Peggy Noonan wrote a very insightful piece
yesterday on a root of Obama’s problems with Obamacare. In short, she points out (as I did back in June) that Obama is not very interested in actual administration. And he has precious little experience
at it. His thing has always been .
. . words.
It’s
a leader’s job to be skeptical of grand schemes. Sorry, that’s a conservative
leader’s job. It is a liberal leader’s job to be skeptical that grand schemes
will work as intended. You have to guide and goad and be careful.
And
this president wasn’t. I think part of the reason he wasn’t careful is because
he sort of lives in words. That’s been his whole professional life—books,
speeches. Say something and it magically exists as something said, and if it’s
been said and publicized it must be real. He never had to push a lever, see the
machine not respond, puzzle it out and fix it. It’s all been pretty abstract
for him, not concrete. He never had to stock a store, run a sale and see lots
of people come but the expenses turn out to be larger than you’d expected and
the profits smaller, and you have to figure out what went wrong and do better
next time.
People
say Mr. Obama never had to run anything, but it may be more important that he
never worked for the guy who had to run something, and things got fouled up
along the way and he had to turn it around. He never had to meet a payroll,
never knew that stress. He probably never had to buy insurance!
And he has surrounded himself with Liberal to
Leftist ideologues, often young, who are, yes, idealistic, who put being right,
er, being enlightened and politically correct far above the boring nuts and
bolts of administration. The
result? (And I find this passage
from Noonan’s post particularly revealing.)
For
four years I have been told, by those who’ve worked in the administration and
those who’ve visited it as volunteers or contractors, that the Obama White
House isn’t organized. It’s just full of chatter. Meetings don’t begin on time,
there’s no agenda, the list of those invited seems to expand and contract at
somebody’s whim. There is a tendency to speak of how a problem will look and
how its appearance should be handled, as opposed to what the problem is and
should be done about it. People speak airily, without point. They scroll down,
see a call that has to be returned, pop out and then in again.
It
does not sound like a professional operation. . . .
And
when you apply this to the ObamaCare
debacle, suddenly it seems to make sense. The White House is so unformed and
chaotic that they probably didn’t ignore the problem, they probably held a
million meetings on it. People probably said things like, “We’re experiencing
some technological challenges but we’re sure we’ll be up by October,” and other
people said, “Yes, it’s important we launch strong,” and others said, “The
Republicans will have a field day if we’re not.” And then everyone went to
their next meeting. And no one did anything. And the president went off and
made speeches.
Because
the doing isn’t that important, the talking is.
So what we have here is a President and an
administration that is very interested in words, but not terribly interested in
the logistics of actual administrating.
As Charles Krauthammer wryly opined yesterday, “It’s sort of touching the
way [Obama] believes in the power of rhetoric, his rhetoric, in denying and
trumping reality.” It is not
unlike the dictator who thinks he can go out on his balcony, make a ringing
declaration, and it is so!
Well, sometimes that does not work as intended.
And, although Obamacare is so ill conceived it was
fated to be a disaster, this wordy ideological trait of the Obama
administration has certainly made things worse, thereby making the Downfall of
both Obamacare and Obama that much more likely.
------
Downfall is an ongoing series anticipating and
tracking what I expect will be the self-destruction of Obama.
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