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    Obama Goes Smarty-Pants; 'Skeptics' Favor More Traditional, Dumb Cabinet

    Sometimes I'm given significant cause to wonder about my country.  One cause of such rumination is when I read things like this:

    But skeptics say Obama's predilection for big thinkers with dazzling résumés carries risks, noting, for one, that several of President John F. Kennedy's "best and brightest" led the country into the Vietnam War. Obama is to be credited, skeptics say, for bringing with him so few political acquaintances from Illinois. But, they say, his team reflects its own brand of insularity, drawing on the world that Obama entered as an undergraduate at Columbia and in which he later rose to eminence as president of the Harvard Law Review and as a law professor at the University of Chicago.

    Really?  After eight years of some of the most naked cronyism in modern American politics, voices in the so-called "liberal media", aka MSM, etc., now have the gall to decry insularity?

    What are we really supposed to be doing with our government?  I think that no one, not even cynically, would openly call for dumb governance.  That seems somehow beyond the pale even for the most extremely indignant among us.  However, we don't want our government too smart either, as this guy notes:

    The libertarian University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, who is not related to Joseph Epstein, worries that the team's exceptionalism could lead to overly complex policies. "They are really smart people, but they will never take an obvious solution if they can think of an ingenious one. They're all too clever by half," he said. "These degrees confer knowledge but not judgment. Their heads are on grander themes . . . and they'll trip on obstacles on the ground."

    Umm.. yeah.  Incidentally, "too clever by half" is probably the best, most concise way to describe libertarian philosophy that I can think of.  Shades of Randian Greenspan admitting massive flaws in his fundamental world-view anyone?

    Bar libertarianism, may I wax Seinfeldian and ask, "Who are these people?"  Or, perhaps more colloquially, "WTF?"  Is my country really this anti-intellectual?  Are we not smarter than a fifth-grader?  While I'm perfectly fine with the argument that a gilded resume does not good governance guarantee, haven't we put cart well before horse here in denouncing prelimary appointments as being all-too-smart for their own good?

    Two things bother me about this, not the least of which is the seeming lack of attention toward our sitting administration.  Why the obsession with pronouncing Obama's incoming cabinet DOA when the currrent POTUS is sitting on his thumbs as our economy implodes?  Somehow I imagine here being aboard the sinking Titanic only to overhear people discuss how awful the next captain will be.

    Some of this is just par for the chorus at this point.  It's all too easy to proclaim whatever you like about the incoming admin.  It's too insidery.  Or too outsidery.  It's too diverse.  It's not diverse enough.  You can say mostly whatever you'd like about it right now.  You can point at a lump of clay and call it a vase.  You might end up being right.

    Worse than this, to me, is that this is the year of Sarah Palin.  Plumb and Plumber.  Though I'm not exactly sure how smart Sarah Palin actually is, I'm fairly confident that she's no great intellect.  It's also been plain to see that there is a significant section of the American public which is more than fine with this.  In fact, it's celebrated.

    And, of course, none of this is lost on the well-educated vanguard of public discourse.  So, it's no great matter that major macroeconomic policies in America proved to require more complexity than the simplistic, or I suppose not "too clever by half", world-views of people like Mr. Greenspan or Mr. Epstein.  They can still engage in whatever amount of pernicious public hand-wringing and premature prognostications of profuse profundity that they like.  I say, "Poppycock."  Their view is parallax.

    People prefer, when proffered, simple explanations, but allow me to posit a premise: Some things are complex. Perhaps many things.  Though we may delight in the idea that the universe is somehow, fundamentally, built according to a very simple and elegant design, could we but see it, but there is little evidence that this is truly so.  There is complexity from the sub-atomic on up, and this is no exception in economics or sociology or governance.  As we evolve, our views and ideas evolve because our information evolves.  It becomes more complete and, as this happens, our ideas more complex.

    The American religion of simplistic ideas needs to die.  I'm not suggesting that things be made needlessly complex, but rather that we recognize, with intellectual honesty, when they truly are complex.  Though the cliché is tired, I don't want a damned plumber prescribing the macroeconomic policies of the 21st century because he's got a collection of simple and beloved ideas about the way things oughta be.  I want leadership that is smart and capable and, above all, intellectually honest about what they do and do not know.  Didn't we just have eight years of the opposite?  Aren't we just now hearing feigned apologies by the likes of Dubya and Condi about how, oops, I guess our a priori method of foreign policy didn't really work after all?  And yet, we still make room in our public discourse for the ideological obtuse pronouncements of those who always have the same story: Our ideology is infallible, it is reality that is imperfect.

    Though Obama's election and approach to governance are heartening with respect for moving a different direction, America's culture remains ill in this respect.  I would gladly welcome a brighter day, pun absolutely intended.

     

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    Comments

    there r smart people and there r nerds. like sarah is a smart person b/c she knows stuff that people care about like not letting the goverment take all of our money and give it to people who don't deserve it. but obama is a nerd b/c he's like not a normal person and he thinks he's soooooooooooo smart. i never thought that america would vote for a nerd b/c when wally lipschitz who is a nerd from my school ran for class president he only got 3 votes and like i wrote before, miley cyrus got more votes than him and she doesn't even go to our school. and then wally got some guns and stuff and was going to kill everyone but the police got him. and that proves that nerds are not normal people.

    but u probably don't understand b/c u r probably a nerd Foot in mouth too. and u r a TOTAL nerd Foot in mouthFoot in mouthFoot in mouth!!!!! i heard that u didn't even go to PROM!!!!!!!!! i went to prom every year since i was 11. Kiss


    Ok, your best post ever DF. Since I know you'll wanna see HOW I reached that conclusion, the breakdown showed -5 for backing complexity, -7 for not seeing how bad Bill Hicks would've hated Summers and Geithner, but... +7,000,000 for leading with a Bill clip. And +17 for bashing Libertarians and the too clever by half quip - bingo. On the issue, I'm glad we're gonna get some smarts. Smarts beats dumbs. And I believe Obama himself has some serious smarts. BUT. Let's be smart and tell the truth on some of the Cabinet choices. Summers and the economic team, we really DO have to ask, "If you're so smart, how come you just drove us over that cliff?" That's an ugly question, and the truth produces only one bottomline. Unless & until they explain that, they've got no business being there, other than to "send a signal" to some big money people. Gates? Well, maybe he's smart now. But when he was up to his ass in Iran-Contra and wanting to bomb & invade Nicaragua, well... that was dumb. Richardson? I like him, but not maybe totally smart. Hillary? Pretty damned smart. So, right now, I think we've got a mixed bag - based just on their own records. But of course, it isn't just gonna be them, on their own. My hope is that Obama's own smarts - and heart and vision - is gonna show in how he directs these people, and who he surrounds them with. But for the Republicans, and Libertarians to be mouthing off, now, about this... well... that's just almost too dumb to believe.

    Absolutely, but this is a different type of criticism than is being forwarded in the WaPo article.  Your criticisms are, erm, how I do say.. valid.  They involve specific people and specific questions about specific decisions they've made, sans CV scrutiny.

    For what it's worth, Glenn Greenwald has impressed me a lot lately by doing exactly that.  In fact, I haven't seen anyone on the left doing as good a job of keeping things honest after election day.

    Of course, another drawback of this travesty is that in spending too much time listening to one guy from a high-profile U bad-mouth people from other high-profile U's is that it avoids a discussion with any real content or specificity.  Then again, maybe these guys really don't dislike the specific choices so much?


    I wonder if anti-intellectualism is new or if it's just a new refrain of the city vs. country fight that we've been having since the country was founded. In any case, they were talking about the orginial "Best and the Brightest" quote on NPR this week. I missed most of it (because it came on when my alarm did and I'm not predisposed to retain a lot of information first thing in the morning), but what I did get was that the quote was meant to be ironic and in reference to the eggheads who got us in to Vietnam.

    As you say, things are complex. Smart people have a greater capacity to be stupid sometimes than even the truly stupid people do, i.e. Greenspan. To be sure, sometimes having the smartest people in the room doesn't help to solve the problem. But given the choice between well-educated, well-informed (even if somewhat arrogant and stiff) Harvard and Yale grads and the Michelle Bachmanns of the world, I'd choose the Ivy leaguers every single time. Unless the problem is how to kill the Thanksgiving turkey. In that case, I want Palin.


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