The Times Online quotes a senior British civil servant’s experience in dealing with the Obama administration.
Britain’s most senior civil servant has complained that Downing Street is finding it “unbelievably difficult” to make arrangements with the United States for the crucial G20 summit.
Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, reportedly said that the handover to the Obama Administration was hindering discussions about the meeting in London next month. …
AdvertisementMr O’Donnell said that No 10 was having trouble even getting in touch with key personnel at the US Treasury department. “There is nobody there,” he told a civil service conference in Gateshead. “You cannot believe how difficult it is.”
His comments come after Downing Street was left frustrated by the White House’s chaotic handling of Gordon Brown’s visit last week. No 10 aides were left scrambling when the President’s staff changed press arrangements at the 11th hour.
Camile Paglia at Salon thinks that Obama’a “flacks, fixers and goons — his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes” are letting him down. Pejman Yousefzadeh meanwhile, wonders why one Obama nominee after the other turns out to have serious ethical, conflict of interest or other liabilities. A commenter at Eugene Volokh‘s thinks Obama is plain unlucky. But at what point are people going to start wondering to what extent Obama’s “flacks, fixers and goons”, his “smirky smart alecks” emanate from the center of power rather than unfortunately attaching themselves to it? The question’s not being asked yet, but it’s in the air, especially after all that time about being ready to lead on Day One; the calls for GWB to step down to make room for the healing touch; after all those speeches in front of the seals bearing the legend, “Office of the President Elect”. After all that, nada. One almost hopes it’s all due to carelessness.
Another time, another gender, but the same story.
Well no one told me about her the way she lied
Well no one told me about her how many people cried
But it’s too late to say you’re sorry
How would I know why should I care
Please don’t bother tryin’ to find her
She’s not there
YouTube Direkt
This administration is turned inward, not outward. It is not what they can do for you, it is about what they are doing to you!
Well, good thing they had time to ease sanctions yesterday against the newly-purged Communist Cuban regime of Raul Castro, Russian intelligence asset.
I guess two hypotheses present themselves at this point:
(1) Incompetence. Our community-organizer-in-chief has little exposure to foreign affairs, as opposed to the foreign “cultures” of his anthropologist mother’s training and his own childhood. He cares about health care, environmental justice and whatnot, but about the global economy, the national interests of other great powers and other stuff they don’t teach about in the Alinsky texts, he and his hangers-on are completely ignorant. (Sec. Clinton’s running her visit to Russia like just another campaign stop argues in favor of this view.)
(2) Multiculturalist anti-Western ideology. He wants to take our traditional orientation toward Europe and especially Britain down a few pegs, because the future of the world is being made in, well, places like Zimbabwe and Venezuela. He purposely dissed the Brits because they don’t matter in the new America.
Only time will tell which view of our new administration is correct.
In the meantime, Evan, I’ll bet on #2.
There’s nothing special about Britain.
– Barack Obama ‘too tired’ to give proper welcome to Gordon Brown -
The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official involved in planning the Brown visit, who reacted with fury when questioned by The Sunday Telegraph about why the event was so low-key.
The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying:
“There’s nothing special about Britain.
You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world.
You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”
While I’ll be the among the first to criticize Obama and Co., I don’t see as necessarily a bad thing that his people aren’t answering calls from the British, who are looking to rewrite capitalism into a huge global regulatory regime; in fact, it might be worthwhile for Obama to keep ignoring these calls until the British put someone new in charge over there.
Someone found the reset button in the West Wing. Lo and behold it went to the factory settings. (DOS version 1.0)
Some notes from Wikipedia that describe executive function disorders are interesting. They exist in the Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity spectrum and some other states.
“The executive system is thought to be heavily involved in handling novel situations outside the domain of some of our ‘automatic’ psychological processes that could be explained by the reproduction of learned schemas or set behaviors. Psychologists Don Norman and Tim Shallice have outlined five types of situation where routine activation of behavior would not be sufficient for optimal performance:[1]
1. Those that involve planning or decision making.
2. Those that involve error correction or troubleshooting.
3. Situations where responses are not well-learned or contain novel sequences of actions.
4. Dangerous or technically difficult situations.
5. Situations which require the overcoming of a strong habitual response or resisting temptation.
The executive functions are often invoked when it is necessary to override responses that may otherwise be automatically elicited by stimuli in the external environment. For example, on being presented with a potentially rewarding stimulus, such as a tasty piece of chocolate cake, the automatic response might be to take a bite. However, where this behaviour conflicts with internal plans (such as having decided not to eat chocolate cake whilst on a diet), the executive functions might be engaged to inhibit this response. The neural mechanisms by which the executive functions are implemented is a topic of ongoing debate in the field of cognitive neuroscience.”
Now I begin to understand why the founding feathers insisted upon having an executive branch of government.
I guess it is not a good idea to do the laundry while the house is burning down. Then again what do I know.
“Mr O’Donnell said that No 10 was having trouble even getting in touch with key personnel…”
So the WH has turned into the DMV. Now these idjits want to control our healthcare. Few things would mean more certain death.
wait, i thought that Bush was the worst President ever.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/03/presidents-first-50-days-dow-jones-changes/
(sorry, i don’t know how to paste a direct link into these comments section)
thanks wretchard for taking care of that for me
Its all good..as long as we can arrange universal health care for all of our Acorn carbon scrubbers. Everything else is inconsequential.
Following up on a link in a previous thread: the perfect storm would be something like Israel nuking Iran on the same day the Mexican government implodes and millions of people stream north across the border and on the same day Obama is on his way to a campaign rally in Detroit or Chicago so can’t be bothered with such trivialities. (I know, the campaign is over. The White House doesn’t know it though.) Sounds like that 2 AM call Hillary invoked during the campaign.
Anyway, if we have a perfect storm similar to that described above the real question is, will some leadership appear somewhere? Biden’s major test is ever more imminent, and so far the administration has badly flunked (or missed) each preliminary quiz.
Not very encouraging. F
The Brits have done two things wrong here.
They have failed to account for the timezone differences and are phoning Washington at 3:00am
They haven’t realized Hillary is on a road trip and isn’t there to answer that wringing phone.
Actually the Brits have not yet been provided a smart power “reset” relations button. They are somewhere in the line with the other 189 countries on the list.
wretchard,
I’m glad you cited that Camille Paglia piece; she is a remarkable writer, a lefty who appears to be open-minded enough to appreciate Rush Limbaugh’s strengths (when I was still a lefty — before 9/11 — I certainly could not have done that).
Jamie Irons
free the president from his flacks, fixers and goons
They must be kidding. He would fall to the floor like a used “sex doll” making a hissing sound as he deflated.
As my Mom used to say “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” – but in the case of the Obama Administration, I’d be happy to make an exception. The gift-giving contretemps – that was embarrassingly inept. I thought we had protocol ‘droids at the highest levels to prevent that sort of thing. Apparently not.
F said: “the perfect storm would be something like Israel nuking Iran on the same day the Mexican government implodes.”
A couple points: (1) A prolonged recession in the US will trigger a deep depression, civil unrest, and repression in China. Hard to predict what happens then. Similarly the US recession increases instablity in Mexico. Dangerous events may not happen simultaneuosly but they will cascade.
(2) If Iran nukes Israel, or closes the Straits of Hormuz, or Israel strikes Iran, a lot of bad actors will try to take advantage of the chaos. My guess is that on 9-11 the US put everyone on notice that we were ready to respond to any eventuality. What will Obama do if someone blows up the Empire State building and no one takes credit?
(3) I believe it is a Richard Fernandez quote- the US would survive if New York City were nuked. Brazil would not survive if NYC were nuked.
Interesting times.
J in V, Unrest has been going on for a couple years now in China, I am not so sure about them (Commie’s) crumbling, they have the gonads to blast large numbers of their own (as shown in 1991) China will survive selling to the rest of the world just fine, Americans think themselves much bigger then we are… “0″ won’t do anything if the empire building suddenly exploded with no clear finger prints, it will become a “crime” issue for the “Law Enforcement” to handle, hell “0″ will most likely make that our (US) grand entrance to the ICC. Remember! that’s how the last over stimulated Democrat President handled it, “0″ has all those cabinet members from the old Cigar players staff, why would it be handled differently, by the way has anyone seen Monica lately
I think much of the British criticism was bound up with their complaints about the transition period. But it’s going on two months now since the inauguration; longer since the election. And Treasury isn’t just any department in a government whose legislative and executive branches are in one party’s control. So even allowing for hyperbole, the response of the current administration to the crisis leaves something to be desired.
The question is whether they can pull out of the dive; to be on the lookout for signs that the President realizes he’s ‘being let down’ and is fixing what’s broken. President Obama called for the “overhaul of the earmark process” as he signed a spending bill into law.
Here again is the method of pushing the resolution of a problem into the future. Earmarks are ok because we’re going to reform them. Trillion deficits are ok because we’re going to abolish them afterward. Spending on health care reform is ok because it’s going to pay itself back. Spending on carbon is ok because we’ll be thankful later. Talking to bad guys is fine because they’ll come around in the end, like the Taliban. Like his own career, like his own management of the Treasury, the solution of problems is postponed to a rosy future. Meanwhile, the present is both venal, abject and bleak. But don’t worry, the skies will open and the seas will part. All in good time, all in good time.
I’ve argued repeatedly for shortening our evaluation loop. Show as a little sky. Give us a crease on the waters. Do something now, and not on credit either. That will boost credibility far more than another speech, another promise, another soaring moment on the stage. Because on the day that Obama begins to lose the liberal pundits, when the scales begin to fall from their eyes, know this: foreign leaders will have long since figured it out and menace will already be on the wing.
It’s hard for me to feel sympathy to our ex-friends in Britain since they were rooting so hard for Obama to win. They got their friggin’ wish so they need to STFU. Especially Gordon effing Brown. I thought it was priceless that they got treated like shite on their trip by their Long Awaited Civilized American President Savior.
Wretchard, couldn’t agree more. As we say around here, the long term is simply a series of short terms strung together.
Next week will make six months since Lehman crashed and it became unambiguous that Obama was going to become President. The Brits are partly puzzled because in a parliamentary system you have an election and the next day the winner goes to visit the Sovereign and the day after they move into No. 10. Civil servants do their jobs and life goes on. A couple of dozen Ministers and Junior Ministers get to run around Whitehall offices trying to find out what is going on. For more on how that works you can view the complete Yes Minister on Youtube. In America the President appoints over 6,000 people, although only a fraction of them need Senate confirmation. Still the complete and total failure of the Democrats to prepare to govern, a task they have been presumably preparing for from their exile roosts in academia and foundations for eight years, speaks to a fundamental flaw in their paradigm about how organizations function and what government can or should do.
Evan said:
“I guess two hypotheses present themselves at this point:
(1) Incompetence….
(2) Multiculturalist anti-Western ideology.”
How about a multiculturalist anti-Western ideology driven by incompetence?
Staring In Disbelief said:
“It’s hard for me to feel sympathy to our ex-friends in Britain since they were rooting so hard for Obama to win.”
A whole bunch of naive and/or stupid people are learning that Obama is not the Messiah. Given that we’re stuck with Obama for the next 4 years, there is minimal satisfaction in saying: “I told you so!”.
The gift-giving contretemps – that was embarrassingly inept.
Not as bad as the afterwards – flabbergasted by the British response, the attempted non-apology by DC insiders (too tired), the official response by our DoS personnel (nothing special).
Where is the Cowboy Bush diplomacy that supposedly drove our allies away? I don’t think we can survive more of this new kind Hopeychangey diplomacy.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn from all of this is something that should have sunk in at least by the time of his famous Philadephia speech.
This man HATES WHITE PEOPLE, and he hates this country. He may not know it, but there can be no doubt about that given his history and what he’s done since getting in office.
There’s been a lot of talk about what Rush said, but what Obie is conveying by his behavior is that he wants us to fail.
What is it, pray tell, that people do not get about “God damn America”?
Yes, trouble is not far down the road, words and no deeds will be followed by action too late! Let’s see, Will “0″ resign first or be impeached, does Bidden stand a chance against Goof of State (Ms. C) or will Pelosi ascend to the throne? Me thinks certain people where arranged to win so others could…
It is the fate of all gonnabees to go up like a rocket and fall back like a stick.
BHO is a bottle rocket.
Don’t underestimate BHO’s self-destructive streak.
He’s incredibly self-indulgent.
As for management style…
It correlates to a tyrannical dictator: he’s an angry autocrat.
The DC insider who said he was too tired, was of course, BHO himself. Only a fulsome narcissist could pop off that response. Absolutely none of his star-struck aides would have ever come up with that slant.
maineman…
BHO is going to give racism a bad name.
Incompetence comes in mind? Assuming the roll of POTUS is way over Obama’s head.
“God has given us the papacy. Now let us enjoy it.”
– Pope Alexander VI
Nobody home?
Perhaps the Obama administration is in its own universe, a universe of its own creation, a universe of wishful thinking, a universe of hope and change where the heavy consequences of one’s actions are always borne by others.
Barack Obama’s lips would move, and people would hear the music of his voice, but they couldn’t hear what he was really saying. He talked of joining their voices to his, so they heeded his call. They joined their voices to his, so it was no longer their voice but rather his, for as his voice rang out their voices became mute.
Listen to the words
Listen to what they mean
Listen to what they say
Don’t just listen to how they sound.
Perhaps with the presidency of Obama
We have a presidency
That has become comfortably numb
Numb to the consequences
Numb to the meaning of crisis
Numb to the feelings of others
Numb to anything other than a desire to numb the pain.
Mr Fernandez said: “pushing the resolution of a problem into the future.”
One of the benefits of the community organizing dodge is that the Orger only has to identify the Problem and set up a demonstration or some other street theater to put pressure on those who are responsible for solving the problem. Now if the Orger is really astute, he’ll come up with a Grant or earmark to develop solutions to the problem so that he’s fixed in the public view (See the Chicago Annenberg Challenge) never mind if the solutions dont work, he’s Trying, and in Orging, that’s as good as doing. Ride the grant til it peters out/Next problem.
Our difficulty is that the sort of thing that Orgers attack are either solved by others (for which the Orger gets credit) or are unsolvable short of a social revolution (uh oh) like poverty or educational reform. In any case he’s showing his experience by kicking the issue down the road for later solution (by others) which is akin to riding out the Grant.
The One is now in the position where there is no other grant to move on to and nobody Out There (like a public works dept) to solve these problems. He has to solve them or get some people who can. Somebody send him (and us) a paddle.
Amen and again, amen. . .
W,
“I’ve argued repeatedly for shortening our evaluation loop.”
Yep – too many other entities are inside this administrations OODA loop.
I never imagined that countries like France and Germany would be to the ‘right’ of the USA on economic issues. When the Europeans have better economic ideas then PBHO, Houston, we have a problem…
Mr Fernandez said: “pushing the resolution of a problem into the future.”
My ex, Operations Research Guy, tells his many admirers of the day he successfully sloughed a difficult maths problem by showing the first part of the solution and then stating the rest could be solved by the Generalized O’Hara Solution. What, you ask, is the Generalized O’Hara Solution? “Fiddle-dee-dee! I’ll think about that tomorrow.”
Who could imagine Putin spouting off like Reagan…?
But the real reason for the French and German policy position is that their systems are so highly geared that they are finished.
This means that their priorities remain themselves.
I’d expect the Germans to dump the Euro under the stress.
European bond spreads are already blowing out for the PIGS.
Being unable to export their currency in grand style is another restraint.
GOP principles defined:
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/breitbart/2009/03/11/best-tv-appearance-by-a-congressman-in-ever/
1. Our Liberty is from God, not the Government
2. Our Sovereignty is in our Souls, not the Soil
3. Our Security is through Strength, not Surrender
4. Our Prosperity is through the Private sector, not the Public sector
5. Our truths are Self-evident, not Relative.
30 herb
“The Orger” sounds like a nice Freudian conflation of “orgy” and “ogre.” Good term for The One.
That’s a terrific link 2×4
From one of the comments:
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”
But in this case, vice versa is more à propos.
Reminiscent of the chant at the republican convention: “Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero….”
The lack of real executive experience is seriously showing, I think.
Brian H @39: From one of the comments:
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”
But in this case, vice versa is more à propos.
Agree completely! Those who are not malicious have a tendency to disbelieve malice in others, even when it’s as palpable as Michelle Obama’s sculpted biceps.
Pelosi I can grant stupidity, because she’s as dumb as a box of rocks. But Frank? Reid? Dodd? Axelrod? Emmanuel? Paulson? Others of that ilk?
Malice, malice and malice.
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men.
eggplant @23 “Obama for the next 4 years”
Odds are at least 50-50 that he won’t be President in a year.
When you’re in over your head, especially THIS FAR over your head, life just sucks and each day is harder than the one before.
Not to mention that we are much more resilient that Chile, or Indonesia. Ayers wanted to bring the war home. He may get his wish.
It was my opinion that GWB bilingualism made him a double minded man and inarticulate in English.
Obama is not bilingual. But I think he is double minded because– for half his life — he held a dual citizenship. This according to his own flack organizations FactCheck.org/by way of FighttheSmears This stuff doesn’t go away.
–total failure of the Democrats to prepare to govern, a task they have been presumably preparing for from their exile roosts in academia and foundations for eight years—
Not to mention their lauded crash program in the Office of the President Elect – which had plenty of time for sign making and radio addresses.
#40 Brian H:
As Eggplant #23 points out, it’s not an either/or question.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
But if neither malice nor stupidity by itself can completely account for the mess, you may have to conclude you are dealing with malicious idiots.
“Like his own career, like his own management of the Treasury, the solution of problems is postponed to a rosy future.”
Personally, I see no reason to revise my theory all along which is that he’s a Manchurian President, and, therefore, doing exactly what his overseas puppet-pullers are telling him to do: Do nothing as all the different situations worsen.
He keeps nominating unqualified and/or sinful people to fill his top positions, which is essentially the same thing as doing nothing, since the positions remain unfilled.
As for poor little Gordon Brown’s feelings being hurted, tough shit. What has England done for America lately? Although it *is* infuriating that the richest country in the world can’t out-gift a mere Brit.