House of Eratosthenes

Must mean the Terror of the Tundra has recently blackened some eyes and bloodied some noses. It has always been like this; she has a victory and we all start discussing “qualifications.”

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowki told CBS News’ Katie Couric today that she would not support Sarah Palin for president because Palin lacks the “leadership qualities” and “intellectual curiosity” to craft great policy.

I’ve been paying this an appropriate level of attention, which is to say very, very little. I don’t know how accurate or precise that final paraphrasing is, or if it is, if someone has come along to nail Murkowski to the wall for her apparent lack of understanding about how our legislative and executive branches work together. She evidently hasn’t been sufficiently curious to educate herself about this.

Or, about how ungodly expensive it has been in the last two or three generations to pay the bills brought to us by “great policy.”

Is ObamaCare great? If it is, I’d hate to see “magnificent.”

Meanwhile…it’s it awesome that the current White House occupant is intellectually curious and adequately qualified? Oh wait…

Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st-century presidency? Obama has looked to many models of leadership, including FDR and Abraham Lincoln, two transformative presidents who governed during times of upheaval. But what’s lost in those historical comparisons is that both men ran slim bureaucracies rooted in relative simplicity. Neither had secretaries of education, transportation, health and human services, veterans’ affairs, energy, or homeland security, nor czars for pollution or drug abuse, nor televisions in the West Wing constantly tuned to yammering pundits. They had bigger issues to grapple with, but far less managing to do. “Lincoln had time to think,” says Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University. “That kind of downtime just doesn’t exist anymore.”

Among a handful of presidential historians NEWSWEEK contacted for this story, there was a general consensus that the modern presidency may have become too bloated. “The growth is exponential in these last 50 years, especially the number of things that are expected of the president,” says presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, who had dinner with Obama and a handful of other historians last summer. Obama aides speaking on background say that the president’s inner circle can become stretched by the constant number of things labeled “crises” that land on his desk—many of which, like the mistaken firing of Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod in Georgia or the intricacies of the oil cleanup in the gulf, could easily be handled by lower-level staff. “Some days around here, it can almost be hard to breathe,” says one White House official who didn’t want to go on the record portraying his boss as overwhelmed. Another senior adviser says that sometimes the only way to bring the president important news is to stake out his office and “walk and talk” through the hall.

Hat tip to Rick for that one.

So two years ago we got together and formed these preconceived notions about who can do the job and who cannot — Obama even got a Nobel Prize for all the “hope” that surrounded the good work He was going go do.

Having been thoroughly schooled in the plain and simple fact that there’s no way to predict with certainty who’s going to be a smashing success and who’s going to be a dismal failure…our news wires, or whatever takes their place in this day and age, are burning up with our frenzied attempt to do it all over again.

I agree Palin is unqualified — if we recognize a new definition for the word. If the job does require lots of bullshitting, she lacks the skill and she lacks the experience.

I just don’t think people have fully grappled with the dynamics of an equation in that time period after the parties have nominated their candidates. You loathe this party’s principles, but the other party has nominated a guy you don’t think is qualified. So you’ll pull the lever for the party you loathe? People generally don’t do that. A small portion of the time, they’ll vote third-party or write someone in…or, they’ll “hold their nose” and vote for the guy who represents the vision they could learn to tolerate.

I remember lots of discussion from presidential elections past about who is & isn’t qualified. What I try to recall is, some of this buzz between the nomination at the party’s convention, and the general election. Regarding the top guy on the ticket. Not the #2 guy, who often is introduced very shortly before the convention, as was the case with Palin back in ’08. The top dog. “But is ______ qualified to serve in the presidency?”

I don’t recall anything, which is interesting because after the convention is when the debates start. We typically have three during that season.

When people use this word, it demonstrates to me that people are not wired to learn from their mistakes. There seems to be a unified common mindset behind this, closely resembling your mindset you maintain when you hire someone. There are baseline “qualifications”…if you don’t meet those, then best of luck in your job search and get the hell out. But it isn’t an on-off pass-fail thing because the field has to be narrowed down to a single winner, and once in awhile you’ll meet the guy who’s super-duper qualified. Unless there’s a reason you don’t want him. In which case he’s “overqualified.”

But two years into a failed presidency, it is clear that using popular consensus to arrive at these answers is problematic. And that’s putting it charitably.

You’d have to be nuts to argue there are no problems involved in it.

So is Murkowski nuts? Is she qualified to get dressed in the morning and go walking around?

Going by recent events, she’s not qualified to even get her name on the ballot.

Lisa Murkowski’s sole relevant qualification for high office was that Daddy had the right to appoint her. And I think that’s all that needs to be said about that.
- Rich Fader | 11/16/2010 @ 09:51
Yes, yes…. “the Presidency is too complex for any one man.” Isn’t this the exact same job, same bureaucracy, same everything that that drooling idiot George W. Bush ran with such Machiavellian efficiency as to “lie us into war”?

I know, I know: if they grokked to facts, evidence, and reason they wouldn’t be liberals. But this has got to be my favorite lefty meme of all time: Bush wasn’t smart enough to breathe without cue cards, but somehow he got everything he wanted. Obama, by contrast, is the distilled essence of uber-intellectual brilliance, yet he can’t even seem to find the levels of power the Chimperor manipulated with his prehensile tail.

Since I’m a conservative, I realize that history didn’t begin last week. I seem to recall this “the presidency is too big / Americans are ungovernable” stuff applied to one James Carter as well… and then Reagan — that imbecile — used the exact same apparatus to get everything he wanted.

Funny, that. It’s almost as if our completely objective, totally nonpartisan media is missing something….
- Severian | 11/16/2010 @ 12:11
Brilliant professionals built the Titanic; a farmer built the ark. I wonder if the farmer was qualified?
- Daniel | 11/16/2010 @ 17:34
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowki told CBS News’ Katie Couric today that she would not support Sarah Palin for president because Palin lacks the “leadership qualities” and “intellectual curiosity” to craft great policy.

(rolls eyes) What-fucking-ever. The good Senator is just annoyed that Palin endorsed Murky’s opponent in the last election.
- cylarz | 11/16/2010 @ 23:58

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

We’re All Abuzz Once More About “Qualifications”Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

We’re All Abuzz Once More About “Qualifications”
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010