Archive for Thursday, July 8, 2010
Photo by Matt Stensland
The Strings Music Pavilion was packed Thursday night as people listened to The New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger speak to kick off the Seminars at Steamboat lecture series.
Sanger reflects on Obama administration
New York Times correspondent discusses president’s first 18 months
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New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger speaks Thursday night during the first Seminars at Steamboat event of the summer at the Strings Music Pavilion.
Seminars at Steamboat
All seminars are at 5 p.m. at Strings Music Pavilion, and all are free. Learn more at www.seminarsatsteamboat.com.
■ July 22: Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board: Can We Make the Government and the Economy Work for Us?
■ Aug. 5: Paul Peterson, professor of government at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University: Saving the American School
■ Aug. 12: Joseph Nye, professor of international relations and former dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard University: Smart Power — America’s Global Position
Steamboat Springs — Steamboat Springs resident Karen Schulman had extra motivation to go see The New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger speak at the Seminars at Steamboat lecture series Thursday. Schulman called the Times on Tuesday and confirmed that she had been Sanger’s fifth-grade teacher.
“I was the student tonight,” she said after the lecture. “I learned so much.”
Sanger addressed a full house at the Strings Music Pavilion about the state of President Barack Obama’s administration and the challenges the president now faces. He offered the first in a series of four summer lectures in Steamboat on public policy.
“I have to approach the mission tonight with some humility,” Sanger said in prefacing his analysis of the first 18 months of the Obama administration. “We are only beginning to learn what Obama’s presidency is all about.”
Sanger’s book, “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power,” recently was updated to include a discussion of Obama’s first year in office. Bob Stein, the Seminars at Steamboat board member who introduced the speaker, said Sanger was about to deliver an “update of the update.”
“We’re really pleased to have him as our first speaker,” Stein said.
In his presentation, Sanger discussed what he called the “curious crossroads” the current administration faces as it navigates pressing issues such as the ongoing war in Afghanistan, the fragile economy and the state of America’s influence in the world. He also talked about the challenges Obama inherited from the Bush administration, as well as the effects of the decisions Obama has made during his first 18 months.
“When President Obama took office in January ’09, I think it’s fair to say he inherited the biggest array of problems since Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933,” Sanger said.
Sanger spent much of the speech discussing the current state of the economy, focusing on the relationship between stimulus spending and deficits. He said the administration doesn’t want to run big deficits but also doesn’t want to see a higher unemployment rate.
“It’s fair to say the Obama administration hasn’t figured this out yet,” he said. “They know that the only thing worse than big deficits is higher unemployment.”
Sanger discussed other challenges the administration has faced in its first 18 months, including the increase of nuclear centrifuges in Iran.
“We have two clocks ticking at different paces,” he said. “We have an American clock ticking to see if sanctions against Iran will work, and an Israeli clock that is ticking faster. There is a point they cannot define in which they couldn’t allow Iranians to go.”
Sanger said the nuclear situation in Iran and the war in Afghanistan would continue to be issues with great consequences for the administration.
Although Sanger said the Obama administration faces many challenges, he is certain that there is plenty of time for the president’s legacy to change. He noted the administration’s troop reduction in Iraq, the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the ongoing BP oil leak as events that continue to change the appearance of Obama’s presidency.
Steamboat resident Jim Kurowski, who has come to the lecture series for several years, said he enjoyed the speech.
“It was a very Washington perspective,” he said. “It was very helpful and informative.”
Comments
CarrieRequist (Carrie Requist) says...
Just want to thank the folks at Seminars at Steamboat for bringing such interesting speakers.
July 8, 2010 at 11:05 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
Truculent (anonymous) says...
“When President Obama took office in January ’09, I think it’s fair to say he inherited the biggest array of problems since Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933,” Sanger said.
I'd also argue he has the smallest skill set since Jimmy Carter.
July 9, 2010 at 9:21 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
jonquinn (Jon Quinn) says...
Truculent - Would you seriously argue that W had a better skillset than Obama?? You must be kidding me. Now O has not gotten everything right, I'll agree to that. Sometimes I think he picked up the shovel W left him and kept digging. But at least O has a brain.
July 9, 2010 at 12:27 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
jonquinn (Jon Quinn) says...
Truculent - Would you seriously argue that W had a better skillset than Obama?? You must be kidding me. Now O has not gotten everything right, I'll agree to that. Sometimes I think he picked up the shovel W left him and kept digging. But at least O has a brain.
July 9, 2010 at 12:27 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
yampavalleyboy (anonymous) says...
1 of 4 posts:
Howdy all, I can't stand it... I must post a "REAL ARTICLE" about Obama. Enjoy!
"Wall Street Journal Sizes up Obama" - They've Got Him Figured Out
From the Wall Street Journal, which today is the most widely circulated newspaper in America .
by Eddie Sessions:
"I have this theory about Barack Obama. I think he's led a kind of make-believe life in which money was provided and doors were opened because at some point early on somebody or some group took a look at this tall, good looking, half-white, half-black, young man with an exotic African/Muslim name and concluded he could be guided toward a life in politics where his facile speaking skills could even put him in the White House.
In a very real way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who else do you know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? "Dreams of My Father" was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The "Audacity of Hope" followed in 2006. If, indeed, he did write them himself. There are some who think that his mentor and friend, Bill Ayers, a man who calls himself a "communist with a small 'c'" was the real author.
His political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might be deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois legislature to the Senator from that state because he had the good fortune of having Mayor Daley's formidable political machine at his disposal.
He was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for the presidency was either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater game plan that had been determined before he first stepped foot in the Capital. How, many must wonder, was he selected to be a 2004 keynote speaker at the Democrat convention that nominated John Kerry when virtually no one had ever even heard of him before?
He outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black population, he oozed "cool" in a place where agriculture was the antithesis of cool. He dazzled the locals. And he had an army of volunteers drawn to a charisma that hid any real substance.
And then he had the great good fortune of having the Republicans select one of the most inept candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole. And then John McCain did something crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown female governor from the very distant state of Alaska . It was a ticket that was reminiscent of 1984's Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and they went down to defeat.
The mainstream political media fell in love with him. It was a schoolgirl crush with febrile commentators like Chris Mathews swooning then and now over the man. The venom directed against McCain and, in particular, Palin, was extraordinary.
Go to part 2 of this post
July 9, 2010 at 12:27 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
yampavalleyboy (anonymous) says...
2 of 4
Now, nearly a full year into his first term, all of those gilded years leading up to the White House have left him unprepared to be President. Left to his own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the briefest of statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters.
Far worse, however, is his capacity to want to "wish away" some terrible realities, not the least of which is the Islamist intention to destroy America and enslave the West. Any student of history knows how swiftly Islam initially spread. It knocked on the doors of Europe, having gained a foothold in Spain .
The great crowds that greeted him at home or on his campaign "world tour" were no substitute for having even the slightest grasp of history and the reality of a world filled with really bad people with really bad intentions.
Oddly and perhaps even inevitably, his political experience, a cakewalk, has positioned him to destroy the Democrat Party's hold on power in Congress because in the end it was never about the Party. It was always about his communist ideology, learned at an early age from family, mentors, college professors, and extreme leftist friends and colleagues.
go to part 3 of this post
July 9, 2010 at 12:30 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
yampavalleyboy (anonymous) says...
part 3 of 4 posts
Obama is a man who could deliver a snap judgment about a Boston police officer who arrested an "obstreperous" Harvard professor-friend, but would warn Americans against "jumping to conclusions" about a mass murderer at Fort Hood who shouted "Allahu Akbar." The absurdity of that was lost on no one. He has since compounded this by calling the Christmas bomber "an isolated extremist" only to have to admit a day or two later that he was part of an al Qaeda plot.
He is a man who could strive to close down our detention facility at Guantanamo even though those released were known to have returned to the battlefield against America . He could even instruct his Attorney General to afford the perpetrator of 9/11 a civil trial when no one else would ever even consider such an obscenity. And he is a man who could wait three days before having anything to say about the perpetrator of yet another terrorist attack on Americans and then have to elaborate on his remarks the following day because his first statement was so lame.
The pattern repeats itself. He either blames any problem on the Bush administration or he naively seeks to wish away the truth.
go to part 4 of this post
July 9, 2010 at 12:31 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
yampavalleyboy (anonymous) says...
part 4 and final part:
Knock, knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as the sock puppet of his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and manufactured this pathetic individual's life.
When anyone else would quickly and easily produce a birth certificate, this man has spent over a million dollars to deny access to his. Most other documents, the paper trail we all leave in our wake, have been sequestered from review. He has lived a make-believe life whose true facts remain hidden.
We laugh at the ventriloquist's dummy, but what do you do when the dummy is President of the United States of America ?"
Yampavalleyboy asks...when will "We" stop being the dummies? Come on November 2012 !
July 9, 2010 at 12:35 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
addlip2U (anonymous) says...
This series will lose credibility if the moderator (interject his own interpretation) and continues to censor the questions of their "lefty" friends.
While I can fully understand the desire to put an end to "speeches" during the Q&A, the failure to be able to ask the tough questions is not a prudent decision.
Surely someone must have presented a question for David Sanger regarding the obvious comparison of Obama with Jimmy Carter.
July 9, 2010 at 2:35 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
TWill (anonymous) says...
Hey Quinn-
We didn't vote for you to fill a local city council seat for you to pontificate the national political scene.
Shut up and get back to work!
July 9, 2010 at 3:48 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
seeuski (anonymous) says...
I voted for J Quinn. I fell for it just like many who fell for Obama's shtick.
July 9, 2010 at 4:34 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
Truculent (anonymous) says...
Blaming the guy before you and railing over the past is one of the sure ways to get nothing done and go down in history as a failure. If W wasn't the best guy for the job, fine. But O needs to start acting like a leader or get out of the way. Actually getting out of the way would probably serve us best. If I get anymore hope and change...well, I hope things will change and I'll still have a job. I'm glad to see we have the most transparent, honest and ethical administration and congress ever!
July 9, 2010 at 11:33 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
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