Barack Obama is no John Kruk

If you’re not a baseball fan, you’ve probably never heard the story, and even if you are, you might not remember it.  Today, John Kruk is a scruffy, rotund talking head, but back in the day, he was a scruffy, rotund hitter for the Padres and Phillies.  He was a good one, too; for all that he walked up to the plate looking like an unmade bed a lot of the time, he could pretty much roll out of bed and collect a hit, so it worked for him.  He was a lifetime .300 hitter with an on-base percentage just south of .4oo, and he had enough power to keep pitchers honest; he made the All-Star Game three times in a ten-year career and could fairly have gone once or twice more.Anyway, I no longer remember the precise situation, but on one occasion, Kruk was confronted by a female fan with a disparaging comment—I think to the effect that he looked too fat to be an athlete (as noted, he was far from svelte).  Slow of foot but quick of wit, Kruk immediately responded, “Lady, I’m not an athlete, I’m a ballplayer.”It was the absolute truth, and dead on point.  Bo Jackson was an athlete.  John Kruk was a ballplayer.  Bo looked a lot better in uniform, but Kruk did more to help his teams win.  Why?  Because being an athlete is about having talent; being a ballplayer is about having skill.  Talent is innate; skill is learned, developed, honed.  Talent limits what you can do with skill, but skill is ultimately what wins ballgames.I got to thinking about this when I read Michael Gerson’s Washington Post column “GOP at the Abyss.”  Ultimately, I agree with Jennifer Rubin’s assertion that Gerson gets the matter backwards; but I also think he gets there in the wrong way.  Gerson writes (emphasis mine),

[American conservatism] has been voted to the edge of political irrelevance, assaulted by a European-style budget and overshadowed by a new president of colossal skills and unexpected ambition.

The vote I’ll grant, but that’s happened before.  The budget I’ll grant, but the mere fact of the budget doesn’t spell curtains for conservatism; if the budget fails, the results are likely to be quite the contrary.  That President Obama’s leftist ambition was “unexpected” I most emphatically do not grant; many people saw that one coming, including Sarah Palin, Stanley Kurtz, and (for whatever it’s worth) me.Most significantly, though, I cannot agree with Gerson’s statement that Barack Obama is a president of “colossal skills.”  He’s a president of colossal talent, of rare political gifts, and few actual skills.  The recent commentary on his dependence on the teleprompter, while unimportant in itself, illustrates this.  He has great ability, but very few political and governance skills because he’s done little to hone them; he’s spent more of his career campaigning for jobs than actually doing them, and it shows—when he needs to accomplish something, he reverts to campaign mode because that’s the only way he knows how to get anything done.  That’s the only area in which he’s done any significant work to develop skills to utilize his talents.  When it comes to actually governing, he’s the Bo Jackson of politicians—he can hit the ball a country mile when he makes contact, but he has absolutely no clue what the pitcher’s going to throw him next.Of course, this is by no means a permanent situation; skills can always be developed, and the president now has a powerful incentive to develop them.  He’s bound to get better, and as he does, the task of opposition will grow more difficult for the GOP.  But that doesn’t mean the GOP ought to buy in to Gerson’s gloomy analysis, because the fact is, Barack Obama isn’t the colossus at the plate that Gerson takes him for.  He might be pretty good with the roundball in his hand, but in this game, he’s no ballplayer at all; he’s just an athlete.  He’ll hit the meatball and the hanging curve, but a good pitch at the right time will get him out.  The GOP just needs to have confidence in their stuff, focus on their control, and go after him.