The Irate Nation Est. 2001

Presidential Inexperience Goes Worldwide

Fred Barnes, "What Obama Accomplished in Asia" - from the article: Obama struck out on his entire agenda in China and he acquiesced as the Chinese subjected him to the humiliation of a choreographed town hall meeting with student members of the Young Communist League. And he suffered through a 30-minute news conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao in which no questions from the media were allowed. Presidents normally come away on visits to foreign countries with "deliverables"--that is, tangible signs of progress like a treaty signing. All Obama got was a list of things the United States and China would do in the future. There's a name for this: diplomatic boilerplate.

As disgraceful as the President's inexperience is, there may be no way to get the American people - on both the Right and the Left - to admit that politics is a skill which requires practice and involves making hard decisions better than most people can. Our culture of individualism means that we think ourselves automatically self-governing and independent, and to a degree, we are. But many of us on the Right complaining about Obama's inexperience would vote someone in who had absolutely no clue how to govern if they said the right things, and sometimes not even that. I like Sarah Palin as a person, but she's got a long way to go in terms of being articulate and less shrill, her record in Alaska is solid but very limited, and the fact that she pretty much is the face of the opposition is a serious problem for those of us who know that the future can made or broken by politics. I know for myself, I've only got one aspect of the solution: don't let things get dumbed down, don't let news analysis degenerate into conspiracy theory. But I don't know how to express the more positive aspect of what political discourse has to become, except that to say if I wanted to run for President, I'd be spending a ton of time studying problems and talking to experts, asking how people get things done given the bureaucracy, trying to meet the right people who would help and instruct, trying to understand how Congress and the judiciary work and what concessions need to be made to them on any given issue. In short: I wouldn't run for Senator and then immediately run for President. Nor would I surround myself with a fan base that only told me what I wanted to hear, not what I needed.

Off-topic, at my blog - Rant: The Banality of Conservatism