Rotten Experience

From: Anthony Bialy/The Conservatory

Those who adhere to an ideology based around promoting the perfectibility of man never improve themselves. It’s fruitless to hold out hope that the Occupy Wall Street-sympathizing pal or relative holed up in your attic is going to give up mooching and buy a suit with his tips from drumming.

People who are convinced that they’re correct despite overwhelming evidence that counters their worldview are unlikely candidates for self-improvement. Specifically, those who think that the solution to problems caused by government spending is more government spending are as set in their ways as zombies, with the difference being that zombies don’t have an excuse.

Barack Obama has developed a habit of not being able to find a clue that has persisted throughout his extended learning period. But his ignorance of how stuff works embodies a broader issue than the fact that he hasn’t held a similar job before to the one he lamentably staffs now.

Lack of time served is only one of Obama’s issues. He famously spent two measly years in Washington before deciding he was ready to be head of state. That said, most of the damage he’s inflicted during his tenure has been due to a warped ideology that compels him to act grabby at home and meekly abroad.

The only exception to his insipid track record comes in the form of George W. Bush’s anti-terror programs that he’s maintained, which is why the Defense Department must invent followup Predator drones that can stack terrorist corpses. Obama’s willingness to accept that some terrorists need to be detained or banished for eternity to a place where there are decidedly no virgins marks one of the few times he’s wised up after observing what’s happened.


Now, why can’t he do that with our money? Maybe forgiving voluntary student loans is how he’s teaching young people to be responsible with their finances. Everyone’s careful with cash when everything’s free.

No job would have helped Obama be a better president, including a trainee program in a state capital. Serving as a lower-level executive would have been supremely useless for someone singularly focused upon spending dollars as urgently as he redistributes them.

It wouldn’t have made a difference if Obama had enough humility to wait and run for the presidency until he was allegedly qualified. He would merely have had a disastrous reign as governor of Illinois or driven a private company $15 trillion into the red first.

Let’s say he deployed enough charisma to overcome his hypothetical awful job as governor and still win the presidency. He would still be atrociously misinformed despite having been a boss before.

Obama would be guided by the same dime-store socialism that got wedged in his head during his pampered adolescence. If he’s not getting better now, he wouldn’t have gained much after an apprenticeship.

Our president wouldn’t be more impressive if he had spent as much time in the Senate as Joe Biden, either. It sure didn’t help Biden. People are always screwing around with him. Years of service don’t help if a certain type of stubborn ideologue is serving them.

In fact, lack of background in the field is actually a helpful characteristic for the particularly woeful field of politics. The outsider’s appeal explains Herman Cain’s rise despite his foreign policy nonchalance, certifiably weird ads, and the fact that he may or may not have made an innocuous gesture to a mysterious disgruntled worker years ago.

He possesses no political experience, like that’s a bad thing. More importantly, he possesses the non-political kind. His enthusiasm for the benefits of small government is far more valuable than having served time in charge.

Of course, Godfather Cain has spent plenty of years as a boss, too, as he’s run several companies entrusted with providing deliciousness. Feeding people is a translatable skill for someone entrusted with promoting economic health. On a related note, helping the Navy fire rockets is the sort of high-pressure job that demonstrates how one is more of a reliable grown-up than, say, a professional community organizer.

An aptitude for fixing problems is an innate trait. Practice can improve one’s ability to succeed. But some tasks can’t be gained. Keith Richards can play chords a fraction of a second before the song’s natural beat, and not because he learned how to do it. Similarly, Cain is a born rocker.

Born leaders with good ideas will accomplish more than dolts who spend countless hours taking notes during executive training programs. As for Obama, he didn’t even go through the motions of attempting to learn.

Obama would be a miserable President if he started his Presidential term in 2028. There’s not enough interesting vocation vacations he could take to improve his job application. Working on a crab fishing boat or as a diner cook wouldn’t help him become well-rounded: as we’ve seen, his ways are cast in stone. And some persist in the notion that liberals are open-minded.

Learning about the world requires someone actually capable of learning. Obama has rarely displayed a tendency to modify his approach in response to failure.

He’d be engaging in the same curiously unproductive behavior whether he started being president in his 40s or his 70s. More time practicing doesn’t necessarily lead to better performances, especially if you’re training to pummel the economy into semi-Keynesian submission.

Anthony Bialy is a writer and Red Eye conservative in New York City. He tweets at http://twitter.com/AnthonyBialy.