Powell’s successor at the State Department, Condoleezza Rice, who first served as Bush’s national security adviser, came off as inexperienced in his view. “She’d been an academic. And, you know, a lot of academics like to have meetings,” Rumsfeld said. “And they like to bridge differences and get people all to be happy.”A quote from Rumsfeld concerning his soon to be released memoirs. A shot at Obama I take it - and a splenetic Rumsfeldian swipe at that entire ilk I'd say. And I pretty much agree with him - there's no doubt a lot Rumsfeld will have to say that I won't agree with, but one of my earliest 'warnings' about Obama, made I think before he'd even announced he'd run, was that he'd want to govern like an academic and that would be bad - academics tend to live in fantasy worlds of endless debate unsullied by real consequences - thrust into a situation rife will real consequences they'd flounder, reaching for rhetorical responses that had served them so well in their cocooned pasts - I figured this would prove especially a problem for Obama because, one, he loves his rhetorical flourishes [as does his adoring press], and two, his identity, his sense of himself and the big ego feeding off that identity are so tied up with the idealized solutions proffered by rhetoric and the adulation conjured thereof that he'd have a very difficult time when thorny issues [the economy, Afghanistan, now Egypt etc etc] had the impertinence to remain prickly despite the application of sweet oration.
Think back to the Harvard prof who got into a heated argument with cops and had to be arrested - Obama's immediate response was immediate because it fit perfectly into an already defined narrative, he didn't have to think about it - poor black man abused by ignorant white cops, enlightened integrity beat down by mindless brutality - when that narrative turned out to be entirely wrong and the cops were shown to have simply been doing their job, Obama reached out for his rhetorical comfort food - all that was needed to fix this situation was better words, bigger words, grander ideas - a 'national conversation on race' - Dear Leader makes a stupid, rash judgement and suddenly we all have to participate in some idiotic conversation, a universal group hug - which of course never happened - but the press lionized him anyway for I guess just being so wonderful and having so many wonderful ideas - that the ideas were utterly detached form reality didn't seem to matter - not only to the press and other acolytes but, much more distressingly, to Obama himself - my feeling was that it wan't even an issue for him that he was talking nonsense just so long as it sounded good and lofty and his ego was duly rewarded for the effort - it was as if the only thing that matter was the speech itself and no one seemed bothered by that, not Obama, not the sycophantic press - very disturbing.
Not a lot of jobs where you can get away with bull shit like that - academic would certainly be one of them, in fact academia encourages this type of thing - President of the United States not so much - or rather, you can try and get away with it, but reality eventually steps up and demands, bluntly, enough with all the fucking around.