Theories of Obama

John Bolton on Tuesday's UN speech, via Robert Costa: "Post-American," pro-UN, anti-Israel, Obama-centric, and fundamentally naïve:

"It was a speech high on the personality of Barack Obama and high on multilateralism, but very short in advocating American interests.”

“It was a very naïve, Wilsonian speech, and very revealing of Obama’s foreign policy,” says Bolton. “Overall, it was so apologetic for the actions of prior administrations, in an effort to distance Obama from them, that it became yet another symbol of American weakness. . . .

Read the rest.

Blogger RW dismisses the charge of naïvete and calls a scorpion a scorpion:

Let what you see guide you to the motive and the man. What kind of man embraces Iran and shuns Israel? What kind of man is raised by a radical liberal, surrounded by radical liberals and communists, went to school and sought out radical liberals and communists, worked with and was picked promoted and presented to us by radical liberals with communist/socialist backgrounds? He is the total sum of his life. He is what he is, and nothing in his life to this point has forced him to change that.

RTR. Question for the class: can he be both a flaming radical leftist and naïve? Discuss.

Victor Davis Hanson makes a beautifully compelling case for Obama as college administrator:

For many in the academic community who have not worked with their hands, run businesses, or ventured far off campus, Middle America is an exotic place inhabited by aborigines who bowl, don’t eat arugula, and need to be reminded to inflate their tires. They are an emotional lot, of some value on campus for their ability to “fix” broken things like pipes and windows, but otherwise wisely ignored. Professor Chu, Obama’s energy secretary, summed up the sense of academic disdain that permeates this administration with his recent sniffing about the childish polloi: “The American people . . . just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act.” Earlier, remember, Dr. Chu had scoffed from his perch that California farms were environmentally unsound and would soon disappear altogether, “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”

It is the role of the university, from a proper distance, to help them, by making sophisticated, selfless decisions on health care and the environment that the unwashed cannot grasp are really in their own interest — deluded as they are by Wal-Mart consumerism, Elmer Gantry evangelicalism, and Sarah Palin momism. The tragic burden of an academic is to help the oppressed, but blind, majority.

In the world of the university, a Van Jones — fake name, fake accent, fake underclass pedigree, fake almost everything — is a dime a dozen. Ward Churchill fabricated everything from his degree to his ancestry, and was given tenure, high pay, and awards for his beads, buckskin, and Native American–like locks. The “authentic” outbursts of Van Jones about white polluters and white mass-murderers are standard campus fare. In universities, such over-the-top rhetoric and pseudo-Marxist histrionics are simply career moves, used to scare timid academics and win release time, faculty-adjudicated grants, or exemption from normal tenure scrutiny. Skip Gates’s fussy little theatrical fit at a Middle American was not his first and will not be his last.

Obama did not vet Jones before hiring him because he saw nothing unusual (much less offensive) about him, in the way that Bill Ayers likewise was typical, not an aberration, on a campus. Just as there are few conservatives, so too there are felt to be few who should be considered radicals in universities. Instead everyone is considered properly left, and even fringe expressions are considered normal calibrations within a shared spectrum. The proper question is not “Why are there so many extremists in the administration?” but rather “What’s so extreme?”

RTR. It's excellent. And it dovetails with Michael Barone's observation that Obama's political views haven't matured beyond the radicalism of his youth.

*Updated to add Rich Lowry's column: Prez comes across as a gullible sap
Excerpt:

President Obama yesterday did his best impression of a high-school sophomore participating in his first Model UN meeting, retailing pious clichés he learned from his pony-tailed social studies teacher.

h/t: Althouse

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