{"id":9846,"date":"2010-04-05T12:03:35","date_gmt":"2010-04-05T17:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=9846"},"modified":"2010-04-05T17:40:22","modified_gmt":"2010-04-05T22:40:22","slug":"hes-carteriffic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=9846","title":{"rendered":"He’s Carteriffic"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the reasons Senator, professors, academics and “intellectuals” make such lousy presidents is that they feel the need to micromanage everything<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of Jimmy Carter’s great failings – among many – was his need to have his fingers stuck deeply into everything his government did, from noodling with the specifics of the various farm bills to directly interacting with the commanders of the Desert One raid as the mission progressed.\u00a0 A president is supposed to delegate.<\/p>\n

Micromanaging is bad.<\/p>\n

Especially when the president gets down to trying to\u00a0 micromanage people’s opinions<\/a>, as with last week’s 17 minute answer to a Town Hall question:<\/p>\n

His discursive answer – more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, “F-Map”). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks and the payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as “FICA”).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m getting a headache just reading about it.<\/p>\n

Always fond of lists, Obama ticked off his approach to health care — twice. “Number one is that we are the only — we have been, up until last week, the only advanced country that allows 50 million of its citizens to not have any health insurance,” he said.<\/p>\n

A few minutes later he got to the next point, which seemed awfully similar to the first. “Number two, you don’t know who might end up being in that situation,” he said, then carried on explaining further still.<\/p>\n

“Point number three is that the way insurance companies have been operating, even if you’ve got health insurance you don’t always know what you got, because what has been increasingly the practice is that if you’re not lucky enough to work for a big company that is a big pool, that essentially is almost a self-insurer, then what’s happening is, is you’re going out on the marketplace, you may be buying insurance, you think you’re covered, but then when you get sick they decide to drop the insurance right when you need it,” Obama continued, winding on with the answer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Leaving aside that it’s lousy oratory – running off at the mouth like that is rude<\/em>; it’s the prerogative of someone who believes his time is worth much, much more than yours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the reasons Senator, professors, academics and “intellectuals” make such lousy presidents is that they feel the need to micromanage everything.\u00a0 One of Jimmy Carter’s great failings – among many – was his need to have his fingers stuck deeply into everything his government did, from noodling with the specifics of the various farm […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-president-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9846"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9861,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9846\/revisions\/9861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}