Unlike his campaign where he seemed to be thoughtful and analytical, he seems to adopt a cookbook approach to governance, like a chess player who can only see one move ahead.
"Seemed" being the operative word. He was borne up on his own soaring, gauzy rhetoric and a sycophantic press. Now we see the reality: Obama is both ignorant and arrogant. He doesn't know economics, he doesn't know history, he doesn't know geopolitics, he doesn't understand health care, and worse, he doesn't think he needs to know because he is Barack Hussein Obama.
He operates on left-wing ideology. Unfortunately, left-wing ideology, with its myopic insistence on fitting the entire world into a simplistic model of exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed, colonist and colonized, has very little to do with the reality of the world's many interdependent actors, both large and small.
Obama has already hit a wall in his Mideast peace process delusions, as the Israelis balk and the Arabs (predictably) refuse to give him even the smallest gesture. Now gauzy rhetoric is meeting unpleasant reality in healthcare as well. Obama is going to have to invent another story that at least sounds plausible, but it's not easy when you are a total economic illiterate. |
