Jennifer Rubin Poses the Question...

that many are afraid to ask. Granted, it is a bit early to seal the verdict for this administration and this president. But I defy supporters of this administration to answer this question deftly.

Many supporters will undoubtedly trot out the usual narratives of "the opposition has been whipped into a frenzy by special interests" and "at least Bush and Cheney are gone." But, press any of them for substance..or show them evidence that the economy is not improving, that our fiscal projections are quite dire, or that every hot-spot on the planet is deteriorating, and you will get a "what, me worry?" and a 'shoulder-shrug' from the Left.

Why Isn’t He Better at Being President?

Jennifer Rubin - 11.17.2009 - 8:08 AM

Obama was the subject of many a pundit’s admiration. So smart! So worldly! Harvard Law Review. And so eloquent. That his speeches upon further reflection were practically unintelligible or self-parodies (are we the ones we have been waiting for? are the oceans really going to recede?) didn’t much matter. He was so smart.

So why isn’t his presidency going better than it is? Seriously, if he’s so smart and well-educated, shouldn’t he have come up with something better than the stimulus boondoggle? Shouldn’t he have gotten sanctions passed on Iran or figured out how not to offend both sides in the Middle East non-peace process? As Bret Stephens points out, we have gotten “bloated government, deficits and health-care bills; paralysis over Afghanistan and Iran; the convulsions over Gitmo and the CIA torture memos.” And then the mind-numbingly idiotic decision to put KSM in a Manhattan courtroom to preach the wonders of jihad and go after his captors. None of this seems very smart.

Well, there are several answers to my headline question. First, the punditocracy confused credentials with knowledge or smarts. A Harvard Law degree does not necessarily confer on one the insight that even if we can try KSM in courtroom, we shouldn’t. Obama seems not at all familiar with the operation of free markets. He has only a dim grasp of how we won the Cold War. And it’s quite apparent that whatever credentials the president possesses, they didn’t enable him to perceive the motives of the mullahs.

Second, even intelligent and well-schooled people can be poor managers, bad decision makers, and indecisive leaders. They can be narcissistic and passive-aggressive. They can be impervious to constructive criticism. Indeed, these are the very qualities that have tripped up the president. And very smart people, come to think of it, may be susceptible to many of these faults because they believe they’re so darn smart.

And finally, as Ronald Reagan said, “The trouble with our liberal friends isn’t that they are ignorant; it is that they know so much that isn’t so.” In other words, they have a set of views at odds with the way the world operates (meekness will endear us to our enemies, terrorists will be impressed with American legal procedures), the American political scene (the public wanted a lurch to the Left), and basic economic realities (you can load mandates and taxes on employers without impacting employment). These views are a great impediment to a successful presidency.

This isn’t an argument against smart or well-educated people being president. But it is a reminder that being so darn smart isn’t everything, and in Obama’s case, it seems not to have gotten him very far. But he has time. Maybe with experience, he’ll wise up.

John Steele Gordon has a follow-up

Jennifer asks a good question that is more and more on the minds of citizens and the punditocracy alike. Obama is so smart and so eloquent, and yet he has not, at least yet, succeeded as president domestically or in foreign affairs.

One answer, perhaps, is that being a successful president requires skills and attributes that Obama simply does not possess. Being “smart” is not among those attributes. Everyone who gets elected president is smart, for anyone who wasn’t could never make it through the world’s longest and most difficult political obstacle course. George Romney — no dummy by a long shot — came a cropper with a single ill-considered remark about having been brainwashed regarding Vietnam.

But being “supersmart” is not only no help; it is, I think, often a hindrance. Six future presidents were elected to Phi Beta Kappa as college undergraduates: John Quincy Adams, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Of those six, only Roosevelt could be considered a great president. Three of them, Adams, Taft, and Bush, were defeated for re-election, and Arthur couldn’t even get nominated for a second term. (His presidential reputation has been improving of late, however.)

And intellectuals, of course, are all too capable of thinking themselves into disaster. Remember George Orwell’s famous crack about “an idea so stupid only an intellectual could have conceived it.”

One might think that engineers, trained to deal with real-world forces, might make better presidents. But the only two engineers to reach the White House were Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, both terrible presidents.

So what makes for successful presidencies? It might be fruitful to compare what the two greatest presidents of the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, had in common. Neither were intellectuals (Roosevelt hardly ever read a book as an adult), but both were very “savvy,” not the same thing as smart. Both were master politicians, able to assemble and maintain coalitions. Both had immense charm. Both were first-class orators. Both had a great sense of humor and loved to tell jokes. Both were comfortable in their own skins and not given to introspection. Both had an abundance of self-confidence but no trace of arrogance. In both, the inner man was inaccessible, and no one felt he really knew what made either man tick. And both had that indispensable handmaiden of greatness — luck.

How many of those attributes does Barack Obama have?