We do learn one valuable piece of information from Jon Meacham?s most recent conversation (reported narrative?) with President Obama: the president likes power.
What he has learned is that he likes, and enjoys, power?the capacity to shape reality in his image and by his lights?and that he finds crisis defining, bracing and useful. That a president feels suited to power is hardly a startling observation, but that Obama so revels in it?in the understated way Obama revels in anything?confounds the competing popular impressions of his persona. Many of his followers see him as the embodiment of a kind of utopian progressive politics in which the brute application of power is pass?, a relic of the ruins of the Age of Bush and Cheney. Many of his critics, meanwhile, think him weak, a crypto-socialist one-worlder who wants to offer rogue nations tea and sympathy.
What was it that Mises said about socialists?
