Obama Is Overwhelmed - Road to the Middle Class

IF YOU READ Solzhenitzyn’s August 1917 you will recall his description of the Russian commander on the front with Germany. He was in a daze, confused and demoralized by the blizzard of incoming information.

That’s why it takes a couple of years in any war to sort out the good generals from the bad ones. It’s a question of temperament. Men who were sitting comfortably in a cradle-to-grave bureaucracy are suddenly called upon to make life-and-death decisions every hour. Most of them can’t make the transition. They get overwhelmed by the confusion and the uncertainty, the “fog” of war.

Right now, I’m right in the middle of reading General Grant’s Personal Memoirs and we are just coming up on the capture of Vicksburg. It’s interesting to read a man who had the temperament to be a general. The critical thing that Grant can do is form a mental picture of the correlation of forces. He can tell what’s a threat and what is not. And he’s good at confusing the enemy. For instance, he sends General Sherman off on a feint up the Yazoo River to the north of Vicksburg before rafting his troops downstream to the south of Vicksburg. He notes that he later found out that the feint caused all kinds of heartburn to the Confederate defenders of Vicksburg.

So when we read that "Obama is overwhelmed," we knuckledraggers who read a bit of military history say: Oh ho. I’ve heard that one before.

The fact is that after the election Obama and his team had a choice. They could continue on Plan A, the plan to ratchet up government spending in health care, in education, and global warming response. Or they could say: Whoa, Neddy. They could say: Whatever we may have wanted to do if we had our druthers, we don’t. It’s Plan B time. And the Obama administration won’t add up to a bucket of warm spit if we don’t fix the credit system. Now.

But they didn’t. They were inexperienced and lacked a strategic vision of what is important and what is just noise.

Actually, that’s true not just of Obama and his team but of most Democrats and liberals.

The important stuff for government to do is the guy stuff, securing the nation against enemies foreign and domestic. All the other stuff that government does is fluff. Mostly, especially in health care, in education, in welfare, and in pensions, it is doing stuff that people ought to be doing for themselves.

But liberals and Democrats get this upside down. They believe that the Nanny State stuff is the important stuff: the mothering on health care, education, and affordable housing. Then they regard defense as imperialism, and policing as domestic oppression.

Sooner or later, when you get things completely upside down, reality catches up with you.

No wonder President Obama is overwhelmed. He’s got his world-view wrong and, in consequence, he’s got his priorities wrong too. The trouble is that the world won’t wait for him to figure it all out.

So the American people will have to pay for his education. And there’s no guarantee that, at the end of his crash course in reality, he will “get it.”

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Comments:

Posted by: Diana Barry Blythe on 03/23/09 9:16am

Yes, Obama is overwhelmed. Biden said quite early on that we can't afford on-the-job training for a President. Oh, well . . . ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The President needs to focus on national protection.Yes. Individuals and individual states should care for their own health, etc.? You Betcha. Calling this "guy stuff?" Fine. (rolls eyes) But saying anything in government that isn't "guy stuff" is "fluff" suggests that "female stuff" or "baby stuff" or anything else is inconsequential. I'm just saying . . .

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Faith & Purpose

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Mutual Aid

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Green, Reinventing Civil Society

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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