I don’t know how it is with colleagues, but I’m getting both extremes of Obamaology in my email bag. That is, I am getting emails telling me that the President is clueless and just winging it, and other emails telling me he’s a Machiavellian playing a deep game.
The former point of view was nicely aired by Karl Rove. Here’s a sample of the latter.
Pieces always seem to fall into place for Obama. Luck and a biased, slavish media don’t seem sufficient explanation. I think this thing was (and is) planned more closely than a space shuttle mission …
So we come to the chaos of his cabinet appointments. Or is it?
Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Maybe he didn’t want Richardson at Commerce but he made points with Hispanics by appointing him and the resultant scrutiny finished Richardson. He’s got his former opponent and undoubtedly bitter enemy flitting around on fool’s errands … Obama gets to be all bi-partisan by appointing Gregg and then makes it impossible for him to serve by treating him like a wetback gardener and then sulks publicly about Gregg’s change of heart. Then there’s the Performance Czar with some pissant tax lien for a few dollars in maid wages FICA that was paid eons ago and she’s out. Daschle was a major player with a lot of clout and contacts in one of the realms Obama wants to glom: health care. Daschle’s finished as someone to be reckoned with and it probably really didn’t cross Daschle’s mind that the limo was taxable income. Just something he got because he was such a VIP. And we come to Geithner.
Geither did know about the tax liability because the IMF cut him a check to cover it. Obama knows this, just like he knows about … and the ability of schools 150 years old to educate students. [That’s a Radio Derb reference — J.D.] And he knows that having a guy who knowingly stiffed the IRS running Treasury is something that’s going to be mentioned by everybody other than Arianna Huffington and Chris Matthews, mentioned unceasingly. And that’s the point …
It’s three months since Obama’s election. He knew pretty much what he was going to do before he was inaugurated. But nobody else does and nobody much seems to care …
Is Obama trying to pull off something really major? He could do it. The guy who kept the SEC without a quorum [? — J.D.] at a critical juncture and disabled all the fraud checks on his campaign credit card software [! — Yeah, that went down the memory hole pretty fast, didn’t it? — J.D.] did not just screw up the Treasury appointment. I don’t think he screwed up any of the others, either …
That all brings to mind Roger Kimball’s favorite phrase: “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” I dunno. I have a deep-rooted conviction that the world is a chaotic place, through which most people stumble and grope their way, and in which most complex 20-stage plans fall in a pothole or run out of batteries around stage 4. Possibly this is only stage 4 of Obama’s plan for world mastery … but I think he’s winging it.