The Flincher

I've been on vacation this week, if you hadn't guess by now. I blogged a lot earlier on but I've been lost the past few days in Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (it's great) so blogging has been light. I'm kind of read out today so it's catch up time. Along with the Hanson piece I referred to below, the best thing I've read this week is from Peter Wehner over at Commentary's Contentions blog. In his post, Wehner also brings up the subject of Obama's temperament, i.e. his touchiness when criticized. He also mentions this:

Obama also has a habit of deriding not just the policies but also the motivations of his opponents. He almost never acknowledges the good faith of his critics; they are people to be mocked, ridiculed, derided. The only reason they oppose Obama is “politics pure and simple.” Republicans “prey on people’s fears and anxieties,” he said today. There is no room for genuine philosophical differences. It is as if Obama believes his ideas are so transparently brilliant and wise and beyond challenge that only the malicious and malevolent can oppose him.

Charles Krauthammer has mentioned this very same flaw numerous times during the panel discussion on Special Report. I mentioned the other day the reason why I think attack is always Obama's default mode: because he's got nothing else to fall back on. He has not spent a lifetime in politics arguing and persuading. Politics is, after all, the art of persuasion and Obama has never been in an environment where he needed to persuade. He has spent much of his life in academia, with its penchant for group-think and its disdain of views different from its own. Academics don't go to the trouble of learning the other sides arguments and attempting to refute them with a better argument. The herd mentality of the dorm room and the faculty lounge make this unnecessary since everyone agrees with everyone else. In this rarefied atmosphere highly dubious arguments are taken as fact, and the views of the general public are given short shrift. Obama then left that environment to become a community organizer on the streets of Chicago. Again, there was no need to persuade. Community organizers play on people's grievances. They gather people who are already unhappy and try to make them more unhappy. If possible, seeing both sides of the issue is even rarer in the community organizer field than in academia. So Obama has always simply had to enter the room, make his viewpoints known, and watch as everyone nods their heads. Now, as president, he's getting pushback and he's got nothing to fall back on but impugning the other sides motives. It's disgraceful.

But Wehner's post in the main is about what everyone else has been talking about all week, Obama's temperament. Apparently it's been obvious to a lot of people and for a long time. His main advisor, David Axelrod, wrote this to him back in 2006:

“This is more than an inconvenience,” David Axelrod wrote in a memo to Obama on November 28, 2006, in raising concerns about Obama’s thin skin. “It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. … When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched.”

Read the whole thing.