Naivete

Naivete

I can't really summarize Protein Wisdom's observations about Obama's foreign policy naivete:

[W]here Obama means conciliation, nations and institutions that are predisposed so to do will see only weakness in such symbolic acts as bowing before the House of Saud. It is naive to think otherwise. It is naive to think that American DVDs will play on British players. It is naive to search for the Austrian language equivalent of “wheeling and dealing.” It is naive to swallow the hype regarding AGW, or to believe that cap and trade can solve the imaginary dangers that CO2 emissions subject us to–though once again that is counterbalanced by cynicism regarding the ends. It is naive to believe that Hamas or Hizbullah are at all interested in a two-state solution. It is naive, albeit cynical, to believe that the government can direct automobile companies to produce automobiles that consumers will want to buy with the money that they won’t have as a result of the government growth initiatives that he wants them to underwrite.

And as others on the right side of the blogosphere have been pointing out with regard to Obama’s Capitulation Tour, his view of American history and the role of America in the world is exactly what you would expect from a red-diaper baby (“You may say I’m a dreamer!”). Everywhere Obama goes, he apologizes in his uniquely arrogant way for the presumed prior arrogance of the US, as he imagines it. But when Obama refers to the US, he does not mean himself, and he does not mean the US citizens who believe as he does. He isn’t apologizing for his country, he’s apologizing for those in his country who believe differently from him. Obama himself is never to blame for anything, foreign or domestic. He has inherited problems? Well, what President has not?

And why shouldn’t he be naive and cynical? Obama has never been responsible for anything his entire life. He was a figurehead at the Harvard Law Review. He somehow managed to graduate from Columbia, apparently, without having to pass its language requirement, which, until proven wrong, I’m going to insist was in place at the time he was there. He wasn’t responsible for the waste of $150 million poured into radical school reform in Chicago with no positive benefit.

I was surprised to find out that Obama's well known job as president of Harvard Law Review seems to have been rather a figurehead position:

It reminds me a little bit of my experience with him when he was president of the Harvard Law Review. You know, I hesitated to say a lot about this during the campaign because I really thought maybe it wasn't fair. That maybe, finally, when he got to be President, this would be a job big enough to engage and hold Barack Obama's sustained interest, because really, is there a bigger job out here?

[...]

[W]hen he was at the HLR you did get a very distinct sense that he was the kind of guy who much more interested in being the president of the Review, than he was in doing anything as president of the Review.

A lot of the time he quote/unquote "worked from home", which was sort of a shorthand - and people would say it sort of wryly - shorthand for not really doing much. He just wasn't around. Most of the day to day work was carried out by the managing editor of the Review, my predecessor, a great guy called Tom Pirelli whose actually going to be one of the assistant attorney generals now.

He's the one who did most of the day to day work. Barack Obama was nowhere to be seen. Occasionally he would drop in he would talk to people, and then he'd leave again as though his very arrival had been a benediction in and of itself, but not very much got done.

I've described Obama as the Affirmative Action President--and this just adds more evidence to that.

I had a friend who worked for one of the aerospace firms in Southern California in the late 1970s, at a time when there was a serious shortage of qualified black engineers. (No surprise: the educational system in much of the country had made it difficult for blacks to get a decent education, both because of segregation and the generally poor quality of many urban school districts.) His supervisor's boss was one of those affirmative action wonders that were so common at the time: a guy who had not the faintest clue what any of the people who supposedly worked for him, actually did. But he was hired because of the color of skin, so that the company could fill in all the right forms for EEOC.

I saw a lot of that at the time: people with degrees from diploma mills who were paid to do nothing at all, except be the black Ph.D. with the job title of "systems engineer." (I'm serious about this being a diploma mill. This guy worked full-time for one of the aerospace companies, and somehow managed to complete a B.S. in Chemistry, a M.S. in Physics, and a Ph.D. in Cosmology, over a period of three years.)

I interviewed one young man who IBM had hired in Westlake Village straight out of college, and after 17 months, he had done almost nothing except read magazines. I spent a lot of time probing, because I wanted to make sure that he would come across well on job interviews. He had done perhaps two months of actual work, before being pushed aside to read. He was IBM's Hispanic professional in charge of filling EEO quotas. I have no idea whether he was capable of doing anything or not. I don't know if IBM knew it or not. What a waste.

And as bad as these affirmative action placeholders were, I saw something worse: minority professionals who were assumed to be incompetent because so many other minorities holding professional jobs were there only because of skin color. I remember one mainframe programmer that I placed at a job, a young lady from San Francisco. She knew what she was doing, and her references were positive about her skills. (After a while checking references, you learn to distinguish genuine enthusiasm from a reference who is saying good things who doesn't mean it.) But I noticed that while she had one job that actually gave her a lot to do, and where she had apparently been pretty effective, a subsequent job had made no real use of skills--except her skill as being a minority quota filler.