saturn return to sender

I think people and the media (mostly) miss the point. It’s necessary to ask whether the policies the Obama administration brings to the office are the right policies. The debate—the tension between the essential conservative and liberal viewpoints—is healthy. Obama’s policies may result in good or ill, or (more likely) some of one, some of the other. I am not an expert on the economy, for example, and though I do tend to think that power should not be concentrated among the empowered, and so am for Obama’s policies, I am definitely ready to admit to the value of the conservative point of view.

But one thing Obama brings (returns?) to the office, and to government, and to our culture, which is in my mind unequivocally, marvelously, giddiness-inducing good, is the intellectual honesty required to be able to tell the difference. If we can’t honestly look at ourselves outside of ideology, it doesn’t matter what the policies are, because we won’t have honest access to the feedback of their effects, we can’t correct course when something goes wrong, and Rome will burn. This has nothing to do with liberal versus conservative philosophies, but does seem to have to do with the current Republican party versus the anyone else, and in particular versus the “reality-based community.”

An example. An Obama official admits the inevitable about the recovery plan: there will be wasteful spending. “How could it not?” columnist Gail Collins says.

Much of the stimulus money is being channeled through state and local governments, through tens of thousands of governors, mayors, county executives, transportation commissioners, parks superintendents and so on. Try to imagine the person in that pyramid with the lowest I.Q., and you’ll understand that there’s a dead-tree planter hidden in there somewhere.

(Note: That quote is the columnist, not the Obama representative.)

Can you imagine a Bush official agreeing that his plan will not work flawlessly? I can’t. A Bush administration official would talk around the point, avoid the question, generalize it to some kind of heroic-abstract “challenge” we must overcome. I keep coming back to the same metaphor (is it a metaphor?): Obama is a grown-up. Bush was a child. A well-intentioned, but petulant and untalented child.

Panicked and unable to understand why the complex world doesn’t bend to his will, a child will invent fantasies about the forces in play against him. Then he understands, he feels like he’s back in control. A grown-up accepts that the world is complex, evades understanding, that he can’t control it, but he takes responsibility and grapples with it anyway, on its own, ineffable terms. The grown-up is concerned with solving problems. The child raids windmills.*

I should say, it seems that Obama is bringing intellectual honesty to the government, it seems that he is a grown-up. We’ll see how the next years play out, but I am optimistic.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 8:30 am and is filed under rants, raves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.