What Obama has[n’t] learned
Peter Baker’s interview with President Obama in the NY Times Sunday magazine is entitled “Education of a President.”
It is a curious document. It purports to tell what the president and his advisers have learned from their first two years in office. The short answer seems to be: nothing, except perhaps that they aren’t the miracle workers they thought they were. Duh.
For instance, after Baker reads back to Obama his famous “the rise of the oceans will begin to slow and the planet heal yada yada yada” excerpt, and then asks him how that high-flying rhetoric sounds now, he replies: “It sounds ambitious. Buy you know what? We’ve made progress on each of those fronts.”
I suppose it should not be a surprise that Obama refuses to say the truth, which is that his rhetoric was ridiculously overblown and phenomenally narcissistic. Presidents in general are loathe to own up to mistakes, and Obama is no different.
What is different is Obama’s stubborn refusal—shot through the entire interview—to admit to any real problem other than not selling himself enough. His policies are fine, rock solid. The fact that people don’t accept them is a mere public relations and communication oversight, which would have been rectified by better spin.
Does Obama truly believe that? And if so, is it because he believes his policies are correct? Or is it because he believes he could sell ice to the Eskimos? And if the latter, does he believe it because he thinks people are just that stupid, or because he’s so powerfully persuasive, or both?
And how can he still believe it at this point? Hasn’t he at least been shown that his persuasive powers are not all that strong? Is it just that it’s easier to believe he hasn’t tried hard enough to convince? Easier than to believe that one of his greatest gifts has somehow deserted him, or that the Peter principle has triumphed?
If all he hears are statements like this one from his staff (or former staff), I suppose it wouldn’t be so hard for him to hold onto his old ideas of himself. These people are enablers:
“There is an anti-establishment mood,” Rahm Emanuel, the former Clinton aide who served as Obama’s first White House chief of staff, told me before he stepped down this month. “We just happen to be here when the music is stopping.”
It’s true that correlation doesn’t prove causation. But c’mon guys, this is big-time denial.
Here is the prevailing wisdom that Obama hears:
The view from inside the administration starts with a basic mantra: Obama inherited the worst problems of any president in years. Or in generations. Or in American history. He prevented another Great Depression while putting in place the foundation for a more stable future. But it required him to do unpopular things that would inevitably cost him.
If this is believed, it isn’t just arrogance. It’s delusion. And that’s never good for a president. And then there’s this:
“He’s opaque even to us,” an aide told me. “Except maybe for a few people in the inner circle, he’s a closed book.”
Not a good sign at all, and said by too many people to not be true. In addition, there’s this:
One prominent Democratic lawmaker told me Obama’s problem is that he is not insecure ”” he always believes he is the smartest person in any room and never feels the sense of panic that makes a good politician run scared all the time, frenetically wooing lawmakers, power brokers, adversaries and voters as if the next election were a week away.
Okay, I’ll go on record here: anyone who believes that he or she is always the smartest person in the room is both arrogant and a fool, and that’s not too smart at all.
That last part, about how he feels, is much of the problem described with the current education system. Being based on emotional security rather than any merit, kids are being tended like a babysitter would, passed through the system without a thought, and end up having to make crucial choices with nothing but how they feel about themselves to base those decisions upon.
Oh, I am sure, not every school, teacher, student, system. But the general sense is that this is a pervasive problem. If you look at his records, what are available, and listen to those who have worked (around) with him, the pattern emerges. It is amazing to see this on such large display. Ivy Leaguer, eh? Wow.
“There is an anti-establishment mood,” Rahm Emanuel, the former Clinton aide who served as Obama’s first White House chief of staff, told me before he stepped down this month. “We just happen to be here when the music is stopping.”
If there’s such an “anti-establishment” mood, then why are the incumbent Republicans not at risk of losing the upcoming election like the incumbent Democrats are?
I’m not sure if liberals actually believe this “anti-incumbency” stuff or if they’re just saying so for appearances. I hope they actually believe it. The resulting fall will be very hard if so.
Mark Cuban says he has a habit, when entering a meeting, of immediately ascertaining who is the dumbest person in the room. When Cuban has difficulty ascertaining the dumbest person in the room, he then knows its him.
There is a type of person in any field who moves from job to job with great fanfare, always leaving a suitable time before the chickens come home to roost. They are always billed as the great savior, redecorate the building, have impressive 4 color brochures printed out, make impressive speeches and then leave.
That’s Obama. Nothing in his career has ever been from start to finish. The achilles heel of these guys is when they are without a prominent position for any length of time. Then they are rapidly eclipsed by new poseurs or people who actually acomplish things. Will he leave the White House early, Certainly he will not run for two terms.
Hasn’t he at least been shown that his persuasive powers are not all that strong?
I’d have to disagree, Neo. I think his persuasive powers are very strong indeed, particularly when coupled with his not-inconsiderable charisma.
However, he’s never really had to continue persuading with an actual track record to follow before. Just around the time most of us would get asked, “Hey, why is it that you never do anything around here?”, he’s off to a new job. This time he said he would do things, he promised us the heavens in order to get the job… and now he doesn’t understand why people don’t believe his promises, the way they always did before. It’s because we can now see, all of us, how quickly and easily he breaks his promises — while claiming he never made them in the first place.
He really did fool all of the people — well, enough to win the Presidency. But he can’t fool all of us all of the time. His act is wearing thin, and yet he keeps playing it, because it’s the only act he knows.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
Denial of their failed social theory/programs is a classic liberal trait. There’s nothing new in Obama’s denial of the failure of his policies.
Its never the policy that’s the poblem, only its implementation or its marketing. For example, in his book “Whose Welfare?” Steven Teles shows that, already by the 1970s, the public had determined that welfare wasn’t working; many sociologists even today, however, deny that ’70s-style welfare programs were bad for their recipients.
It’s one reason we will never see liberals dominate practical fields like engineering and construction. They dominate the interpretive fields (arts and social sciences) where the more arcane the BS, the more erudite the BS-er is percieved to be.
>the smartest person in any room
You know who else was famous for believing that?
http://www.amazon.com/Smartest-Guys-Room-Amazing-Scandalous/dp/1591840538/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1287176119&sr=8-1
I’m just sayin’.
Obama has spent his whole life repeating the platitudes he heard from his elders and, later, associates. Because they were not popular platitudes, except among leftists, he became convinced that he had greater insight. I have not seen any evidence that he ever really questioned anything or had a crisis of faith. He never tested his thoughts against the real world and grew from the experience. He has always been able to move up to a higher position, convinced that his utopian dreams only required more power to be implemented or more efforts at selling. He is probably too well armoured to begin any critical thinking now. He will continue to spin, embellish, and blame.
Obama’s arrogant cluelessness is revealed in his failure to realize that refusing to admit any grandiosity in the oceans-receding remark or any other errors or miscalculations at all would not make him look smart or competent. A genuinely intelligent person realizes the value of a small, gracious concession here and there, for instance to the effect that he might have overestimated what the stimulus would do for the unemployment rate by just a LITTLE. Properly done, this enhances your credibility and strengthens your defensive position of the choices you aren’t about to apologize for. Insisting that everything you’ve done is perfect – and you’re still, always the smartest person in the room – leads your audience irresistibly to the opposite conclusion.
Combine this dumbness with the NYT reporter to Obama’s earlier failure to realize that he should not admit, out loud, in a room that he knew contained Bob Woodward, that he based life-and-death decisions on how to conduct the war in Afghanistan on what he thought would mollify his political base — and I am left wondering why anybody on earth, other than the narcissistic man himself, still imagines that he is smart at all.
As Jonah Goldberg said in a recent piece he wrote on the “Incredible Shrinking Messiah”:
“….Rahm Emanuel, as he was fleeing for the healthier and more civic-minded political environment of Chicago’s backrooms, said, ‘I want to thank you for being the toughest leader any country could ask for in the toughest times any president has ever faced.’
“Really? The times have been rough, we can all agree, but if memory serves, the Civil War was no cakewalk either. And that Pearl Harbor thing – not to mention 9/11 – might compete with the miserable economy Obama inherited and then ignored as he pursued his own “transformational” vanity projects.
“There’s an irony to occupying the Oval Office. When presidents think they’re bigger than the job they hold, they shrink in office. When they think they’re smaller than the honor that has temporarily been bestowed upon them, they grow into it. Obama has done nothing but shrink….”
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/249512/obamas-outsized-ego-jonah-goldberg
All democrats know they’re being destructive. They just despise free peoples going about their lives and becoming all unequal and stuff. Transplants from 1960 Soviet Union wouldn’t have been more gung ho trying to transform America.
I would posit that this is definitional insecurity. If you have to hold that you are the _____ in *all* situations, then you hold that as an aegis, something to ward off having to deal with reality or apply any critical thinking to a situation.
Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Eric Hoffer
Obama probably normally is “the smartest person in the room” so long as the room in question is the bathroom.
Kaba,
You stretch…
If he does run for office again that whole “oceans stopped rising’ ought to be played over and over by his opposition.
So, apparently, his narcissism borders on megalomania. That’s not a good sign.
Thanks a bunch, 52ers.
From what I read here thinking of new and clever ways to describe the fact that our all knowing president is NUTS has evolved into a whole new literary genre. What can we call it as it deserves a name; perhaps “lay psycho-politico noir” (you’ll take what I dish out and like it and if I want your opinion I’ll beat it out of you). Or “Obama-Kafka” (A giant insect awoke one morning to discover he had turned into the President of the US). Or Melvilleama, (call me Messiah, whenever I feel myself pausing in front of coffin warehouses then I feel it time to destroy the happiest state in history), Tolstoyama, (Prince Obmaski felt confined by those silly men who believing themselves his moral equal, refused to admit to his own natural greatness). Obromantic (The young and arrogant Lord Obamy walked distractingly into the party, drawing attention of all purely by the force of his yet undeclared but obviously salubrious demeanor and affecting all polite discourse by announcing he was everyone’s superior and they better get used to it.)
Time to go home now.
Sorta kinda relevant, by Victor Davis Hanson:
How to Turn a Recession into a Depression
“”thinking of new and clever ways to describe the fact that our all knowing president is NUTS has evolved into a whole new literary genre””
Bob
Obacracy: Democracy with the feature of not allowing the extremist majority to **** it up.
These are among the indications that Obama will not respond to the upcoming elections as Clinton did in 1994.
For one thing, Clinton could tack to the center because he really didn’t have any principles except his own aggrandizement so he was willing to go shooting where the ducks were. Obama is a genuine ideologue; he’s going to conclude that there’s something wrong with the electorate, not his ideas.
Second, his overwhelming and overweening sense of self does not make him susceptible to second thoughts and reconsiderations. I can’t really blame him. From prep school on he’s gotten where he is not so much because of what he’s done but more because of what he is. Everyone has told him how smart he is and he believes it.
Damn if I wouldn’t but, alas, few who know me have ever told me how smart they think I am.
Obama’s advisers, and mentors, stunted his intellectual growth, an intellectual capacity which during the campaign he seemed to demonstrate, as opposed to the increasingly losing capacity of McCain, which hit rock bottom that horrible moment when we discovered the non-existing capacity of Sarah Palin.
Most if not all of Obama people have been the old guard status quo … of the very worst sort.
Obama assumed “Change” by default of being a Harvard Graduate, Lawyer, Left-Activist, Black Man … this superficial narcissism robbed him of a real opportunity to gather fresh, young, creative, energetic, America-loving American minds to manifest a real-real change.
Could have been awesome, but … here’s my favorite line from that misdirectedly-nostalgic film, “Gone With The Wind, “Askin’ ain’t gettin'”
nyomythus: Obama chose his advisers. Most of them have been his advisers for years, too, so you can’t say he didn’t know them.
Advisers cannot create narcissism. They can only feed it or try to cut into it. Most of the time narcissists choose advisers who will feed them what they want—adulation, sincere if possible, lying if not.
nyomythus Says:
October 15th, 2010 at 8:06 pm
Sorry, that just isn’t true, and I’m not letting you get away with it.
McCain had very tepid support and his campaign only took off when he named Palin as his VP. Only after she was on board did his campaign generate any excitement and enthusiasm at all.
The psychoanalysis of Obama; the wondering what he thinks and what he wants; the disbelief about him not getting something; the not understanding why he does what he does.
It’s no mystery at all. We invent the mystery because the plain truth is a true horror.
It’s called evil. Obama is a corrupted soul. He does what evil souls do.
There is nothing more to it than that. And that is plenty as it is.
Does Obama truly believe that? And if so, is it because he believes his policies are correct? Or is it because he believes he could sell ice to the Eskimos? And if the latter, does he believe it because he thinks people are just that stupid, or because he’s so powerfully persuasive, or both?
none of the above…
remember, this ideology is a way for people of LESS intelligent to overthrow the meritocrats and maintain position.
the smarter someone is, and more capable he is (or she of course), the more likely that they are generous if they have not been affected. that is, the easier time they have allows them to share themselves more with people, and have things to offer, which then feeds back.
but that’s normal people, not left liberal affective sociopathic socialist cargo cultists who are not actually smart enough to understand what they are pushing. (unlike the smart and nasty that they look up to that did).
its a mental thing that is VERY hard for me to try to put into words. but its along the line of, if i say what the smart say, then i am to all appearances smart, and no one can tell that i am not, and that i dont understand PRINCIPALS…
which is a BIG indicator of why they dumb down and break thought processes in the public education to make more of them.
while if you wanted more renaisanse type people you would be teaching principals, not lists of confucian rules to live by, and leaving them dysfunctional by never excerpting or developing their working memory where they put things together and hold facts to compare and then work towards solutions.
you seldom see the smart and knowing in this game, you usually see and pay attention to the posers who the smart and knowing manipulate.
this is why there is a denial of validity or truth… they cant reach a conclusion based on a set of facts, so they do everything to hide that fact.
so in their world the solution is to keep copying what works, or what the people they think are smarter and copy think works. and then this is where the game gets to be which side to emotionally sway to get. because THATS how they align to the person that they are going to copy what they think because they know.
sounds bizarr, but its so common you dont notice it. you see it in fads… especially fads with new old knowlege, trying to believe that someone in the past knew more because they sure dont.
Obama like many did not alight on the ideology of his life through any kind of reasoning. which is why this always favor the young, who in schools were always asked which end result they wanted, never the process how to get that was in the choice.
they are cargo cult, and have strong religious convictions which are not focused on what religion focuses on, but are no less religious in their zeal, obeisance, following their prophet, and having unbreakable faith.
and given that people dont stop them, they are embolden that what they have chosen to copy and do is correct.
if one wants to play a bit with ideas one can say that normal people have a self drive focused on productive ends all around them… and other thinkers tend to have parasitical minds, which tend not to want to learn anything that the productive learns. skills, principals, etc… the point of the parasite is to do more with less because your making up what your missing by obtaining by other means.
what would parasites need with economic principals that set their victims free?
wouldnt parasites want a constant supply of controlled cattle to feed on at will, the way people want and eat steak?
taking such a path of cargo cult, populist, cultist, poser, image concious, sociopathic… you take shortcuts…
why learn when you can fake it?
so, the big O basically is flying by the seat of his pants applying the Confucian rules he learned through his life from this system and studying it.
his responses and goals are very predictable, given that he is operating on a rule book thrown out long ago, but all he had to really study…
he cant choose any other choices in what he is doing as that would require understanding principals of operation, and he has had an easy time by following the rule book, rather than being a real individual who understands principals, and so on. and not as tools to move normal people because you have no care about them and you know they do (sociopathic).
he is following an ideology, and ALL ideologies are nothing but simplifications of how to see the world rather than even trying to comprehend it in its complexity and then have reverence. this is why using religion, but not really believing, to believe in a religion and be full is to understand principals and how hard and how completely amazing things are, a person who cant understand how reality works just sees the world as a movie, a flower is not amazing, things just happen…
no reverence, as no image is any harder than any other image. talent isnt real. abilities are not really different its cirumstance (so i am the same as a producer, and the reason i cant is because he was lucky so its ok for me to do this to make it even).
he has faith in his prophet who he believes got him where he is. that prophet is marx and his religion is socialism, ergo liberation theology and social justice of the not christian kind…
No matter how smart you are (or think you are), there is always someone that knows more than you do. If you think otherwise, that’s arrogance pure and simple.
Was there ever any leader that was so psychoanalyzed by so many while he was still in office? Supposedly a man’s speech is a window into his soul. On that I have to again quote Eric Hoffer “Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.”
Alex Bensky is certainly right. It’s has gotten to the point where one commenter after another is repeating the same symptoms and reaching the same conclusions. It is a sad commentary on our leadership that no major figure has simply stated that Obama is too unsound mentally to be allowed to continue in office. Alas his speaking skills hide his deficiencies to all but that insignificant minority, the informed.
“the rise of the oceans will begin to slow and the planet heal yada yada yada”
It’s true that “his rhetoric was ridiculously overblown and phenomenally narcissistic.” It was also cringe-worthy and the fact that he doesn’t see just how embarrassingly sophomoric it was with the benefit of hindsight is amazing.
I think it was Jon Baker back a few comments who said this could be used effectively against Obama and I agree. He may be too thick to understand how silly it sounds, but the voters, particularly the youth who were taken in, are bound to grind their teeth when reminded of it. Especially when held against his accomplishments
Obama’s career reminds me of a guy who was married to a friend of mine. He’d go from law firm to law firm, leaving just before any of his cases came to trial. Enjoyed a great rep for about a decade.
Remember, this is a guy who voted “present” on any tough issue while a member of the Illinois legislature. He has to rank among the most un-tested persons to ever occupy the Oval Office.
Obama’s career reminds me of a guy who was married to a friend of mine. He’d go from law firm to law firm, leaving just before any of his cases came to trial. Enjoyed a great rep for about a decade.
Remember, this is a guy who voted “present” on any tough issue while a member of the Illinois legislature. He has to rank among the most un-tested persons to ever occupy the Oval Office.
There is nothing particularly wrong about thinking you are the smartest person in the room, especially if you *are* the smartest person in the room.
The problem is when you think you know more than everyone else in pretty much any subject and/or think you are near infallible.
Being smart means you know your limits – that is you know what you know and know what you don’t know. You can bring people who know more than you (and are, thus, better than you at said subject), ask the the right questions, and take their knowledge and synthesis it with others.
Being smart means you can do that over a very wide range of disciplines, it also means you know when you are better off totally trusting someone else (and know who to trust too).
It also means you know you aren’t *always* the smartest person in the room, how to recognize that, and how to take advantage of it.
There are very much people who can truthfully say that the general assumption is that they are the smartest person in the room at any given moment. Of those that truly can say that they will usually have some combination of humility in there too, but even the ones that try and talk more about that have to understand on some level what they can do (the ones I have known dominate conversations when they choose too).
As far as I can see Obama thinks he is the *best* at everything in the room. That people are simply advising him as an inferior. That is subtly different yet has a MAJOR difference in their ability to be effective. Nor have I seen many qualities of “smart”. I’ve seen many qualities of education – that is he can recite data. I’ve seen many qualities of confidence – I think he really thought the rhetoric about being a near messiah were true. But I haven’t seen “smart” – I haven’t seen the ability to understand the data and react to it nor have I seen that he seems to know where his boundaries are at.
I’ll even argue that knowing your boundaries is better than being able to synthesize more information but not know where you need to stop and let someone else work on it. I think Obama’s ability to recall information and understand it is higher than Bush’s – yet I think that Bush knew where to hand it over to someone else and how to judge their abilities. In this we saw Petraeus win Iraq. I do not think that Obama could ever give that amount of control over, I do not think he could ever internalize that Petraeus would do the job better than he could.
I would argue that, over all, that made Bush the smarter of the two – at the least it made him the more *effective* of the two. Witness what Bush got passed without control of Congress and how Obama has struggled with full an total control of a sympathetic Congress. He can’t keep up with the detail (no one can) yet seems to figure that even his half assed attempts at it are the “best”. It basically means Obama is only as effective as he is whereas Bush is as effective as his best adviser is – no matter how good Obama is I can assure you that a team of 20+ people each one of the foremost experts in their field will be better.
That is what it means to drink your own kool-aid – a person who is great at managing people will outperform someone who can do most of it himself assuming the latter will not hand things over. Obama is the latter and too many fell for it. There is an assumption that knowledge has a value and, while it does, it doesn’t make one *effective*.
nyomythus: Obama chose his advisers. Most of them have been his advisers for years, too, so you can’t say he didn’t know them.
I didn’t say he didn’t know…
Advisers cannot create narcissism. They can only feed it or try to cut into it. Most of the time narcissists choose advisers who will feed them what they want–adulation, sincere if possible, lying if not.
I know Advisers cannot create narcissism…
I know you know I know.
And here is a very relevant video from Bill Whittle, one of the top 300,000,000 smartest people in the room:
What We Believe, Part 2: The Problem with Elitism
Principles, NOT principals.
Thank you.
I heard/read recently (where I forgot) that Obama back in late winter/early spring had some historians into the White House to explain the Tea Party movement and was there ever such a happening in the history of the US. That he had to ask the queston shows how clueless he is. That he had to have somebody explain the history of populist movements in the US to him shows he can never be the smartest person in the room, not even an Ivy dorm room (maybe a greenhouse surrounded by plants, though I’m not even certain of that). All he had to do was stay in D.C. on September 12th in 2009 and 2010 instead of bugging out and he would have had an inkling of the answer. The answer to the question of why everybody is so angry would have infuriated him, of course, as the answer is both Obama’s arrogance and his policies. “You’d think they’d be saying ‘Thank you’.”
Arrogant malignant narcissism coupled with incompetence are never good traits combined in one person, especially if that person has their finger on the button (and I don’t mean the reset button). I really can see Obama trashing the country in fits of rage because, like Hitler before him sitting in the bunker berating the German people as not being worthy of him and deserving of the pain and misery the fall of the Third Reich brought onto them, Obama feels the same way about us bitter Bible and gun clingers. We just do not ‘get’ his brilliance, his magnificence, his greatness. We are not worthy of him. So whatever bad happens to us, we deserve it because we rejected him. Besides, we owe it to the rest of the world to fail so they can gain. The world is a zero-sum game to Obama, which is the essence of social justice and wealth redistribution: Someone rich must lose so that someone poor can win.
For the country when it comes to Obama, it’s one and done, if we’re lucky.
Wonderful stuff, all of it. Now, let’s work on how we are going to throw all the bums out. Then work on how to the throw the deeply embedded bureaucrats out right behind them, and get back to the business of growing our freedoms back, and growing our nation.
strcpy,
Great comment. I would add that those smarter than Bush also sensed that when he trusted them to do a job there was a sincere recognition of their abilities that caused them to go the extra mile to get the job done. They knew he wouldn’t throw them under the bus. Obama’s people are all playing the same spin game and always having to look over their shoulder.
“Okay, I’ll go on record here: anyone who believes that he or she is always the smartest person in the room is both arrogant and a fool, and that’s not too smart at all.”
I thought that was a symptom of being a teenager.
RickZ
I reached the same conclusions about the weirdo in chief some time ago. Fortunately we have institutions to prevent such behavior, damn, it just occurred to me his finger will be on the nuclear button to the very end.
McCain had very tepid support and his campaign only took off when he named Palin as his VP. Only after she was on board did his campaign generate any excitement and enthusiasm at all.
Palin’s introduction was very exciting, peering through the crowd it was hard to get a full glimpse of this woman for the first week or so. Then she spoke and I gave her the benefit of the doubt. Then not so far before the election I realized wow what an irresponsible decision, what is McCain thinking?
Rickl I make the distinction that unfortunately for McCain the initial appearance would have to go on and reveal some substance before the election which was shortly coming. I believe McCain chose to see, “Hmm, vibrant, attractive go-getting opportunist who is holding and doing well with the governorship … in Alaska … hey it’s virtually a 3rd of the country.” In McCain’s defense he may have realized that there were no other options, the zeitgeist, the wish of the masses, after the racist trashing Obama got from the Clintons’ during the Democratic primaries, Obama was not going to fail.
The zeitgeist in a sentence might look something like this, “You can’t have a black man who can stand up to the muster of the campaign, take this kind of abuse, and then … lose?” It wasn’t going to happen.
Try to image the alternative: It would have been the image of America that broke the camel’s back in the eyes of the world. All of the world’s worst suspections about America would suddenly all be true.
McCain should have simply stood on principle and ask Lieberman or Giuliani to join him. Mccain still would have lost perhaps, perhaps not, but whatever, it would not have been for a cheap trick. To continue to not see Palin as a failed tool [it is about gender, used as a tool, stop it] is what I expect from the worst o the Right.
It isn’t simple, and it comes down to one of two choices, Obama failed, he knew he wasn’t ready for this but the people shoved him in, and since I really should be a part of the electoral process, despite criticism that I also for the Right, the Republicans have my support this election cycle.
“He’s opaque even to us,” an aide told me. “Except maybe for a few people in the inner circle, he’s a closed book.”
Opaque because there is nothing to see.
Its reached a point where I feel Obama’s being elected President was merely his way of crying for help.
Bob
I’m still laughing about your Obama-Kafka. Brilliant!!!
It sounds amibitious? Making the seas recede sounds ambitious? D’ya think?
My favorite: guys who put new nameplates on doors. (“Now there’s leadership!”) No more pathetic displacement activity exists.
Daniel, I’m with neo on this one.
Much like a brothel inmate is pretty persuasive to drunken sailors, Obama is effective with people who are already in the bag, but not with those who are not. He can fire up those already fired up, but cannot persuade skeptics — the essence of persuasion.
No matter how smart you are, there’s always — always — someone smarter. Someone with an IQ of 140 (certainly much higher than Obama’s) is in the top 0.5% or so of the population (IIRC), i.e., to be 1 in 200 in IQ of people chosen randomly. Put a little selection bias in there (although in DC it’s increasingly unclear whether they select for or against intelligence), and that number plummets. Obama would be lucky to be the smartest person in a phone booth, if such still existed.
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It isn’t simple, and it comes down to one of two choices, Obama failed, he knew he wasn’t ready for this but the people shoved him in, and since I really should be a part of the electoral process, despite criticism that I also for the Right, the Republicans have my support this election cycle.
Wow, I was a bit frivolous by not adding…
Republicans have my support this election cycle unless new evidence makes me reconsider … which is why i rarely know who I’m going to vote for until the ballot is in my hand … probably because centrist are so difficult to sniff out.
How utterly wonderful for us that you are aboard, if only for a moment, Nyomythus. A man of strong convictions you are, with wonderful clarity of vision.
Pending “new evidence”, of course.
Other Obama literary genres:
Obmystery: Watson: Holmes, we find out who killed Sir Barack!
Holmes: I did it, don’t tell anyone.
SciFiama: The great demon turned the humans of Universityville into mindless zombies by the high pitched sounds coming from his superior outerworldly mind. Only the residents of nearby Hicksville seemed immune, possibly because the sound-waves were indistinguishable from the braying of diseased mules.
New evidence requires one to re-think ones opinion, right? As opposed to “this is the way, all else be damned” … that would be regressive.