You'd think this would be obvious. You'd be wrong:
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I find it astonishing that he goes around making speeches in which he deplores the state of the economy, the growing income inequality, chronic unemployment, staggering middle class income, and it's as if he has been a bystander, as if he's been out of the country for the last five years. It's his economy; he's the president.The he in question is the Leader of the Free World, the most powerful man in the world. But you have to understand -- this is Allegory of the Cave stuff. We're watching the shadows on the wall. You're not supposed to mention the last 4-5 years. Don't think about Obamacare, or Cash for Clunkers, or Solyndra, or the multiple pivots to the economy. Can't think about any of that. The good news? Krauthammer works for Faux News, so he can be ignored. And if you're to pay attention to anything Charles Krauthammer says, it's this observation from 2008:
He's talking as if this is the Bush economy, I don't know, the Eisenhower economy, and he just arrived in a boat and he discovers how bad the economy is. This is a result of the policies he instituted. He gave us the biggest stimulus in the history of the milky way, and he said it would jump start the economy. The result has been the slowest recovery, the worst recovery since World War II, and that is the root of all of the problems he's talking about, the income inequality -- the median income of the middle class of Americans has declined by 5% in his one term. So who's responsible for that? Those were his policies. He talks about this in the abstract and he actually gets away with it in a way that I find absolutely astonishing, it's magical. This is his economy and he's pretending he's just stumbled upon it. And the policies he proposes are exactly the ones he proposed and implemented in the first term.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a "second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition -- do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.
5 comments:
i disagree on his possession of 'first class intellect', but he is a first class political talent, a born natural in the art of bullshit.
anybody winning elective/political office is about as certifiably intellectual as Barry Bonds, Tom Cruise, Kim Kardashian or Jessica Simpson: they market a narrow skill set for maximum personal benefit.
further proof: see Pelosi or W Bush.
politics, like sports and showbiz, is about what one can get away with, not about how actually 'intellectual' one is.
I don't doubt that he's very smart in the sense that he's got the hardware capable of it. I'd be willing to bet that he's a good deal smarter than any of us who comment here.
I do doubt, however, that he is a deep thinker, seeking truth, concerned with ideas. He employs them as a means to some other end, much like a player might pretend to like poetry to get a girl into bed, or a thief might employ a disguise to evade detection.
Now Gino, why on earth are you picking on Kim Kardashian as if she were really scummy enough to resemble a politician? :^)
Seriously, while I agree that Obama's got some political genius, I agree with Gino that I simply haven't seen much evidence of a first class intellect on his part. Not even second class, really.
I don't know whether it's a lack of "q" on his part, or whether he's simply never learned to work, but his actual accomplishments, like passing the bar, only place him at best among tort and divorce lawyers advertising on UHF stations.
Political genius? Absolutely. Demogoguery? You bet. Intellect? Nope.
I still don't completely believe that he is his own man. I think that he's the front man for a bunch of shadowy figures in the background. The reason he's president is the same reason that Greg Brady got to be Johnny Bravo. Both fit the suit.
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