*Camille Paglia Hasn't Given Up On Barack Obama: *She isn't even close
to giving up on Barack Obama, but she does think that he is making
rookie mistakes, and that he needs better staff
<http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2009/04/08/bow/index.html>.
At a certain point, however, Obama will face an inescapable
administrative crux. Arriving at the White House, he understandably
stayed in his comfort zone by bringing old friends and allies with
him -- a team that had had a fabulous success in devising the
hard-as-nails strategy that toppled the Clintons, like crumbling
colossi, into yesterday's news. But these comrades may not have the
practical skills or broad perspective to help Obama govern. Like
Shakespeare's Prince Hal ascending the throne, Obama may have to
steel his heart and banish Falstaff and the whole frat-house crew.
Obama's staffing problems are blatant -- from that bleating boy of a
treasury secretary to what appears to be a total vacuum where a
chief of protocol should be. There has been one needless gaffe
after another -- from the president's tacky appearance on a
late-night comedy show to the kitsch gifts given to the British
prime minister, followed by the sweater-clad first lady's
over-familiarity with the queen and culminating in the jaw-dropping
spectacle of a president of the United States bowing to the king of
Saudi Arabia. Why was protest about the latter indignity confined
to conservatives? The silence of the major media was a disgrace.
But I attribute that embarrassing incident not to Obama's sinister
or naive appeasement of the Muslim world but to a simple if costly
breakdown in basic command of protocol.
We know so little about Obama that we do not really know why he made
that bow. Is he ignorant of basic protocol, as Paglia says? Or is it
something more sinister? (There have been reports --- I haven't tried
to verify them --- that Obama got considerable help getting into Harvard
Law from a well-connected Saudi. If those reports are true, it would be
interesting to know /why/ he got that help.)
Paglia makes a logical error in ascribing Obama's mistakes to his
inexperience, rather than his leftism. Obama's mistakes could be due to
both. For the sake of the country --- and the world, I hope that she is
right, and that Obama does learn from his mistakes, but I can't say that
I expect she will be proved right.
One reason I have come to that tentative, but unhappy, conclusion is the
many legal extremists
<http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/March2009_4.html#jrm7233> Obama
has named to high positions. One wouldn't necessarily expect Obama to
know much about international protocol, but you would expect Obama to be
well informed about the views of people like Eric Holder, Harold Koh,
and Dawn Johnsen..
- 8:51 AM, 8 April 2009
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