The same question keeps popping up in discussions of the disaster that is the Lord Obama presidency: Hopelessly naive or shrewdly calculating?
My vote is that he's an academic Marxist. Every major college campus has dozens of these clowns padding around campus. They're in every department that isn't hard science/ engineering. He isn't special, he's just another clever campus commie. He's never made a payroll, never held a job where he had to please stockholders, never did much at all except polish another leftist's apple and get an attaboy and a good grade or promotion. To guys like that a mainstream liberal is a "Conservative." He is totally and completely a product of the far left and so, yeah, when it comes to doin' a grip and grin with thugs and dictators he can't even see why that's a problem. Telling al Qaeda our interrogation methods and further saying "Don't worry. We won't hurt you fellers"? No problem! So, in that way, he's a naive child playing grown-up sitting in the big chair until the adults come back.
But there is a shrewd political side to him too. He came out of the Chicago D Machine and continues to surround himself with that kind of hack and corner-cutter. Throw in his "community organizer" past and the Saul Alinsky school of politics of personal destruction and you can see the ugly underpinnings to this humorless, self-aggrandizing mama's boy. That part looks far from naive, thus the endless question I'm hearing every day from people trying to figure Lordy O out.
One thing's for certain, by going into a September 10th mode on every front in the primary conflict of our age, he has put his administration at grave risk. If something horrible happens in this country on his watch he's political toast. He won't be able to put the blame at the feet of the prior administration who kept terrorists from their evil designs inside the USA for seven and a half years. That will fall right at his feet and the blowback will be enormous. In that way he is hopelessly naive.
Don't look now but Rasmussen has him at 54% approval. Not exactly the stratospheric number that the legacy media promotes. They dismiss the opposition (not the Republicans who can't get it together-- We The People who are taking to the streets all over the country) yet they know the administration can't go to Congress with another bailout request, or carbon taxing scheme without Congressional Democrats pushing back now. Those moves in the first 90 days that looked bold are starting to look like a miscalculation. Naivete? It's starting to look like they are playing checkers in a world of 3-D chess boards.
