I can’t tell whether David Brooks thinks that President Obama is delusional, duplicitous, or just a plain, old, ordinary, garden variety politician from his recent rather harsh column in the New York Times:
You can see the ecstasy of Washington promise-making spread joy from soul to soul. Infected by these visions, automakers vow that in three years they will have created a resurgence of enthusiasm around the Chevy Aveo. Financiers vow they will build an entirely new banking industry that doesn’t rely so much on loan repayment. Health care executives vow that in three years they’ll perform CAT scans at Kinko’s.
Some say these are just meaningless promises that ignore hard choices and that no one has any intention of keeping. But this is ungenerous. At these events, the president has taken former rivals and has joined them in the holy bonds of mutual fantasy. He has taken a divided nation and has given us photo-ops to bind us and remind us of our common humanity. Business lies down with government. Management embraces labor. You call it what you will; I call it beautiful.
Oh, my.
My own view is that it’s a combination of guile, an inflated sense of self-importance, and wide-eyed innocence. In other words, mostly a plain, old, ordinary, garden variety politician.
I think you’re partly right: it’s guile. I don’t think Obama has even an ounce of wide-eyed innocence.
I think that President Obama and many of his advisors are extremely ignorant of how businesses actually operate. Since I’m inclined to be kind, I interpret that as innocence.
If you zoom out..the big picture really tells the story…the old ways of doing business have burnt themselves out…our old ideas and ways of doing business will have to change, the planet can’t support a business as usual much longer..and either we do it and do it thinking about the big picture, or it will be done for us..one crises after another.
Larry, that short paragraph had a lot of interesting claims with no substantiation. Do you care to debate them?
I’d take it as a representation that Obama really doesn’t have a lot of “depth” in terms of political power at the national and state levels beyond his office. He didn’t come to office with a pre-existing political power base beyond his campaign, which means that he can’t as easily go into “attack” mode.