Obama Goes Smarty-Pants; 'Skeptics' Favor More Traditional, Dumb Cabinet

Sometimes I'm given significant cause to wonder about my country.  One cause of such rumination is when I read things like this:

But skeptics say Obama's predilection for big thinkers with dazzling résumés carries risks, noting, for one, that several of President John F. Kennedy's "best and brightest" led the country into the Vietnam War. Obama is to be credited, skeptics say, for bringing with him so few political acquaintances from Illinois. But, they say, his team reflects its own brand of insularity, drawing on the world that Obama entered as an undergraduate at Columbia and in which he later rose to eminence as president of the Harvard Law Review and as a law professor at the University of Chicago.

Really?  After eight years of some of the most naked cronyism in modern American politics, voices in the so-called "liberal media", aka MSM, etc., now have the gall to decry insularity?

What are we really supposed to be doing with our government?  I think that no one, not even cynically, would openly call for dumb governance.  That seems somehow beyond the pale even for the most extremely indignant among us.  However, we don't want our government too smart either, as this guy notes:

The libertarian University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, who is not related to Joseph Epstein, worries that the team's exceptionalism could lead to overly complex policies. "They are really smart people, but they will never take an obvious solution if they can think of an ingenious one. They're all too clever by half," he said. "These degrees confer knowledge but not judgment. Their heads are on grander themes . . . and they'll trip on obstacles on the ground."

Umm.. yeah.  Incidentally, "too clever by half" is probably the best, most concise way to describe libertarian philosophy that I can think of.  Shades of Randian Greenspan admitting massive flaws in his fundamental world-view anyone?

Bar libertarianism, may I wax Seinfeldian and ask, "Who are these people?"  Or, perhaps more colloquially, "WTF?"  Is my country really this anti-intellectual?  Are we not smarter than a fifth-grader?  While I'm perfectly fine with the argument that a gilded resume does not good governance guarantee, haven't we put cart well before horse here in denouncing prelimary appointments as being all-too-smart for their own good?

Two things bother me about this, not the least of which is the seeming lack of attention toward our sitting administration.  Why the obsession with pronouncing Obama's incoming cabinet DOA when the currrent POTUS is sitting on his thumbs as our economy implodes?  Somehow I imagine here being aboard the sinking Titanic only to overhear people discuss how awful the next captain will be.

Some of this is just par for the chorus at this point.  It's all too easy to proclaim whatever you like about the incoming admin.  It's too insidery.  Or too outsidery.  It's too diverse.  It's not diverse enough.  You can say mostly whatever you'd like about it right now.  You can point at a lump of clay and call it a vase.  You might end up being right.

Worse than this, to me, is that this is the year of Sarah Palin.  Plumb and Plumber.  Though I'm not exactly sure how smart Sarah Palin actually is, I'm fairly confident that she's no great intellect.  It's also been plain to see that there is a significant section of the American public which is more than fine with this.  In fact, it's celebrated.

And, of course, none of this is lost on the well-educated vanguard of public discourse.  So, it's no great matter that major macroeconomic policies in America proved to require more complexity than the simplistic, or I suppose not "too clever by half", world-views of people like Mr. Greenspan or Mr. Epstein.  They can still engage in whatever amount of pernicious public hand-wringing and premature prognostications of profuse profundity that they like.  I say, "Poppycock."  Their view is parallax.

People prefer, when proffered, simple explanations, but allow me to posit a premise: Some things are complex. Perhaps many things.  Though we may delight in the idea that the universe is somehow, fundamentally, built according to a very simple and elegant design, could we but see it, but there is little evidence that this is truly so.  There is complexity from the sub-atomic on up, and this is no exception in economics or sociology or governance.  As we evolve, our views and ideas evolve because our information evolves.  It becomes more complete and, as this happens, our ideas more complex.

The American religion of simplistic ideas needs to die.  I'm not suggesting that things be made needlessly complex, but rather that we recognize, with intellectual honesty, when they truly are complex.  Though the cliché is tired, I don't want a damned plumber prescribing the macroeconomic policies of the 21st century because he's got a collection of simple and beloved ideas about the way things oughta be.  I want leadership that is smart and capable and, above all, intellectually honest about what they do and do not know.  Didn't we just have eight years of the opposite?  Aren't we just now hearing feigned apologies by the likes of Dubya and Condi about how, oops, I guess our a priori method of foreign policy didn't really work after all?  And yet, we still make room in our public discourse for the ideological obtuse pronouncements of those who always have the same story: Our ideology is infallible, it is reality that is imperfect.

Though Obama's election and approach to governance are heartening with respect for moving a different direction, America's culture remains ill in this respect.  I would gladly welcome a brighter day, pun absolutely intended.