Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I believe. Great line, although I think both he and Sean Connery answering to “Dr. Jones” vis a vis the pretty blonde, was, while perhaps not more enlightening, just as good. :)
I’d like to think Obama actually believed it when he wrote it too. The alternative would mean that politics really is as cynical and self-serving as it appears. And yes, he does act differently. Either he (and his family?) got threatened and then controlled, or he found out that real power is elsewhere and he became disheartened, or he made accommodation to present reality instead of trying to effect change with few insiders willing to help him (and he didn’t want to end up like Carter), or that what he does do doesn’t get any attention or traction, or any of a dozen or more explanations. The bottom line is indeed that he doesn’t act like the author of the book. Now, if you remember your Gibbon, we can see why Diocletian wanted to get away from the corrupting, controlling, twisted (and demonstrably murderous) political cesspool that was Rome and why he (Diocletian) moved the power center elsewhere.
The arrogance and narcissistic ways of Obama hindered whatever real objectives he had in health care reform (which, in typical Washington fashion, helped some things, made other things worse, added to burdens, furthered unsustainability, and fattened the future purses of the members of the Consortium). Obama is a problem solver, in his mind at least. He thinks policy problems out, although perhaps not through. Healthcare, along with plenty more besides, is a bankrupting train wreck coming (indeed, it’s in plain sight), and he wanted to tackle it, and deserves praise for the wanting. Of course, the corrupting system used up so much of his political capital to try to fix the nearly unfixable (the problem only appears to be just a mechanical one; it’s really a structural one and cultural one as well) that it seemed to take the wind out of his sails. Perhaps in his mind he felt punished for trying to do a good deed. Yet the man seems incapable of acknowledging that his own arrogance and narcissism contributed to the distaste many felt about the law or the process. In his defense, it must have been galling to see how this 1200 page law, rarely read and even less understood, was misrepresented, selectively focused or referenced, or even lied about by those who merely wanted to do him political damage.
As for what part of his wealth he might want to leave his daughters, ah, Madame, that is a whole long discussion we are going to have soon!
Critique of his foreign policy will come in future postings, but I will say this: the man’s smart enough to know that he’s been handed a pretty big pile of legacy crap, and he’s trying to manage it. He isn’t trying to transform it very much, however, again because maybe he (and the country) doesn’t have the political and economic legs, and so he is reactive and transitional. He’s not a great risk taker, perhaps partly or largely because of all that. I posted a piece on blowback on the Professor side (that’s not a shameless plug, really) that explains this further. And with those (China perhaps) who often make better economic decisions than we do increasingly questioning, and in the future maybe dictating, his job in unenviable. This isn’t John Kennedy at the height of American power, certainly.
All right. Let’s turn to one of the points you brought up and that was a portion of his book: education.
“Money does matter in education—otherwise why would parents pay so much to live in well funded suburban school districts?—and many urban and rural schools still suffer from overcrowded classrooms, outdated books, inadequate equipment, and teachers who are forced to pay out of pocket for basic supplies. But there’s no denying that the way many public schools are managed poses at least as big a problem as how well they’re funded.” Obama 161
As Obama relates, and this teacher verifies, study after study shows that the most important thing in determining how well a student does is not economics or ethnicity, but who the student’s teacher is. Yet we do the opposite of what’s necessary to get good teachers. Instead of mentoring by pairing up new teachers with master teachers, we throw new teachers at the wall and hope they stick, or worse, treat them in isolation. Instead of giving proven teachers more control over what happens in their classrooms, we micromanage them and load them up with all sorts of things that have nothing to do with teaching or learning. We hold them to ridiculously simplistic test scores which they have limited control of and that don’t take into account many, many other factors, among them an often dumbed-down curriculum because under-the-gun administrators force the teachers to teach to the test so they don’t lose funding due to No Child Left Behind. Instead of paying teachers like the highly vital professionals they are in teaching our forming young citizens, we grudgingly dole out poverty wages. Instead of shared governance in their schools, teachers are dictated to by administrators whose numbers have grown tremendously while teachers’ numbers, pay, and status have stagnated at best. And teachers rarely get to peer review each other, or even have input. The bulk of teachers know who the poor-quality apples are, and want to have the influence to improve those teachers—and failing that, get rid of them. But they don’t have that power; politically influenced administrators or petty and selfish self-serving union officials do.
To add insult to injury, we have not only done all the above and failed to compensate most teachers anywhere near what they’re worth, we have furthermore robbed them of the respect that other cultures give those whose responsibility it is to teach future functioning adult citizens, and to keep informed the present ones. And now we attack, as demonstrated in the current budget battles, what little those teachers have. Lots of people like to criticize teachers, or focus on those who “have it easy,” but say little about the multitudes who toil, long into the nights and weekends, in trying to do an impossible job.
And we need one more thing too: quit babying students. Quit trying to “take care of them,” to process them through the system. No. When they fail, they need to fail. They need to meet real and meaningful consequences that they can’t get out of, but that will teach them early and hard lessons that they can learn from and overcome. In other words, quit pandering to backgrounds, home life, and a dozen other things; have empathy and understanding, but then go on to treat everyone effectively fairly and equally—and let them know that’s how it is in school, and the world. Charles Sykes (unfortunately for him, usually wrongly attributed to Bill Gates) wrote a stirring op-ed piece 15 years ago on this very thing.
Higher education and state legislatures and communities and society in general must focus more on making college more financially possible. We need to show, in words, in deeds, and in resources that we value that education more than we value sports, however valuable those sports may or may not be.
Math, science, and engineering. We are barely investing in research and development (R&D), and fewer people are going into those big three areas. We are starving those areas for resources while we spend endlessly on other things. While other countries are investing in their R&D, we are cutting back. That’s a prescription for a cut-rate power. And a big and unsustainable trade deficit. And being dictated to by others.
If we invested a mere $9 billion a year into R&D, it would pay off big dividends and reverse some highly damaging trends. That’s an example of government spurring the foundation, of government making a wise economic INVESTMENT, instead of just spending money with no return.
Another facet examined soon!
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