The Peter Principle in the White House

As was the case more than once during the campaign, SNL’s doing a better job of dealing with the news (in its own inimitable way) than the people whose job it is to cover it; this sketch captures the deer-in-the-headlights cluelessness of the Treasury Secretary so well, it’s almost painful to watch.  For all his résumé, it’s clear that Timothy Geithner is out of his depth in doing the job he’s been given; he has risen to the level of his incompetence.Unfortunately, it isn’t just Secretary Geithner.  We were repeatedly told during the campaign that Barack Obama was going to improve America’s reputation around the world—but that doesn’t appear to include our allies, since we’re not even two months in to his administration and he’s already managed to infuriate the Brits.  Though delivered in the “stiff upper lip” tone that Americans associate with our closest ally, the outrage in the British media at the way President Obama responded to their prime minister’s visit is clear.  I’m sure they particularly appreciated this curt dismissal of their concerns from an official in the State Department: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”True enough, I suppose, except of course for the fact that unlike those other 190 countries, the UK has been a staunch and consistent ally of our government . . . Now, as the whole David Brooks episode clearly demonstrated, this White House is remarkably thin-skinned when it comes to criticism and complaint, and so when the firestorm erupted, they defended the President—if you want to call this a defense (emphasis mine):

Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been “overwhelmed” by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest.British officials, meanwhile, admit that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister.But Washington figures with access to Mr Obama’s inner circle explained the slight by saying that those high up in the administration have had little time to deal with international matters, let alone the diplomatic niceties of the special relationship.Allies of Mr Obama say his weary appearance in the Oval Office with Mr Brown illustrates the strain he is now under, and the president’s surprise at the sheer volume of business that crosses his desk. . . .The American source said: “Obama is overwhelmed. There is a zero-sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.”

In other words, as Power Line’s John Hinderaker summed it up, “Don’t blame us, we’re incompetent!”  Except that there’s one other factor referenced in the Telegraph article:

A well-connected Washington figure, who is close to members of Mr Obama’s inner circle, expressed concern that Mr Obama had failed so far to “even fake an interest in foreign policy”.

It seems clear that indifference—to foreign policy in general and Great Britain in particular—also played a part in this:  Barack Obama and his administration simply didn’t care enough about Gordon Brown’s visit or our alliance with his country to try to be competent about it, or even to try to hide their lackadaisical attitude about it.That said, the portrait painted here of an overwhelmed president who’s unable to keep up with the demands of his job in any sort of effective fashion is deeply worrying, and particularly when combined with his own expressed opinion that he’s “very good” at the job.  This is a member of the Self-Esteem Generation, all right.  It’s no wonder he inflated his résumé (follow the links from that post), took credit as a Senator for work he didn’t do, and gilded the lily in his autobiography to make his first job look much better, and his decision to leave it much more meaningful and meritorious, than it really was; he’s the product of an educational system that’s been more concerned in recent decades with making sure students feel good about themselves than about giving them the education they need to live lives that merit a healthy self-respect.  It’s all of a piece with him taking a job at a law firm, slacking on billable hours, and spending much of his time working on his autobiography (which he didn’t even manage to finish, at least while he was there).Up until last November, none of this has been much of a problem for Barack Obama; he’s had the brains, the grace, and the charm to keep wangling his way along and retelling his story to suit himself without anybody minding enough to cause him any problems.  After all, nothing was really riding on him.  The law firm wasn’t depending on him; the Illinois State Senate got its bills passed whether he did any work or just voted “present” (though the man who ran the shop was happy enough to boost him by putting his name on bills anyway); the US Senate kept running along whether the junior Senator from the state of Illinois was in his seat or not.  Being President of the United States, however, is different; and now, this is a problem.  This is the first actual job he’s had since his days as a community organizer (which were, by his own admission, unsuccessful) in which his job performance actually matters—and it’s one of the biggest jobs in the world, and his performance is all-important.  Now, it matters immensely whether he gets things done, and whether they’re the right things; and unfortunately (for us), he has never cultivated the habit of digging deep and digging in to get things done, he has never cultivated the endurance necessary to true accomplishment—in Nietzche’s words, he’s never practiced “a long obedience in the same direction”—and so he doesn’t have the habits and skills and life patterns necessary to do that job effectively.This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, since it was all there in his résumé, for anyone who cared to look; but too many people didn’t.  The McCain campaign tried to make the point, but they couldn’t get beyond talking about “experience,” as if it was simply a matter of time served, when it was really a matter of character.  This allowed the Obama campaign to counter it emotionally, by making “experience” mean “old, tired, and four more years of Bush”; it allowed them to counter it mathematically by adding Sen. Biden to the ticket, when in fact Sen. Biden’s career in the Senate basically consisted of nothing much more than Sen. Obama’s time in the Senate, spread out over many more years; and perhaps most fatally, it allowed them to portray Sarah Palin, when she was named as John McCain’s running mate, as equally “inexperienced.”  Thus what should have been a powerful comparison for the McCain campaign—that Gov. Palin had accomplished far more of substance at a similar age than Sen. Obama—ended up being used against them.  People looked at the numbers and missed the real point:

Two things would leap out from Sarah Palin’s résumé—a pattern of overachievement and a pattern of actually getting things done. Two things would also leap out from Barack Obama’s résumé—an undeniable wealth of talent and an equally undeniable dearth of accomplishments. . . .In truth, Sarah Palin is the kind of employee virtually every enterprise seeks—the kind who gets things done. And Barack Obama is the kind of employee a company hires only when it’s in the mood for taking a risk and willing to wager that the candidate’s past performance isn’t predictive of his future efforts.

So far, that risk isn’t looking too good.