Washington Post White House reporter Scott Wilson has a very long piece on Obama in today’s Outlook section. It’s an interesting essay, but it has many of the problems that are known to plague this kind of piece. Because Wilson covers the White House, it reads like a damning indictment written by someone who doesn’t want to hurt the feelings of the very people he’s indicting.
There’s much to comment on, but I want to focus on one of the two core claims of the piece. According to Wilson, Obama is isolated in large part because he doesn’t love the nitty-gritty, human side of politics – which I believe – and that Obama prefers instead to obsess about the finer intricacies of public policy. Wilson hammers this point until you can’t see the nail any more:
In the first two years, the phrase I heard often in the White House was “Good policy makes for good politics.” Even then, the principle seemed based on a naive reading of a hyperpartisan capital.
Obama’s policy-first approach diminished the importance of people — people on Capitol Hill and along K Street, let alone throughout the country — in pushing through his program and providing the White House with valuable intelligence. Whether it was a matter of giving the American public too much credit or not enough remains an open question for many inside the administration.
The president’s supreme confidence in his intellectual abilities and faith in the power of good public policy left the political advisers and policymakers in his White House estranged. The initiatives that have emerged have often been unpopular and unsatisfying — too small, too big, too beside the point — to a country consumed by economic uncertainty.
Now I don’t think Wilson is flat-out wrong. Obama certainly does see himself as a policy wonk, and he’s surrounded himself with people who see the president in precisely the way the president likes to be seen. Funny how that works. Also Obama is one of the most zealous members of the cult of experts we’ve had in the White House in a very long time. Remember when he told Katie Couric:
“I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that’s not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.”
So what’s my complaint? Simply this: Where’s the proof that Obama is a master of public policy? To be sure there’s ample proof that he’s a master at talking about public policy, describing the problems, summarizing the current thinking, regurgitating all of the reigning clichés and platitudes. But where’s the evidence that he’s actually good at public policy?
It’s a sincere question: What have been the truly innovative, groundbreaking or even unconventional big public policy ideas to come out of this administration? Are there any? Because from where I sit, it simply looks like Obama takes existing, conventional, liberal ideas – some of them very, very old – off the liberal pantry shelf and hawks them like it’s new inventory. Where’s the evidence that Obama’s “mastery” over public policy has translated itself into creative approaches? Not in the stimulus from what I can tell. Maybe there’s something impressive to tout in ObamaCare, but Obama didn’t actually have much to do with the crafting of ObamaCare – a fact Wilson acknowledges. Was his genius to be found in shoveling cash into Solyndra and other embarrassing white elephants? Was he the guiding intellect behind a green jobs program that has produced dozens of jobs in places where it was supposed to create thousands?
And if he’s such a genius about public policy, why did it take him so long to discover that there’s no such thing as “shovel ready jobs”? You don’t have to be a Jedi Master of public policy to have known that.
Heck, if he’s spent so much time focusing on getting the policies right, why are things so bad? Why are they so much worse than he predicted? Why did it take him so long figuring out reality was sharply veering from his assumptions?
Here’s a thought: Maybe Obama is just a big fan of public policy the way I’m a big fan of movies? I can talk about movies all day long. I can discuss camera work, acting, story, directing etc. with some fluency. I can even talk about how movies are financed and the role of foreign markets. But you know what? I don’t have a frickn’ clue how to make a Hollywood movie (and I’ve actually made some documentaries).
Maybe he’s not a public policy Scorsese. Maybe he’s, at best, the Roger Ebert of policymaking – or more likely, just a policy buff.
This also raises an interesting question: Do you even want a super-wonk to be president? As Wilson discusses in his piece, Bill Clinton was certainly a wonk and so was Jimmy Carter. But to the extent Clinton’s presidency was successful it was attributable to his political skills, not his policy genius (and to an economic boom for which he deserves significantly less credit than he claims). Jimmy Carter’s presidency demonstrates that point well enough. If Obama’s wonkiness translates itself into simply hawking the existing inventory of liberal ideas, wouldn’t it make more sense to have a salesman who can, you know, sell the inventory?
The White House spent the first two years of this administration working from a slew of false assumptions not just about the economy, but about the political skills of the president. As Noemie Emery recently laid out, this president isn’t nearly as good at politics as he and his advisors thought he was. Now their explanation is that while he may not be great at politics, it’s only because his true gift is for “getting the policies right.”
Good luck with that.
A little armchair psychoanalysis:
"The president’s supreme confidence in his intellectual abilities" is probably a defense mechanism. He knows deep down that he was passed along and promoted as the pet black person of liberals for his entire academic and political career. He knows the secret of his mediocre SAT scores and academic performance even after accruing all the advantages our culture has to offer. But he can't accept those truths.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt is little wonder to me that Obama would prefer backroom dealing (another word for government by the experts) to two-party democracy because, as a Chicagoan, it is all he knows; there's a reason Great Debates of Chicago Aldermen is not a best-seller. So much of his failure, it seems to me, stems from coming from an environment where the ordinary horsetrading and back and forth of government does not exist.
His anger and contempt for enemies is much like that of the Daleys-- as Mike Royko's biography Boss pointed out, the old man's response to opposition was always "What's their plan?", which presupposed that the only choices were between different things to build with public money on the site of the neighborhood or Louis Sullivan architectural gem you planned to obliterate, the idea that there might be value in not spending federal or state money and leaving things the hell alone being literally unimaginable. I think, too, his disconnection from any concept of accountability goes back to Chicago too-- whether you're a community organizer or a wheeler dealer, obtaining tax money to spend IS the end in itself, what comes from spending that money is of no consequence. It's like asking a football quarterback what he intends to do with the land he's just conquered.
I desperately wish we could go back in time, get his mind off the presidency he is patently unprepared for, and let him rather than his chief of staff run for mayor of Chicago earlier this year. In eight years, managing a racially mixed city under straitened circumstances, he might well be a realist politician by then qualified for the presidency; or he might have been long since booted out as another Coleman Young (and too many whites remain in Chicago to tolerate that type for long). What's obvious now is that, protected like an orchid through his rise in politics, he failed to pick up either the skills or the hard knocks from reality he needed to be effective on any level—or wise about the real world on any subject.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAwesome, my comment finally appeared. Buried at the bottom of page 3, two days later. So glad I bothered.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOkay, I see belatedly that I got a star so it won't happen again. Sorry for the peevishness of the comment above.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe fact that the President keeps reverting to the same stale liberal ideas to which tenured hippies are addicted is proof that he ISN'T as smart as his sycophants in the press keep claiming.
I realized the President wasn't all that smart about the 348th time I heard him mention "weatherizing" as an economic stimulus program.
I know all about guys like him. I call it "Regurgitative Intelligence." I've worked with Harvard (and Michigan, and Stanford, etc) Law School lawyers who, if you tell them what the argument is, can present it very well to the judge. But they just don't have the creative intelligence to figure out the right answer to complex issues in the first place.
That one can read aloud well is proof of the ability to read aloud. It is not evidence of high intelligence.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTranslation for common people: Obama has prestigious degrees from prestigious Universities and he considers himself a genius--problem is he is incompetent and based upon results, may actually be dumber than a box of rocks!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA box of rocks would be an improvement from every point of view.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI have never seen any proof of Obama's genius. What I have seen is that many people will dumb themselves down to elevate this man up. This is probably the first time in his life he is being held to account for his foolishness.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI guess I don't care whether his policies are creative or not; I'm more irritated that most of them aren't any good. If he pushed the best of what other people had come up with, that would be fantastic.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhen was the last time you heard him give any of his staff any credit for any idea? [Hint: "Don't mess with Joe" doesn't count.]
It's not in his DNA.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseObama is neither a policy genius nor a political genius. He is an ideologue, "focused like a laser" in pushing through as much of his socialist/fascist/Marxist philosopy as he is able by skirting around the legislative process, which he found too slow. He surrounds himself with the few like-minded fellow travelers and enablers like Jarrett and Axelrod, who reinforce his own perception of being a genius.
Obama is dedicated to imposing the economically destructive "dreams from his father" that he is able with the "audacity" that he claimed in his first self-congratulatory "autobiography."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJonah's been channeling me. I've said for the entirety of this moronic presidency that Barack Obama has no skills at all. He can't change a flat tire. He can't iron his own shirt. He can't even speak without a teleprompter. Dude's a complete flake at everything but sneering.
I was saying this before Rush was saying it, and I know Jonah was thinking it but good manners kept him from saying it aloud. It's now so late in the game that manners no longer have a place in the conversation. Obama's complete and total incompetence is seriously damaging the country.
Time to think about solutions to the wreckage left in this corrupt tool's wake. Solyndra and Fast and Furious both offer immediate solutions in the form of impeachment. Nobody on either side of the aisle doubts Obama's involvement. He's the ideologue; Holder is simply a feckless Harvardian with the right skin color, a black Tim Geithner with no clue how to run anything.
Go ahead and say it, Jonah: This affirmative action presidency has to go if America is to survive.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJonah's been channeling me. I've said for the entirety of this moronic presidency that Barack Obama has no skills at all. He can't change a flat tire. He can't iron his own shirt. He can't even speak without a teleprompter. Dude's a complete flake at everything but sneering.
I was saying this before Rush was saying it, and I know Jonah was thinking it but good manners kept him from saying it aloud. It's now so late in the game that manners no longer have a place in the conversation. Obama's complete and total incompetence is seriously damaging the country.
Time to think about solutions to the wreckage left in this corrupt tool's wake. Solyndra and Fast and Furious offer immediate solutions via impeachment. Nobody doubts Obama's involvement. He's the ideologue; Holder is simply a feckless Harvardian with the right skin color, a black Tim Geithner with no clue how to run anything.
Go ahead and say it, Jonah: This affirmative action presidency has to go if America is to survive.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe administration that agreed to Cash for Clunkers is primarily interested in "good policy?" That was a horribly stupid policy on almost every conceivable level.
It destroyed value by wrecking operable cars. It raised the cost of used cars and car parts, which especially burdened lower-income and frugal people. It didn't stimulate the economy, because it just pulled forward car purchases that were matched almost exactly by a plunge in sales when the program ended. It didn't do anything tangible for the environment, since the very small change in carbon emissions would not be enough to avert the predicted climate change (and people may drive more miles in cars with greater efficiency).
Its one saving grace should've been political popularity. After all, everybody likes free money! But when they somehow failed to anticipate the popularity of giving away free money, the program bankrupted itself and became another symbol of government stupidity and incompetence. It also gave a punchline to fiscal conservatives at the same time the town halls nationwide erupted in opposition to Obamacare - precisely the time Obama wanted to portray himself as a judicious steward of the fisc.
It was horrible politics and horrendous policy. But you can't look at it and think it was anything but politics - a shallow attempt by politicians to give away money.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseObama is constantly accused of being a genius...I think it's white guilt, myself. We're never offered real proof, only loads of hearsay.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis is valid, but misses the larger point. Barry excels at that poisonous combination of arrogance, ignorance, and egotism where he would consider himself a genius at whatever he does. He thinks he is a policy wonk because that is the coin of his current realm. I am sure in law school he felt he was a genius at legal theory. I am sure when he goes to the ice cream shop he feels he knows the most about picking the best flavor of anyone that ever walked in any ice cream shop in the country. Truth is, he is too ignorant to see his own failings and the sycophant press confuses power with greatness.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Where’s the Evidence Obama’s a Policy Genius?"
Maybe it's buried in one of his autobiographies?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWe'd have to ask the author: Bill Ayers.
(capcha "total shamble". The word is "shambles". Can't NRO contractwith a literate on-line security program?)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI remember during the Obamacare debate, Eleanor Clift
lamenting that Obama just needed to be more like LBJ was when he passed the Great Society. What? LBJ spent close to a generation in Washington DC as a Representative and then as Senator. It could be argued that if there was something that LBJ didn't know about politics and policy in Washington then it wasn't worth knowing.
Eleanor's remark may be telling about the disconnect between what liberals touted about Obama in 2008 and what we have all gotten in succeeding years. Say what you will about the filling inside Obama's suit, but he is no LBJ and never will be.
O's sub-par job performance should come as no surprise despite all the accolades about the most intelligent president etc. Even liberals are too smart to really believe in such nonsense.
Asking Obama to channel his inner LBJ is like asking
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusea cub scout to channel his inner Airborne Ranger.
It's enough turn me into a SAT-yr, complete with cloven hooves and Pan pipe. Oh, Oh, what's O's verbal? Oh, Oh, what's O's analytical?
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse