Whether or not this is true of President Obama, it’s an insightful analysis.
Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:
His essential problem is that he has very poor judgment. And we don’t say this because he’s so famously bright—academically credentialed, smooth, facile with words, quick with concepts. (That’s the sort of intelligence the press and popular historians most prize and celebrate, because it’s exactly the sort they possess.) But brightness is not the same as judgment, which has to do with discernment, instinct, the ability to see the big picture, wisdom that is earned or natural.
Mr. Obama can see the trees, name their genus and species, judge their age and describe their color. He absorbs data. But he consistently misses the shape, size and density of the forest. His recitations of data are really a faux sophistication that suggests command of the subject but misses the heart of the matter.
I’m still working out how much of this I agree with as it applies to the President,* but that’s not my real interest in this passage. What interests me is Noonan’s insightful distinction between “brightness” and judgment.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone through a similar analysis while reading scholarly articles about North Korea. So many bright people have constructed intricate, coherent, and rational packages of incentives for North Korea to disarm, to reform, and to better the lives of its people — and still do, to this day, in spite of everything! — while misjudging much more fundamental things: Why do they think Kim Jong Il/Un wants those things as much as they want him to want them? What makes them think he’d go along with their plans? Why should we trust him? What outcomes are their plans likely to have achieved a year after we’ve made the down payments? What kind of behavior are we incentivizing and perpetuating?
Asking bright people such questions can be like asking the gnomes about Phase 2. They repeat Phases 1 and 3 — a little more slowly, this time — and patiently re-annunciate why the plan’s logic is so unassailable, even (especially!) from Pyongyang’s perspective. They’re almost always correct. And it’s almost always irrelevant that they are. In projecting their own reason and altruism onto the little gray men in Pyongyang, some of the world’s brightest people sound as oblivious to the bigger picture — as lacking in judgment — as those missionaries who set off in a shiny new air-conditioned tour bus to read Bible verses to the Taliban … in Korean. The outcomes were not dissimilar.
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* I know I don’t agree with the word “faux.” I think the sophistication is real. I also agree that sophistication is overrated.
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Update: Here’s a good example of what I’m talking talking about. Phase 1, throw money at North Korea. Phase 3, peace! HT: Stephan Haggard.
That’s why the Glans Plan follows a specific sequence:
1. PRC stays out.
2. ROK annexes DPRK.
3. USA gets out.
Isn’t that the coolest plan ever?
I think it’s the foundation of a good plan.
This is the big question, and I agree that brightness and judgement are not the same things. What I ponder is, where does the stubborn resistance to making a judgement come from? The analogy of a family that includes an abusive drunk, but refuses to admit it pops into my mind. Say he beats his wife, and if she complains to a family member she gets told she should try not to make him angry. There’s some sort of fear involved in refusing to publicly call a bully a bully. Perhaps because we assume it will inevitably lead to open conflict, and that we might lose? I’m not sure if this is the right dynamic, but Joshua’s experience with bright people who absolutely will not consider another point of view leads me to think the problem is about emotion in general, and fear in particular.
I doubt the guy is bright at all. Look at videos where he has a teleprompter malfunction and he turns into a babbling idiot. He has been promoted beyond his capabilities every step of the way since his teen years.
Eric, are these videos on Youtube, or only in your brain?
Just to add a clarification, I’m not talking about Obama specifically. His administration isn’t going after North Korea, true, but look at the history of other administrations, other governments, and various commentators. There’s a widespread reluctance to call a spade a spade, and when something is as toxic as the North Korean government, you have to wonder. Although here I’d like to add that George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech didn’t help. He used “moral judgement” as a cover to launch the disastrous Iraq War, and in so doing gave a big boost to knee-jerk appeasement.