Incompetence
So, Peggy Noonan just started to perceive this a few weeks ago?
I would add that in recent weeks I have begun to worry about the basic competency of the administration, its ability to perform the most fundamental duties of executive management.
Maybe Noonan’s time lag in noticing is because she’s a nice person. At least, I’ve always gotten the impression that she’s a nice person, and nice people often don’t like to think ill of others. Especially others they once thought highly of, and Peggy was an Obama fan once, not so very long ago.
But actually, the fact that Obama and company lack management skills has been obvious for a long, long time. And before you say “But neo, you’ve always said yourself that he was smart,” let me just point out that “smart” and “competent” are not the same things. Nor are management skills.
I’ve long said that Obama has basic intelligence of the sort that probably did allow him to get good grades when he finally decided to apply himself, which probably had happened by the time he was at Harvard Law School. He’s also very smart (and probably even a good manager) about politics and especially about campaigns, as are the advisors he chose for that purpose. How else could he have won the election of 2012 (and for those of you who think he cheated to win, that would come under the heading of “smart about politics” too)? But it was clear even in 2008 that he had virtually no executive experience except for running his campaigns, which meant that even things he wanted to get right as president—and I think we can safely assume that the Obamacare website was one of them—would be at risk for poor management.
As president Obama has hired a great many political operatives who are untried and untested in other arenas, which has meant that this tendency of his towards poor management has been greatly multiplied. Appointing people with more experience and wider knowledge of the world would have avoided the problem, but it would also have meant some of those people might have criticized Obama or crossed him or showed him up, and he couldn’t have that.
Along with Noonan, I have to say that no president in my lifetime has ever struck me as incompetent in this same sense. Some were more competent than others, of course. Some I liked and some I didn’t, some I agreed with and some I disagreed with, but I never questioned their basic competence to run things This time I do, and it’s not just Obama—it’s the whole lot of them. Of course, it doesn’t take much competence to muck things up royally.
It’s all about affirmative action. No white guy with Obama’s lack of experience and accomplishment would have been nominated much less elected. Most conservatives and some liberals knew this and looked the other way like Peggy Noonan and Ann Althouse. So far, it has not got us in a war, but many Americans have suffered in his economy, and all Americans will suffer to some extent from his attack on the health insurance sector.
“Maybe Noonan’s time lag in noticing is because she’s a nice person….and nice people often don’t like to think ill of others.”,/em>
Funny, Noonan had no problem eviscerating Sarah Palin.
Funnier still that Palin had an accurate reading of Obama’s competence back in 2008. Caribou Barbie was 5 years ahead of you , Peggy.
This Obama video clip speaks for itself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1s6ld271Dk
Incompetent and inept.
Peggy Noonan, like so many of the DC insiders, couldn’t comprehend the meaning of Obama’s long standing association with the Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers. It was and is a form of willful blindness. Now she’s surprised?
Slightly off topic, but Kevin Drum at Mother Jones is claiming lots of ObamaCare successes.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/12/surprise-lots-people-are-saving-money-thanks-obamacare
After reading them they sound like the ads that appear in the comments section of lots of websites. “You can earn $8000 a month in your spare time at home…”.
I’m not so sure Peggy is necessarily a nice person who doesn’t think ill of others. It could be she simply has to act nice and say nice things because she needs to swim in the same waters as do the liberals, and she wouldn’t be allowed in if she were to always express just what she thinks when she wants to. She needs to bide her time until the right moment; in this case, that has meant waiting until many liberals are seeing the light with regard to Obama’s incompetence.
Lizzy, solid hit there.
Obama is smart in the same way that Smeagol was smart and so could easily morph into Gollum. Smart as in cunning, clever, calculating. (The three “c’s” were accidental.)
As the ring chose Smeagol, so- if there is an effervescent evil with super intelligence orchestrating the empire-the presidency came to Obama.
Early this morning (before I read Noonan’s piece, I promise!) I was musing on the many different aspects of federal government incompetency that have recently been revealed, in particular related to security.
I started making a list.
First, of course, there’s Obamacare. You could spend days listing the various incompetencies related to that debacle from Congress passing the bill without reading it in the first place through all the failures since then by the White House, HHS, the website contractors and all the rest. And it’s not limited to the feds — the states have messed up royally too. Connecticut’s website listed the wrong info for every policy on the site for a month. The State of Washington’s exchange could be worse than the federal one — find the Facebook page for “Washington Healthplanfinder” and start reading comments from frustrated would-be insurance buyers. And more and more, of course. But beyond health care reform —
— the Navy Yard shooter somehow got federal security clearance admitting him to the facility despite a highly checkered career and recent manifestations of mental illness that were known to the Navy.
–Snowden somehow was given or stole clearances and passwords giving him access to an overwhelming amount of confidential material as a brand new employee who’d worked for a private contractor for something like a month.
— Yesterday’s news told the story of John C. Beale, a top EPA official who has spent the last 10 years getting time off from work — a total of 2 1/2 years and almost $1 million in unearned salary — by pretending that he worked for the CIA, while supervisor after supervisor accepted the story without ever thinking to check whether the story was true or complain about all the absences.
–the Secret Service allowed a schizophrenic with a history of involvement in two people’s deaths to share a podium with the President in South Africa — and that came after a couple of prostitution scandals involving this once-irreproachable (or so we thought) agency.
Please add to my list if you can — I know there’s more. I’m not talking about corruption, I’m talking about a seeming cascade of examples of previously unimagined government incompetence piling up all of a sudden in the last year or so — and in all fairness, not all of it can be laid at Obama’s door, though I’d love to. What the heck is going on?
Just adding to my comment above, it’s not that government used to be competent and all of a sudden it’s not — it’s that there isn’t usually so much proof of undeniable incompetence at all levels of government, hitting the news all at once.
Recent weeks?
Bear in mind that Peggy Noonan was a speechwriter for President Reagan, who is remembered for his “Government is the problem” quote.
Peggy Noonan is just finding out that the “Government is the solution” crowd were selling us a pig in a poke?
Regarding finding out about the competence of an Obama-led administration, I recall the rubric I composed before the 2008 election. For those who had been US Senators and had been elected President, I composed the following rubric:
1) Armed Forces experience
2) Governor experience
3) House of Representatives experience
4) Cabinet secretary experience
5) Vice President experience.
Of those with US Senator experience who became President, only President Harding had NONE OF THE ABOVE experience. NONE OF THE ABOVE experience also describes President Obama. And President Harding at least had some executive experience- he ran a newspaper for a dozen years.
Why would ANYONE be surprised that someone with such a lack of executive experience and high government experience would run an incompetent administration?
But Peggy Noonan just found out about in the past few weeks. Congratulations.
I am sorry, but Dear Peggy and the other so-called conservative coterie of pundits lost me in 2008, when they went down on their knees, cooing about the Obamster. No, he wouldn’t have gotten any farther in his political career than serving a couple of lackluster terms in the House of Reps, if he had not been so exotic – Kenyan and white, raised in Indonesia, for pete’s sake! So cool, so exotic, so handsome and well-spoken! They fell in love, like a bunch of teenagers reading an article about the Beatles in Tiger Beat in 1964.
So, yay – she has figured out what I knew in 2008. Thanks, Peggy – can I have your paycheck? It’s not like you’ve been really doing anything to earn it in the last eight years.
The national media foisted this empty shirt on us. For that dereliction of duty I would see them all broke, dressed in sackcloth and adorned with ashes.
I put more credibility in commenters like Stephen den Beste and Wretchard at Belmont Club – and on Neo, among others.
I agree that Obama’s smart. I don’t think there was a single POTUS who wasn’t. For that matter I suspect we have had only smart governors.
However, smart does not equate to being good at leadership, it is necessary (to some extent) but not sufficient. Generally a certain maturity is more important then being smart. What some call emotional IQ.
Dear Peggy: Well, Duuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh…!!!
What planet have you been inhabiting, dear?
Don, Obama’s problem is that he is lazy. He has used his smarts, his color,and his background to wow people so that they won’t see how incredibly superficial he is. He has never worked to acquire deeper knowlege or understanding of problems. He has never questioned the whacko ideas taught by his mother. Why should he? He is cool.
Name a bigger business or government screwup than Obamacare.
I can’t.
The Left would probably cite Vietnam, 9-11 and Iraq. War is entirely different.
And we won in Europe for WW2 in the same time for the Obamacare rollout.
neo,
one reason the he’s incompetent” meme is catching on is that LEFTISTS want to be able to explain away the INEVITABLE failure of the policies as being the result of OBAMA’S incompetence and not of socialism itself.
This is what gets me about the “smart set”, the good good communicators, whose judgement is off, like Althouse and Noonan, who couldn’t see through this fraud. Good communications, such as writing, seems to be the base indication of intelligence, and I have come to highly doubt it. It just seems to indicate good communications, and maybe not much else.
Good one Lizzy. Peggy is cut from the same cloth as McCain and Boner who have no problem with harsh and belittling criticism for conservatives. Nice is conditional.
It was obvious to anyone who actually listened to Obama what he stood for, and there was no indication anywhere he had ever worked at anything in his life except self-promotion and spreading bullshit wherever he went. Nothing about him was a secret for anyone who was willing to take him at his word -even when he clearly stated he was going to transform America, it was brushed off by people like her and Krauthammer (as mentioned earlier).
Whatever the motivation or reason for taking 5 years to come to this epiphany, it ought to shine a light on her own incompetence as a political pundit.
You write “I’ve long said that Obama has basic intelligence of the sort that probably did allow him to get good grades when he finally decided to apply himself, which probably had happened by the time he was at Harvard Law School.”
Oh, really? What were his grades from Harvard? What papers did he publish while president of the Harvard Law Review?
I was under the impression that they were a couple of the few super-top-secrets that even Ed Snowden was unable to ferret out. I’ve never seen anything that he has written (since I didn’t bother to read his so-called “books”).
We know he was a stoner at Punahou; but everything after that has been erased from history.
Noonan is too nice? I expect talking heads to be critical thinkers, at least on the center right side of the house.
My main question when pondering Noonan is whether she is a fool or a knave.
Noonan and others are blind. Maybe she will wake up, or maybe not.
Blind as well is Chris matthews. Chris Matthews heard Obama speak and claimed that he felt a tingling sensation running down his leg. Chris confused that sensation with infatuation for America’s first black President.
Conservatives on the other hand look at facts. Conservatives knew the truth about that tingling sensation – we knew it was Obama pissing down our back side.
Which just goes to show; piss on liberals, as long as you are an ethnic minority or a liberal such as “I did not have sex with that woman” Clinton you can pee away all day long and they won’t say boo.
(Just don’t be a Republican who says things like “Ma’am” or look at them “wrong” that will get their knickers in a bunch so much that they scream about evil wrongs.)
It wasn’t his intelligence that prompted the Chicago machine to replace an experienced black woman with someone THEY thought they could sell to the gullible public.
His ability to read a teleprompter well (most of the time) isn’t not a sufficient guide for intelligence, in my book. Jarrot and Axelrod seem to be the one’s pulling the strings…jugears just enjoys his vacations and the indulgence of his narcissism.
Everyone should read lizzy’s comment.
I don’t play around reading peggy or ann althouse any more. I used to have hope untili realized they are the problem.
They are mean. They can’t comprehend that this country needs a heavy dose of personal responsibility and fiscal sanity.
I continue to prepare my family. Ann and peggy are not helping they are hurting us.
My point of view is born of love
There’s nothing we can do to Chris Mattews, Peggy, or Ann of Althouse, that the Left won’t do worse to and longer.
So long as the Left is left alive and powerful, one need do nothing about their tools. The tools will be discarded in due time.
Their position is certainly not superior to us. If we are to suffer and die for the crimes of Democrat crims, then so will they. The difference is that the power to save won’t be something they can buy on Amazon. That power only rests with one side, salvation only comes from one source.
Couple of thoughts:
1> With regard to Pres. Obama. There’s an old saying that applies directly to BHO. Class A people surround themselves with Class A people. Class B people surround themselves with Class C people.
2> The Federal Gvmt in general. As a resident of the DC area, a regular participant in various dept. activities and an engineer with several decades of experience. I’m always amazed to hear some PhD with little to no actual experience pontificate on issues that they clearly know nothing of.
DC (not the only place) has managed to confuse education with experience. The whole Healthcare.gov problem is consistent with this attitude that a PhD will solve anything while completely ignoring experience. BHO’s comment that “you didn’t build that” is insight to that mindset that if you don’t have the right credentials you couldn’t possibly have a clue. While most of us recognize that the opposite is actually true.
We have an entire administration that seems to have lots of education, but little to no experience. And, to make matters worse, little respect for those with experience…