Spoiler warning: It’s his own blessed fault.
(Via Hot Air Headlines) I’m mildly fascinated about why David Gergen apparently doesn’t get what is ridiculously obvious to probably everyone reading this:
…it has now become equally puzzling why [Barack Obama] has not become more sure-footed in foreign affairs. He is one of the brightest men ever to occupy the office, and yet his learning curve has been among the flattest.
It is has been my experience that young people who constantly get told that they are the brightest people in the room grow up into middle-aged people who unconsciously assume that they are the brightest people in the room, and thus have no particular reason to improve themselves. Fortunately, the universe usually deals with this by placing individuals in tough situations where they quickly learn the limits of their abilities, typically with the enthusiastic application of negative reinforcement. The trouble there, alas, is that some deeply, deeply unlucky individuals go through life continually being coddled and kept from the worst consequences of their mistakes; invariably, they eventually end up in a situation where they cannot be further protected, and the resulting meltdown is ten times worse than regular events of idiocy or incompetence.
See also: Barack Obama, Presidency of.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: Contra David Gergen, Barack Obama already is a lame duck. And he will remain so until he does some very simple, very straightforward, things to maybe get his Presidency back on track again. His call: I have a plan, either way.
The thing is I’ve never seen where O’bama was the brightest person in the room. No flashes of insight or intelligence, no signs of intellectual curiosity, nothing. It’s like he learned everything he wanted to in high school and just stopped there, never wanting to learn anything more. I’d argue that his whole presidency has been a lame duck one since he had promise but never really put forth the effort to accomplish anything. Even O’bamacare isn’t really his project but that of a Democrat congress and he managed to screw even that up. If Gergen didn’t want a lame duck president he should have voted for someone else.
Agreed, “Obamacare” is a misnomer. I think that caught on just because calling it “The Affordable Care Act” would be ridiculous.
Disagree.
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Pelosi and her apparatchiks wrote it, sure, but Obama was the sales hustler who got people to buy it…
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That sales job started when he was a nobody candidate with no real 2008 prospects who *maybe* could get an agency head gig out of Hillary…
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It’s his, as much as it’s anyone’s, so .. I’ll go ahead and call it Obamacare until 2015 .. then I’m calling it Demcare.
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Mew
The people who proclaim he’s the brightest person in the room do so because he tells them they’re right. As far as they’re concerned, his ability to recognize their brilliance is proof of his.
If one assumes that his highschool use of pot impaired his learning from then on, it makes perfect sense that his fellows with pot as a formative influence might filter that from their perception, and mistake him for being ever so bright.
As I have said before, he is the anthropomorphic personification of the Dunning-Kruger Effect…
Also contra Gergen, I reject the idea that Obama is one of the brightest men to ever occupy the office. He’s never struck me as more than a hack-level grad student.
Thankfully Obama spent most of his political capital on gun control, If he had chosen immigration instead, he would’ve signed a immigration bill and went into the sequester fight with the GOP in retreat. The gun control push ended his electoral momentum, and he’s never regained it.
What political capital he had left he wasted pushing an immigration bill through the Senate only for it to die in the House.