My daughter has always been an exceptional student. She is very bright and works very hard. In college, she would study enough to feel that she had mastered even the most difficult material. When she arrived at Medical School she discovered that no matter how much she studied, and no matter how bright she is, she could never master the quantity and complexity of all the material she was expected to learn. This led to several painful conversations where she complained of how difficult Medical School could be and how impossible were the expectations of her and her classmates. I explained to her that the tests were designed to be so difficult not only because of the sheer quantity of the material but for a more important, more deeply subtle reason. Impossible tests were part of the creation of a Doctor. In the real world, Doctors are often faced with having to make life and death decisions and recommendations with insufficient data. In a great many situations it is impossible to know enough to be able to offer any certainty to our patients (who, under duress, often want and need our certainty to reassure them.) Medical students who come to their education with a history of academic excellence and the youthful arrogance to believe they can master anything academically, quickly learn humility and come to understand that they not only do not have G-d-like judgment based on their degree but of necessity cannot have G-d like knowledge with which to treat their patients.
This is a round about way of getting at what troubles me so much about our current choices for President. I worry that both John McCain and Barack Obama evince certainty about issues where there can be no certainty. There are going to be innumerable times and places where a President must make decisions and must do the best he can under trying circumstances. Yet, when Barack Obama casually and unknowingly makes diplomatic blunders, and then acts as if his reversal is of no consequence, or John McCain suggests he knows best how to manage complex issues like the role of CO2 in climate, their lack of appreciation of the limits of their knowledge is troubling.
At the same time, we are certainly complicit in this; the public colludes with our politicians when we surrender our judgment to theirs and fail to hold them or ourselves to standards that correspond to reality. Fro example, Charles Krauthammer makes the eminently sensible point that if we want to decrease our use of fossil fuels, the best way to do it is to keep the price of oil high, rather than create a new bureaucracy to establish a cap and trade system that will offer all the disadvantages of a government bureaucracy (including bureaucratic immortality) and none of the advantages of a free market. (He would establish a floor price for oil, supported by taxes if necessary, which would leave more of the money here rather than sending our cash overseas to peopel who do not have our best interests in mind.) He knows that such an idea would be electoral suicide because Americans want to be fooled into believing that the government can reduce our dependence on foreign oil while refusing to drill for oil at home while simultaneously keeping the price down. This can't work but if a politician points that out, the MSM will savage him or her.
Beyond the foolishness of cap and trade, which might more accurately be referred to as the lifetime lobbyist and lawyer full employment full bill, lies the greater concern over the apparent failure of Obama and McCain to understand, let alone pass, the Rumsfeld test. They seem to not recognize that there are not only known unknowns but, even more importantly, unknown unknowns, and this is troubling.
John McCain has the advantage of having faced tremendous adversity. He restricts his certainty to relatively circumscribed areas. He is certain that McCain-Feingold will protect us form corrupt officials and mitigate the influence of money on our politics. He has been shown to be spectacularly wrong and as time goes on it is possible that the Supreme Court will continue to slowly mitigate the worst excesses of the McCain-Feingold assault on free speech. He is certain that AGW is real and threatens the planet and that cap and trade will be a market driven solution. He is wrong on this in too many ways to mention, but our economy is robust enough and growing (over the longer term) fast enough as part of a global economy that has a current doubling time of 15 years that the worst ills from cap and trade will be mitigated. Beyond these two issues, I do not see a lot of evidence that McCain underestimates the complexity of the world or his human limitations in being able to manage that complexity.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, repeatedly offers evidence that he sees himself as capable, by virtue of his superior intellect and superior judgment, of solving problems that he is in no way capable to solving. In commenting on Barack Obama's unforced error yesterday, Ed Morrissey makes an important point:
Another Obama flip-flop: Jerusalem
Barack Obama had to backtrack on foreign policy yet again today, this time on Jerusalem. He tried to outdo John McCain at AIPAC yesterday by insisting that Jerusalem remain the undivided capital of Israel. The Palestinians erupted in anger at that statement, and by the end of the day they had Obama backpedaling:
Facing criticism from Palestinians, Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged today that the status of Jerusalem will need to be negotiated in future peace talks, amending a statement earlier in the week that Jerusalem “must remain undivided.”
...
Obama quickly backtracked today in an interview with CNN.
“Well, obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations,” Obama said when asked whether Palestinians had no future claim to the city.
Yes, obviously. Unfortunately, in learning a lesson on foreign policy, Obama managed to anger both parties and forced them into making public demands that only make diplomacy more difficult later. This is what happens when candidates with no experience in diplomacy and foreign policy think themselves experts in both.
How many of these can we expect to see with Obama in the White House?
Ed Morrissey was absolutely correct to pick up on the "obviously." Someone who has just made an error and dismisses it by saying that he obviously knew what he showed no evidence of knowing, is someone who doesn't appreciate his own limitations. It was, in fact, not at all obvious from Obama's initial statements to AIPAC that he understood that the final status of Jerusalem is a hotly contested issue which is subject to negotiations. It is probable that he was simply telling his audience what he thought they wanted to hear, yet if that were the case, his slip is even more egregious, not because it represents a type of pandering seen so often from politicians, but because it suggests a complete lack of understanding of the very real stakes and issues in the Middle East. Did he not know or care that the Palestinians, with whom he has been close in the past, would object?
Despite Michele Obama's constant complaints about how hard her life has been, the reality is that Barack Obama has led a rather charmed life. (I am not discounting how difficult it is to grow up abandoned by your father, but neither he nor Michelle attribute their difficulties, such as they are, to his upbringing; she, at least, places the blame for their difficulties on the white establishment, and he says nothing that contradicts such a position.) He lacks the humility that can accompany setbacks and failures.
Even while Barack Obama holds himself out as one who can solve our problems through hope and change, he gives little evidence that he appreciates that there are levels of complexity and intractability to our problems that he has not yet plumbed. Ronald Reagan was roundly criticized by the MSM and elites as having a simplistic approach to complex problems, yet his ideology offered a framework through which he expressed a deep humility at his ability to solve all our problems. Conservatives believe that we should rely on people to solve their own problems, since they are closest to the problems and government solutions, of the bureaucratic "one size fits all" variety, have a long history of evolving and persisting to failure.
Barack Obama has an ideology that sees the government as the solution to myriad problems for which it is unsuited and he appears to lack the humility that comes from the understanding that he doesn't know as much as he thinks he knows.
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