Ginny Says:
March 1st, 2010 at 2:35 am
Perhaps it is because I’m not a very good driver and have more conversations with my insurance company than they or I would like, but I honestly can’t imagine anyone who doesn’t know the difference between liability and comprehensive, that doesn’t know who is at fault in a rear end. That that someone is a lawyer makes it even stranger. What strikes me about this is that he must have gone through life with absolutely no curiosity about the world around him, no humility about what he didn’t know and no sense that he was responsible for anything.
How many times have we been told this guy is brilliant? How many times have we been told that George Bush was not only stupid but completely lacking in intellectual curiosity?
This is the mystery of Obama. There is some wattage there, obviously, but it has neither gone to intellectual accomplishments nor to practical knowledge. It all has gone to persuading a certain class of the Establishment that he is Presidential material.
I'm near the end of reading Game Change, a good juicy bit of gossip by Mark Halperiin. Halperin has bought into the idea of Obama as having intellect. I'm nearly through the book, and I can't think of any remark attributed to Obama that struck me as brilliant. Politically savvy, okay, staying calm under pressure, giving a charismatic performance, okay, but brilliant? there was nothing that Halperin described as a brilliant insight and I didn't see any signs of brilliance.
Yet Halperin plainly regards Obama as brilliant, where he calls Sarah Palin naive; yet to me, they seem very similar political figures: charismatic, charming, intensely competitive big game players who both entered "the Bigs" with great self-assurance before they were ready when handed the opportunity by others. Sarah Palin got the worst of it because she was dumped in with no time to prepare and she threatened the press' chosen candidate. There is really no excuse for how McCain mishandled his VP selection - he had SIX MONTHS to chose!
Obama used his time well and ran a good campaign, but I get the sense he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. Hillary ran a willful, dysfunctional, entitled campaign (she shut Bill and his people out until after Iowa, when it was too late to save herself), and Clinton fatigue was huge among Dems. Obama had Axelrod and Plouffe and a fawning press (even Halperin admits that much) to give him a perpetual tailwind. They were running in a year that would have favored any Democratic candidate. The one unexpected setback they encountered, Palin-mania, they did not handle well. They did not so much handle the financial crisis as just stay calm; they knew the crisis would hurt Republicans. McCain helped them by rushing back to Washington without a game plan so they stood back and let him do it. Did Obama plan this or did he just luck out? It's not clear.
So altogether, it seems to me that a lot of Obama's supposed brilliance came from comparison to the mistakes of his competitors, which came easy because the press covered for him and attacked his opponents mercilessly. Yet, even looking from the inside, Halperin hints at Obama's arrogance, but still buys the myth of Obama brilliance. It's a very powerful meme and to this day I do not understand it. I listened to Obama all 2008 & last year and heard nothing but liberal boilerplate, not even presented coherently. |
