While there is still much to learn about the scandals and controversies swirling around the White House like ominous dorsal fins in the water, the nature of President Obama’s troubles is becoming clear. The best defense of his administration requires questioning the premise of his presidency.
“Republicans paint us as liars or idiots. In fact, we are closer to being idiots.” This is the administration’s best defense so far.
It was offered to CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson by an anonymous adviser involved in the White House’s disastrous response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
Well-intentioned human error rarely receives the recognition it deserves. People want to connect the dots, but this is only possible if it is assumed that all events were deliberately arranged by human will. This is the delusion that underlies all conspiracy theories, from the Kennedy assassination lunatics to the “real” events of 9/11.
Behind all such delusions lies the assumption that government officials we dislike are omnicompetent and completely hostile. The truth is closer to this. They mean well, but they can’t do much, very well.
This brings us to the other side of the conspiracy theory – call it the redemptive fantasy: if only we had the right government with the right leaders, there would be nothing we couldn’t do.
It’s been a while since we’ve had a self-proclaimed redeemer president. John F. Kennedy certainly dabbled in the myth that experts can solve all our problems, even though much of JFK’s messianic status was imposed on him posthumously by the media and intellectuals. You really have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson to find a president who harnessed the saving power of politics as much as Barack Obama.
His presidency was based on the fantasy that “there’s nothing we can’t do” through government action if we put all our faith in it – and, by extension, in him. We are the ones we have been waiting for, he tells us, and if we surrender to a post-political spirit in which we put aside our differences, as America (allegedly) did during other “Sputnik moments” (one of his favorite expressions) we can “give jobs unemployed”, heal the planet and even “create a kingdom [of heaven] right here on Earth.”
For Obama, the only thing standing between America and redemption is politics, specifically obstruction by unhinged Republicans and others clinging to antiquated and somewhat illegitimate motives. Opposition to gun control is irrational because “the government is us.” Reject warnings “that tyranny is always lurking,” he told Ohio State graduates, because a self-governing nation cannot tyrannize itself.
But suddenly, as the administration falls into the trap of mistakes of its own making, the curtain falls on the cult of expertise and the fantasy of statist redemption. At the beginning of the IRS scandal, before the agency’s initial lies were exposed, David Axelrod defended the administration, claiming that “the government is so vast” that the president “cannot know” what is going on “underneath it.” Of course, it was Obama who once said, “I know more about politics on any particular issue than my political directors.”
That is, when things are going relatively well. When the scandal hits his fans, he goes from “the government is us” to talking about his own agencies the way a tsar might dismiss injustice in some Siberian backwater. The pride of omnicompetence gives way to the statement “cheer up, we are idiots.”
Many of his defenders now say it is unfair to hold him to too high a standard. He’s just a man, just a politician. Oh well.
Meanwhile, Obama insists he is outraged. And if it’s true, that’s nice. But so what? The president never seems to have fully understood that the founders were smarter than he is and that Americans are not as stupid as we think. His outrage has nothing to do with it.
Free people will have legitimate differences of opinion on political issues. A government this immense – no matter how huge it may be – is doomed to abuse its power, especially in a climate where a savior president continually delegitimizes dissent (and journalistic scrutiny). Government officials will sometimes act like idiots, not because they are naturally stupid, but because a government that takes on too much will make an idiot of anyone who thinks there are no limits to what he can do. This alone is a good reason to fear tyranny. Indeed, it would be idiotic not to do so.
