Topic: Decline of the West
Two facts seem pretty clear at this point in the overture to the 2012 election season: (1) the economy is not in good shape, and (2) the Obama Administration has no idea what to do about it.
Back in April, there were many predictions that the President would don his green eyeshade, sharpen his pencil and join the GOP in an orgy of budget cutting. It was time, the pundits said, for Obama to perform a hard pivot from left to center in the style of Bill Clinton. Thus would he woo anew the independents whose votes swept him to victory in 2008. Bill did it and got himself reelected; Barry could do it too.
This prediction took account of everything, except the facts.
What I’ve come to think of as the Obama Illusion—that since he’s is a smart guy he must be a pragmatist—dates from the early days of his presidency and has proved stubbornly resistant to multiple reality checks. Actually, there’s no particular reason to believe that superior intelligence guarantees good judgment. Smart people do stupid things every day. So while it’s obvious that pragmatism is in Obama’s best interests just now, his supporters shouldn’t get their hopes up.
As students of history well know, good judgment is a rare commodity. Certainly it’s much less common that mere intelligence. The reason, I think, is that a high IQ is just one component of good judgment—and not the most important one, either. Good judgment is an amalgam of three elements: intelligence, experience and character. A person of average intelligence who has profited by experience and possesses a sound character is far more likely to make good decisions that an extremely intelligent person who lacks experience and possesses a weak character. Does the latter person sound like anyone we know?
Barack Obama is very smart—no doubt about it. But he lacks executive experience, which is a handicap for a president, though not necessarily a fatal one. His most crippling deficiency lies in the area of character. Thin-skinned, cold-blooded, disdainful of his opponents, careless with facts and, above all, mightily impressed with his own wonderfulness, our president’s character is just plain un-presidential. It makes him impervious to reality—a serious deficiency indeed. Barry the Pragmatist? He’s a fantasy figure. What we see in the Oval Office is what we get.
