Cantor: The President "Just Doesn't Get It"

Cantor had previously described Obama as "in over his head."

He offers a fuller outline of Obama's serious intellectual deficiencies to NRO.

Obama seems to think about issues on the level of babytalk.

He’s overly sensitive to someone differing with him on policy grounds,” Cantor says.

And he’s isn’t persuasive. “There’s never any sort of economic argument that he can make for his position. It always reverts to that social-justice end,” Cantor argues.

Not that Obama uses the phrase “social justice.” “It’s ‘fairness.’”

What’s more, Obama’s prickliness is “directly opposite” Cantor’s experience with Vice President Joe Biden: “I had almost seven weeks with the vice president, and those talks were substantive. He and I spoke weekly. Our staffs met daily. The agenda was set. Our staffs had done the initial ‘tolerance test’ as to probing how far either side could go on a particular issue. And if it was too far, we tried to stay away from it.”

By contrast, Cantor believes the president’s ideological mindset is impenetrable: “This guy just doesn’t get it.”

"Fairness" is an emotional response, particularly when there is no supporting concrete evidence offered to explain why one position is fair and one isn't. It's just a gut thing, which is fine for a disengaged voter in deciding for whom to vote for President, but the actual policy wonk in chief is supposed to have a stronger grasp of the details of the problem beyond "fairness."

Does the supposed intellectual not think in terms of numbers and abstractions?

posted by Ace at 01:50 PM

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