The
buck may or may not stop moving somewhere between here and there:
One comes away from Baker’s account with the sense what what really offends Obama about ISIS is that the terrorist group has forced him to make a decision:
Mr. Haass said attention to nuance was a double-edged attribute. “This is someone who, more than most in the political world, is comfortable in the gray rather than the black and white,” he said. “So many other people in the political world do operate in the black and white and are more quote-unquote decisive, and that’s a mixed blessing. He clearly falls on the side of those who are slow or reluctant to decide because deciding often forces you into a more one-sided position than you’re comfortable with.”
I don't know. Someone who's more quote-unquote decisive might not be so terrible. I mean, we don't want him to be "decisive" decisive, but he could at least make a multi-sided decision, provisionally.
13 comments:
Could we decide to decide later? I mean, not with a hard date or anything.
Given his previous lack of executive experience, this is not surprising.Sad yes, surprising, no. In 2008 I constructed an experience metric for US Senators who had become President. Going into the metric: 1) House of Representatives, 2) US Cabinet, 3) Governor, 4)Military. Only Warren Harding and Barack Obama scored a 0. And Harding at least had a dozen years or so of running a newspaper, so he did have experience in decision making.
We got what we paid for. Or in the case of most readers of this blog, we got what others voted for.
Also in the experience metric: Vice President.
Let's not rush to judgment. He is firmly equivocal.
We got what we paid for. Or in the case of most readers of this blog, we got what others voted for.
Not to worry, you paid for it, too!!
Just get Valerie to decide. She does most of the work load anyways.
Don't give it to John Fing Lurch Kerry, though. He'll spend 6 hours staring at it like he did on 9/11 2001.
There is a great quote by a CEO...believe of John Deere, but not positive...about decision-making. It was something along the lines of 'not being afraid to wander through the forest of ambiguity and uncertainty, but also not afraid to come out the other side'...unfortunately have not been able to find the original quote.
See also Koestler of Nuance:
http://photoncourier.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_photoncourier_archive.html#108742674553065522
But Obama is not always indecisive. In fact, he can be decisive to a point that I would consider ruthless. Neoneocon has written extensively about Obama's treatment of his early political opponents: his betrayal of his mentor, Alice Palmer; the mysterious unveiling of the divorce proceedings of two later opponents. These are small scale but they are evidence of decisiveness.
On a larger scale, Obama is apparently quite comfortable deciding who dies in US drone strikes. That's serious decisiveness and, frankly, I'm more than a bit uncomfortable having a President who's willing and able to make such decisions on his own.
Similarly, Obama is decisive about changing ObamaCare and other executive orders. When he waffles he seems to be not so much waffling as pausing to sniff the political winds. So I don't think the problem is decisiveness; I think it's something else. I'm just not sure what. Perhaps cluelessness?
I think when his own immediate personal interest is clear, he's capable of decisiveness. Having to make a difficult choice about policies that involve the welfare of other people is another matter. For one thing, he can't be sure which choice will most redound to his personal benefit, without knowing how a policy is likely to turn out, and being able to judge how a policy is likely to turn out is way beyond him. It's a lot easier to talk about gray areas and the inscrutability of fate.
From David's link:
"In vital emergencies like the present [1950], when man stands at a crossroads which leaves the choice of this way or that, the difference between the very clever and the simple in mind narrows almost to the vanishing point, or even turns to the latter's advantage. It is amazing to observe how in a crisis the most sophisticated often act like imbeciles. Imbued with the mental habits of the "neither-nor" attitude, of looking for synthesis or compromise--a profoundly human attitude of essential value in its proper field--they are incapable of admitting, even to themselves, that there are situations in which an unambiguous decision is vital for spiritual and physical survival. Faced with destiny's challenge, they act like clever imbeciles and preach to neutrality towards the bubonic plague. Mostly they are victims of a professional disease: the intellectual's estrangement from reality."
Also from Mr Foster's link: The first demands that we should refuse to see the world divided into black and white, heroes and villains, friends and foes; that we should distinguish nuances....
Of course, the dialectic is nuance; it's just coarser than the Know Betters like. And the Universe is built up from the crap shoot of binary dice. Crap shoots being indecision personified, allowing as they do to let mere chance make the decision.
And the aggregate of Yea, yea, Nay, nay is highly nuanced--just look at the fragmentation of American politics, and of the paragon of international politics, the UN.
Oh! There's nuance everywhere! It's so hard to choose....
These are small scale but they are evidence of decisiveness.
These are backstabbing--a subset of indecision, since they demonstrate an inability to face the matter. The drone strikes and Obama's evident pride in deciding which target he'll kill today combined with his difficulty in deciding to take on larger foes also demonstrate fear of being the decider of large things.
Eric Hines
So long as they keep executing people, are they not Executives?
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