Obama’s problem is he’s too smart

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Dana Millbank:

Seeking a template to understand the enigmatic president, I consulted three leading academics in the fields of psychology and behavior. With their help, I put Obama on the couch and came away with a reasonably coherent diagnosis: There’s too much going on in the poor guy’s head.

“What distinguishes Obama particularly is the depth and carefulness of his thinking, which renders him somewhat unfit for politics,” said Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at the University of Virginia. “He is a brilliant social and political analyst, which makes it harder for him to play hardball or to bluff.”

Obama’s strengths and weaknesses come from his high degree of “integrative complexity” — his ability to keep multiple variables and trade-offs in mind simultaneously. The integratively simple thinker — say, George W. Bush — has one universal organizing principle that dominates all others, while the integratively complex thinker — Obama — balances many competing goals.

Millbank also believes it wasn’t Gilligan’s fault that the SS Minnow survivors were stuck on that island, it was because the Professor was too smart to save them.

What really peels my potato is the fact that MILLBANK GETS PAID TO WRITE THAT SHIT!

BTW:

This will be my last post until the next one.

The peasants are revolting

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I’m still not sure what Obama and the rest of Republicans are up to. They’ve always talked about getting rid of Social Security and Medicare, but I thought they finally learned their lesson and knew better than to actually do anything about it.

There is a reason that they call Social Security “the third rail of American electoral politics.” As Ronnie Raygun put it, “Touch it and die.” Any politician who really tries to cut back or end benefits under Social Security or Medicare will get a close-up view of a new phenomena known as a “flash lynch mob.”

Back during the eighties and nineties there seemed to be a core group of people in Washington DC who were rational and reasonable. They understood that we need a certain amount of government and that we need tax revenues to pay for it. They knew that the New Deal didn’t take place in a vacuum.

Lately I can’t tell if the people in Washington are stupid, insane, or part of some incredibly devious Lex Luthor-type plot to re-set the clock to 1890 so we could re-live the wonderful days of laissez-faire capitalism and robber barons.

I’ve reached the depressing conclusion that as bad as things are right now they will have to get a whole lot worse before the voters get mad enough to force real change. We may have to let them take the New Deal away before people realize there was a reason it was enacted in the first place.

If they finally repeal the New Deal, what’s next? Will they try to bring back slavery?

“The Thirteenth Amendment is socialism!”