BREAKING NEWS: New York Magazine Discovers That Obama Holds High Opinion of Himself, Is In Over His Head

I think there's an old saying about a horse that can perform basic mathematics -- you are amazed not that the horse is good at math (it isn't) but that it can do some math at all.

Similarly, the MFM -- two and a half years late to the game, but amazing even a few of them showed up for it at all.

In the third of Rouse’s baskets was the failure to use Obama’s gifts as a communicator to full effect. He was overexposed. He was in the weeds. The thread got lost. “With these big legislative fights, he was almost like a prime minister or negotiator-in-chief,” says the same official. “The price for that was, we lost the vision, the inspiration.”

Though Obama grasped this last critique, he dismissed the charges of aloofness and insularity. When business complained that he was hostile, he cited all the times he had invited CEOs to the White House. When donors moaned about the fact that at the first year’s Christmas parties, he had done away with the tradition of taking pictures with the guests, Obama scoffed, “Big deal, they’ve all got pictures of me before.”

Emanuel’s ad-hocracy, meanwhile, didn’t faze Obama. The president’s friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett sometimes pointed out that not only had he never managed an operation, he’d never really had a nine-to-five job in his life. Obama didn’t know what he didn’t know, yet his self-confidence was so stratospheric that once, in the context of thinking about Emanuel’s replacement, he remarked in all seriousness, “You know, I’d make a good chief of staff.”

Those overhearing the comment somehow managed to suppress their laughter.

Thanks to Slublog, via Moe Lane.

Correction: That's New York magazine, not The New Yorker. My original headline pretty much fudged the difference ("The New Yorker Magazine").

posted by Ace at 02:42 PM

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