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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated
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To: Neeka who wrote (295745)3/9/2009 9:42:08 PM
From: Nadine Carroll1 Recommendation  Read Replies (2) of 793883
 
Here's another who agrees with me (h/t Instapundit):

MATT WELCH: Obama: I Am Not a Socialist, Because Bush Expanded Medicare! “Obama will get no argument from me when it comes to Bush’s disaster socialism. But this new he-did-it-too argument does run counter to another, Hendrik Hertzberg-applauded narrative that Obama has been running with since before inauguration: That his administration’s economic policies represents a sharp break from the policies of his predecessor. As people like Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson have begun to point out, Obama is running high on the contradiction-meter.”

The distinction is not whether you inherited your beliefs from your parents and mentors or not. Of course, almost everybody has. What are parents and mentors for, anyway, if not to impart their beliefs? The real distinction is whether you have internalized your own consistent guidelines from your beliefs, so that you have a mental framework to approach any a new subject without having to take a poll of your friends. It's a hard thing to achieve this framework and yet not be rigid or kneejerk about it - but harder still not to have it. A leader needs such guidelines. People look to their leaders to make sense out of new and difficult situations.

My own sense of Obama is that his political philosophy is of the inherited kind. He has never turned his considerable mental firepower towards the question of examining his own beliefs. He was too fixated on constructing his sense of self and engineering his own rise. I think we are seeing Obama's lack of political philosophy in his inability to make the case for his policies in a serious-sounding way, without resorting to rhetorical tricks so obvious that even his supporters are starting to squirm.

Note: this isn't because his philosophy is so far left. Committed democratic socialists argue their case all the time. They have an easier case to argue because it all sounds so fair and noble-minded, while their opponents on the right have to get people to pay attention to results down the line, a harder task. But Obama, whom I would call a democratic socialist, is doing a lousy job of arguing his case.
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