The buck stops here!
(Harry S. Truman, Desk Sign, Oval Office, 1945-1952)
For ultimately the buck stops with me.
(Barack Hussein Obama, Speech, January 7, 2009)
Starting with "isolated extremist," the president tried five times over several days to say something sensible about the Christmas Day bombing attempt. Last Thursday's speech finally got many things, though not all things, right, including "buck stops with me."
But the restatement of Mr. Truman's slogan reminds us that, for our president, everything is about him.
Mr. Truman's sign succinctly summarizes Article 2 of the Constitution, which assigns executive powers and responsibilities to the U.S. president. And the priniciple stated by that sign is universally true, regardless of the identity of the occupant of the Oval Office. The "buck stops here," meaning the president's desk in the White House. The buck stopped there in 1945, because HST was the president of the United States. Mr. Truman did not say the buck stopped with me; for him, it was the office that mattered, not the occupant.
The famously slippery Mr. Obama deserves credit for taking something resembling responsibility, as he did here. But he did it, predictably, with one of his two favorite words -- me (the other being I) -- and with a grandiloquent, professorial, and unnecessary adverb -- ultimately. Stops is stops. Ultimately stops is a longwinded way of saying stops.
In the big picture, however, what Mr. Obama says doesn't matter all that much. Whether it's his promise to filibuster the intelligence bill, his promise to take federal campaign funds, his promise to open the medical takeover bill to C-Span, his occasional remarks about the unsustainability of the federal debts he is creating, or his redundant claim of responsiblity for stopping the next terrorist attack, it's all words, just words. Even fellow Clever People are beginning to mock and berate him.
What matters is what the president does, and what he is doing, at the moment, is not firing any of the Keystone Kops who work for him.
Here, from Krauthammer, is a good takedown of the president's "mind-numbingly bureaucratic, flat, bloodless" speech.
UPDATE: Thanks for the link from Harris County Almanac.
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