He is author of “The Death of Liberalism,” published by Thomas Nelson Inc.