At what point does ignorance say more about the deliberate blindness of the speaker than about the difficulty of learning the subject? Two years ago, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote of then-candidate Barack Obama, that “he is a fog of a man. We know little about him, and, for all my admiration of him, I wonder about his mettle.”
Today, writing about John Edwards, Cohen still wonders about Obama.
The out-of-nowhere rise of Palin and Edwards in less than a decade is warning enough that something is wrong. I will also throw Barack Obama into the mix, not because I know something nefarious about him but because I realize more and more that I know so little about him.
Through the column, Cohen admits how long he was taken in by Edwards. He also shows that his admiration for Obama is unconditional because it is uninformed, and two years later it would seem to be through a willful ignorance.
If he just stopped with a comparison of the two men, one could write it off as naivete or a broader gullibility. By adding Palin to the mix, however, he unmasks himself. Palin was “astonishingly unprepared and unsuited for the presidency,” according to Cohen.
