The latest conservative talking point is that Obama so far has demonstrated incompetence. Their argument, through articles like this and this (or at least, in this case, POINTING to articles like this), includes hard looks at such things as his handling of the economy, the Gordon Brown thing, and the many Cabinet nomination withdrawals.
Anyway, all this got me thinking to President Bush, and how incompetence was one of the main charges leveled against HIM. So what makes “competence” in a President? Is it SIMPLY “making good decisions,” or is there something more, something that could be even a little more objective? Or is it all purely subjective? Does Obama have it, or is he, as Pagllia says in the second link, just giving ammo to Republicans? How does he differ in this way from Bush?
My rabidly Republican sister told me that Obama could not make a speech without a teleprompter. I told her we should be grateful that we have a President who can read a teleprompter and who does not make up words as he goes.
Another thing about competence: it’s almost always defined as incompetence. You’ll hear someone called incompetent ten times more often than competent. It’s much stronger as a criticism than as a compliment. Ford was competent; meh. Carter was incompetent; goddamn the sonofabitch.
Talking about competence in politics, maybe at all, is a shifty move.
Boy, that first article is some powerful stupid. I can’t bring myself to read the second.
The straightforward answer is that there is no straightforward answer. Running a country is not a simple task that can be gauged by one “competence” metric. A President can be good at some things and bad at others - as in fact most of them are - based on a huge variety of personal factors, such as intelligence, management style, political contacts and allies, ideology, moral compass, courage, so on and so forth.
I would further add that the same person can make a very fine President at one time in history and would be an awful President in another. George Washington was a great President in part because his personal ethics and morals were what the country needed at the time; I’m not entirely sure George would have been a good president for handling, say, the Depression (even if one grants him the education and understand of a man of that time.) To use an example from another country, Winston Churchill was a terrific Prime Minister for a UK that was fighting for the survival of moral civilization; he likely would not have been a good PM in a time of peace, and in fact his peacetime term was not one of enormous success.
It’s just absolutely bone-stupid for anyone, Republican or Democrat, to think they can assess Obama’s competency as President at this point. He hasn’t really DONE anything yet - oh, he’s done lots of things, but we don’t even know what the world is going to be like during most of his term. We can theorize that some moves are good (stem cell research ban lifted) and some pretty bad (continuing to give money to GM and Chrysler) but we really don’t know the shape of his Presidency and we don’t even know what attributes of Obama will come into play.
Is Obama smart? He’s damned smart, but Jimmy Carter was damned smart and a bad President. Is he inspiring? Absolutely, but so was Reagan and a lot of people on the SDMB think he was a bad President (I don’t, but he’s the easiest recent example.) Perhaps Obama will be courageous; but Grant was both morally and physically courageous, enormously so, and he’s ofted cited as a bad President. What about what Obama lacks? Well, Obama lacks accomplishment prior to taking office - but Herbert Hoover was arguably the most accomplished person to ever be elected President and his administration is not fondly remembered to say the least.
Nobody knows how “Competent” Obama will end of being, or even what “Competence” will be required. They elected the smartest guy and he seems like a decent human being and I doin’t think you can make a safer bet than that. Beyond that we shall see.
A lot of things help, but fundamentally? I’d say it’s that old standby, a Sense of Responsibility. With that, the other stuff falls into line. Without it, nothing else really matters.
Competence requires a person be able to consider a number of different situations that are before him; be capable of prioritizing them; recognizes what the situations are; is able to discover possible ways in which these situations can be influenced; is able to rationally weigh the pros and cons of these possibilities; is capable of choosing which actions to take; and is capable of causing these actions to occur.
At this point the state of the world disqualifies conservatives from expressing any opinion on the subject of ‘competence’. Or foreign policy. Or economics. Or science. Or, if they have ever read any Rand, literature.
We already have. It’s 1929 + environmental collapse. Short of starting an all-out nuclear war it is simply not possible for Obama to do worse. And it has been conservatives with their ‘free the hidden hand’ superstitious nonsense that has got us into this mess. And it is conservatives that have prevented effective action on climate change.
At this point you people have been proven disastrously wrong at every turn. You should recognise that fact and just sit humbly and quietly on the sidelines until you’ve figured out what the world is like and how it actually works.
And when you’ve come up with some other answer than ‘lower taxes on the rich’ for every problem from credit collapse to ingrowing toenails you can run it by us.
Unfortunately the fact that George W Bush was an imbecile does not validate every crazy Left-wing theory on every possible subject. You will only be able to blame Bush for so long. At what point are we allowed to evaluate Obama’s policies on their own merit?
Obama is still learning so he gets a pass (as he usually does). But given the economic situation, given all the problems, rightly or wrongly, expectations are high. He didn’t really make it easy for himself with all the hoopla in the campaigns and all the promises that he can no longer keep. The truth is, every criticism that has been levelled on him by his opponents are being proven correct by him.
He’s displayed a generous amount of naivete on a number of issues.
His reliance on teleprompters (even in small settings) make him look like an empty suit.
He double-talks a lot. He has diametrically opposite messages ready for the right audience.
Right now, I am certain that a lot of people are having buyer’s remorse and wondering - would another person perform as poorly as Obama. Probably not, but then again, he’s smart (but he’s not the smartest in the field) and he will learn soon enough.
I mean, George Bush may have been a bad President, but blaming climate change on conservatives is… well, it’s fricking insane. For one rather obvious thing, climate change can’t be effectively addressed by countries acting independently, and no real effective international agreement on climate change has ever ben reached. So unless there was some period of time in which conservatives conttrolled all the world’s governments, or were uniquely responsible for controllinge nough governments to prevent international cooperation on the issue, it makes no sense. And no, I don’t think Kyoto constitutes an effective plan.
Even if it had, in Canada we had a Liberal government - politically moderate and quite liberal by American standards - that signed off on Kyoto. Indeed, we were one of the first nations to do so. Then for eight years that same Liberal party, in power the entire time, did essentially nothing to enforce it, only coming up with a plan in 2005 and what they did come up with was a pathetic, half-assed load of hooey that wouldn’t have met our Kyoto commitments any more than it would have made me the Queen of the Nile. We pretty much ignored Kyoto’s very existence. Canada’s carbon emissions ballooned, growing by an estimated 25% over that period of time. And hey, why not? The treaty was DOA; since you could not enforce any other country’s application of it, no political party of any stripe in Canada could enforce it here.
In any event, climate change is not something that just popped into existence in 2000 and which has an easy solution. It’s the product of more than a century of increased use and dependence upon fuel sources that release carbon; you just as well might blame Franklin D. Roosevelt or LBJ or pretty much anyone who’s ever driven a car. It’s a problem created by the entire world in proportion to their level of industrialization, NOT political bent, and which is difficult to solve not because of “conservatives” but because of an international system, designed to promote and enforce the unassailable sovereignty of individual nation-states, that dates back to, at least, the Peace of Westphalia.
Sorry, but the truth is that climate change is everyone’s fault.