*Private Obama: *The /New York Times/ says that he is learning on the
job <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/world/29commander.html?_r=1&hp>.
He is the first president in four decades with a shooting war
already raging the day he took office --- two, in fact, plus
subsidiaries --- and his education as a commander in chief with no
experience in uniform has been a steep learning curve. *He has
learned how to salute. He has surfed the Internet at night to look
into the toll on troops.* He has faced young soldiers maimed after
carrying out his orders. And he is trying to manage a tense
relationship with the military.
(Emphasis added.)
I believe privates learn how to salute on their first day in the army.
It would be a rare private who did not know how to use the Internet to
find information on casualties before joining the army. Obama has more
learning to do; if we are lucky, by the end of his first term he will
know as much as the average sergeant.
If he applies himself intelligently. The article says two things
general things about Obama, that he looks for information on his own and
that he really isn't all that interested in military problems. The
first tells me that he does not know how to use his staff --- an
essential skill for a top commander. The second tells me that he may
not know even as much as the average corporal by January 2013.
Perhaps the /Times/ should have told its readers about Obama's ignorance
of military matters during the 2008 presidential campaign. (His
ignorance isn't a surprise to me and probably isn't a surprise to you,
but I am still impressed by how many people chose, deliberately, not to
think about it.)
(Obama's ignorance may explain why Defense Secretary Gates agreed to
stay on. Gates may have believed that the nation needed someone to help
Private Obama, and so he stayed on out of patriotism.)
- 12:09 PM, 29 August 2010 [link]
<http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/August2010_4.html#jrm9088>
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