Obama Seeks Power Sharing

The Detroit News of Tuesday Dec. 2nd carries a news analysis titled "Obama chooses 'strong.'" The subtitle is "Selection of Clinton, Gates, Jones for security team show his deference to pragmatism over ideology." So pragmatism equals strong. Strong what? No answer given but I can tell you that his picks are all strongly committed to abiding by any consensus that may arise. Why? Because it allows each of them to share power and this is what each one 'strongly' desires. The photo accompanying the article testifies to this fact at least for Hillary.

The first paragraph further reinforces this theme:

"The selection of experienced centrists -- Hillary Rodham Clinton, Robert Gates and James L. Jones -- to head President-elect Barack Obama's national security team points to the possibility that, on Iraq, the incoming commander-in-chief may take a more measured path to ending American military involvement than he described during the presidential campaign."

A 'centrist' is one who walks the middle of the road on everything; who takes a spoonful of poison with every spoonful of food and who is willing to compromise on every savage's claim that America is evil and needs to be reshaped into the savage's notion of ideal and most of all, that every American value is something that can and should be negotiated away for some temporary, range of the moment satisfaction.

Surrounding himself with 'experienced centrists' makes Obama's choices 'strong'? These 'strong' choices means there is no chance any of them will support extreme positions like individual rights, freedom, justice, equality under the law, earning one's way through life, letting people chose what's in their self-interest etc.. And what is "...a more measured path..."? Measured according to what standard? Compared to Bush's or the leftists who think Obama will pull the troops out right away? No. It's more measured than his campaign rhetoric which was only said to evoke emotions of approval. It worked nicely.

Obama likely will rely on Jones, who spent 40 years in the Marine Corps but has never served in the executive branch of government, to lay the groundwork by melding the views of Clinton and Gates.

What does 'melding the views" mean? How does one meld the views of "strong personalities and strong opinions" of Clinton and Gates? Can 'strong views' even be melded? These words are just meaningless nonsense meant to convey not ideas but feelings. One feeling is 'there, there now, daddy is here and everything is gonna be ok because daddy is doing everything right and he will take care of you.'

It's obvious that James Jones's job is to make sure that everyone shares in the administration of power and gets the appropriate prestige. Our government will be run by committee like baking an apple pie by committee. One person will decide what kind of apples to use, another how many to use, still another what temp to cook it at and still another how long to cook it while others will decide whether to cut in in 6 pieces or 8, and so on. And when it turns out to taste horrible, they'll all scream "It's not my fault!" That's what we have to look forward to.

The underlying theme of the article is that Obama will be getting the benefit of the best expertise possible and all will be well. Unfortunately, most of those people don't have a clue as to how to fix things except by more government intervention. It's going to be interesting to see how this power sharing works out in reality.