Amateur Hour
By Pat Racimora on February 12, 2009 at 8:55 PM in Barack Obama, Qualifications
These days my ears hurt a lot whenever I turn on TV news shows. Those who control how we will be forced to live appear to be digging us even deeper into an 8-year-old hole. And the one now trying to lead the new pack is a man with no experience in doing what he is doing. Even after a few days in office, it shows.
Kathleen Parker , writing for the Washington Post, says it so well.
The first however-many days of Barack Obama’s presidency have been a study in amateurism.
Many suspected that Obama wasn’t quite ready, but kept their fingers crossed. Optimistic disappointment is the new holding pattern.
What’s missing from Obama’s performance isn’t the intelligence that voters acknowledged in electing him. It’s the experience they tried to pretend didn’t really matter. Experienced politicians, after all, got us into this mess.
Absent is maturity — that grown-up quality of leadership that is palpable when the real deal enters a room. There’s a reason why elders are respected. They have something the rest of us don’t have — yet — because we haven’t lived long enough. We haven’t made the really tough decisions, the ones that are often unpopular.
Parker goes on to discuss what we at No Quarter have also been saying for a long time. We have a President who wants—needs, really—to be liked. That right there should have been a reason enough to refrain from running for this particular office in the first place. His inexperience alone is likely to reveal itself in a myriad of actions (or, as likely, inactions) that will result in confusing, confounded, ill-conceived, and wishy-washy decisions. You know the old saw: “He who seeks to please everyone ends up pleasing no one.”























