“Some people are born on third base and think they hit a home run.”
This quote refers to those who have an inherited financial or political advantage, or sometime just plain luck, but think that their brains had more to do with their success than they wish to recognize. Nassim Taleb in Fooled by Randomness explains how successes are often more the result of luck than brains or brilliance. The problem with luck as an ingredient to success is that it is hard to repeat. But when a string of lucky events does lead to success the victor often soon becomes a victim when the law of averages reasserts itself.
While so many cheered Obama’s election as a watershed event and praised his brilliance, I always thought he was born on third base. This is not to say that he is not a bright guy, though this has not been as vetted as many would like, but “intelligence is only a first step towards wisdom” (to quote Star Trek’s Mr. Spock), and wisdom seems to be in short supply in this administration.
This is a nation of commerce from Main Street to Wall Street. And this administration seems more unaware of the needs of commerce than any we have seen. As the little coffee shop in Chicago is drowned in Kafkaesque local bureaucracy, thousands of other small business owners have learned to lose respect for the power of government to control so many trivial and significant aspects of our lives. These small shop owners have families, friends, suppliers, and customers who share their stories and each story shifts their politics a little more rightward.
Most voters may not understand the economic intricacies of monetary and fiscal policies, or the root causes of the financial collapse, but they understand that unemployment is still too high and that health care is not getting cheaper. Three years after the election it is unsatisfying to keep blaming Bush, or the European economy, or the Japanese tsunami or whatever else the president can summon without taking any responsibility for our failures.
Obama won because he ran after a very unpopular president involved in a very unpopular war ended his term with a financial collapse of epic proportion on the eve of the election. The GOP contender ran a very timid and often inept campaign, and was outspent by multiples after Obama reneged on his pledge to limit his campaign to public funds. Given the huge advantage of these conditions, it is surprising that the vote was as close as it was.
The public wanted a change and was so willing to hope that Obama was the centrist he claimed to be that they either avoided much of the vetting process or simply chose to believe what they wanted to believe to justify their vote.
After the election the Democrats controlled both Houses and had a free reign to enact their pent up social fantasies. They failed to realize that the election was a tremendously lucky break, and not an endorsement of the progressive agenda they pushed. In fact this wrongheaded assumption quickly brought a strong reaction in the form of the Tea Party, a Republican winning Ted Kennedy’s seat, huge GOP gains in state governorships and other state offices, the trouncing in the subsequent House elections, stubborn resistance to the Health Care Act, and the growing popularity of Mitt Romney.
I predict Obama will lose by a much larger margin than current polls reflect. At this point he should be substantially ahead if he had any real chance of reelection. Blame mongering will only further weaken his credibility, and his statistically creative claim to be fiscally prudent is laughable. Demands for free contraception and gay marriage are minor sideshows to an administration of sheer incompetence and misguided ideology.
Obama supporter Artur Davis has switched parties. Obama has avoided overt support of the union in the Wisconsin recall election because they will get soundly defeated. Bill Clinton publicly praised Romney’s business career. Obama’s criticism of Bain Capital looks hypocritically ridiculous in light of the number of Solyndras he has funded with billions of dollars of our tax money.
Yet we are warned not to discount him. He is brilliant, we are still told. He is a shrewd and smart campaigner, we are still told. But the fact remains that however brilliant he seemed during his last campaign he has been a big disappointment and is incapable of glossing over his failures in office. In campaigns you can make commitments without clarity: one can hide behind clever slogans and rhetoric. Once elected, however, laws have real words and real consequences and such harsh realities provide no safe harbor.
His original victory may have had much less to do with his ‘brilliance’ than it had to do with the very fortunate series of events surrounding his campaign that is unlikely to repeat itself. His party governed like they hit a home run, but in reality they started out on third base.
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