George Will says here that Obama has more in common with President Wilson than Lenin or Mao. Note the Obama quote below.
Professor Obama, who will seek re-election on the 100th anniversary
of Wilson’s 1912 election, understands, which makes him melancholy.
Speaking to Katie Couric on Feb. 7, Obama said:“I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some
very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t
have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and
have that passed. But that’s not how it works in our democracy.
Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of
negotiations with a lot of different people.”Note his aesthetic criterion of elegance, by which he probably means
sublime complexity. During the yearlong health care debate, Republicans
such as Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee have consistently cautioned
against the conceit that government is good at “comprehensive”
solutions to the complex problems of a continental nation. Obama has
consistently argued, in effect, that the health care system is like a
Calder mobile — touch it here and things will jiggle here, there and
everywhere. Because everything is connected to everything else, merely
piecemeal change is impossible.So note also Obama’s yearning for something “academically approved”
rather than something resulting from “a lot of negotiations with a lot
of different people,” aka politics. Here, too, Obama is in the spirit
of the U.S. president who first was president of the American Political
Science Association.Wilson was the first president to criticize the Founding Fathers. He
faulted them for designing a government too susceptible to factions
that impede disinterested experts from getting on with government
undistracted. Like Princeton’s former president, Obama’s grievance is
with the greatest Princetonian, the “father of the Constitution,” James
Madison, class of 1771.
