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The Boy President

President Obama?s performance in his first months in office has reinforced my belief that it would be a big mistake to elect a boy to do a man?s (or woman?s) job.

Note to the politically correct language police: I am very much aware that ?Boy? was long a racist, insulting, demeaning term used, especially in the South, to refer to black men. I do not choose to use that term in reference to President Obama because of his race but because of his callow youthfulness. Not his youthfulness per se ? John Kennedy was even younger when he was elected, but he was no boy ? but his unseasoned, callow youthfulness.

callow
adj
Lacking adult maturity or experience; immature....

Obama is like a normally sober and well-behaved little boy left unattended by adults (there being few of those in Congress, and even fewer among his governing party) in a candy store ? our candy store, the treasury where all our goodies are stored. Faced with so many tempting treats that he is unable to decide which to eat first, he rushes from this jar to that in a mad effort to devour as much as he can before someone makes him stop, knocking over many jars in the process but oblivious to the waste caused by his haste.

His appetite is matched only by his overweening faith in his own abilities, another conceit of untempered youth, a quality nicely captured today by George Will:

The president?s confidence in his capacities is undermining confidence in his judgment. His way of correcting what he called the Bush administration?s ?misplaced priorities? has been to have no priorities. Mature political leaders know that to govern is to choose ? to choose what to do and thereby to choose what cannot be done. The administration insists that it really does have a single priority: Everything depends on fixing the economy. But it also says that everything depends on everything: Economic revival requires enactment of the entire liberal wish list of recent decades.

Obama, in short, is acting as though he believes that he must cram as much as he possibly can, and then some, down his (and by extension, our) throat right away, because sooner or later the adults will surely come in and insist on a balanced budget diet, delaying the gratification of dessert until after we?ve eaten our vegetables.

Full post as published by Discriminations on March 12, 2009 (boomark / email).