Brace yourself. It's going get rocky soon. We are about to have a very bright man as our president. And we've been away from that territory for a very long time.
Barack Obama is what social scientists describe as "cognitively complex." He can accommodate within his views and values what others see as contradictions. He inhabits an abstract rather than concrete world. For the cognitively complex among us, the gray area is broad.
That's why he doesn't rush to a microphone to explain actions that generate controversy. He operates on this rule: "They won't remember you got it to them late so much as that you got it to them wrong."
He is more considered than cautious. If he were cautious, he wouldn't have invited Rick Warren to do the inauguration prayer. That decision likely came from a lengthy sorting out of the pros and cons. The same could be said of some of his cabinet appointments. He may have discredited experience during the election, but he has high regard for it now.
For a man intent on change, he relies heavily on the way he has made decisions for many years. He lines up the ducks. He looks past the obvious. He prioritizes. He contradicts in one sense in order to be consistent in another. That doesn't preclude change, it merely means the President-elect's avenue to it will not be newly paved.
He takes time to identify options likely to succeed in the long run or ones that serve his higher order goals. By necessity, therefore, some people are going to be disappointed early on in his presidency.
Even those people willing and able to entertain complexity on a host of issues are often unwilling and unable to do so regarding their passions. In other words, as Frank Rich has implied, Barack Obama may overestimate at times his ability to bridge differences, especially among people passionate about particular causes. They are likely to be very impatient if their issues are among the ones President Obama puts on the back burner.
As delighted as so many of us are to have Barack Obama's presidency right around the corner, we'll need to keep in mind the type of thinker he is. He may have begun his race for the presidency with the single concept of hope, but he will begin his presidency with considerably greater complexity. He may have captured us with his heart, but he will lead us largely with his mind.
We should brace ourselves for him to make decisions that seem at times contradictory to what he said during his campaign - not because he lied, but because he never got very specific. As the complex among us do, he left doors slightly open on major issues knowing he might need to slip through them to focus on more pressing ones.
We elected a complex man. If anyone expected he'd agree with any particular interest group on all issues, he or she wasn't paying attention. But if President-elect Obama thinks he can train all of us to think at his level, with openness and understanding, that we'll come around to his thinking even if he breaks our hearts, he may not have been paying attention either.
Only time will tell, but it's good to go into the New Year knowing our future president's preferred decision-making style. He grasps passion and has exuded it often, but he will be a thinking person's president. That is at once a terrain on which we'll stumble having not traversed it in some time and a welcome breath of fresh air.
Dr. Reardon also blogs at bardscove.
He's fine about commenting on terror in Mumbai but cannot condemn Collective Punishment and the use of cluster bombs in Gaza?
Shame on you, my President-elect.
Google him and read about his education.
I won't go into trying to figure out the last smart Republican President.....ok, Nixon, right? And before that IKE? I'll look into this.
This is absolutely the WRONG ANSWER to start fixing our economic problems. Remember too, that OBAMA also went to push the bankers bailouts?
So far I am not impressed. Mr. Obama may be smart, but it seems that smart people in the USA still do many studpid things.
This is exactly why I voted for him. I WANT a person who can handle cognitive dissonance and think things through to their logical conclusion without getting lulled into a false sense of surety due to his enormous ego and limited intellect.
I think we're ready for complexity -- and I think most of us get that things aren't black and white and they most certainly are not about our pet issues. We've seen enough blood shed worldwide to understand what's at stake here.
Bring on the sanity, the well-reasoned choices, and the deliberate and deliberated progress.
OBAMA - 2012
Hopefully, they will be willing to admit when they are wrong at least to themselves and adopt better positions.
I graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1992 with a BA Degree in Political Science and a minor in Economics.
I ran for United States Senate from New Hampshire in 2002.
My website is http://www.myspace.com/kennethstremsky
Sincerely,
Ken Stremsky
Loved Frank Rich's articles about McCain. Rich called Obama arrogant with a big ego.
http://typelogic.com/intj.html
"To outsiders, INTJs may appear to project an aura of "definiteness", of self-confidence. This self-confidence, sometimes mistaken for simple arrogance by the less decisive, is actually of a very specific rather than a general nature; its source lies in the specialized knowledge systems that most INTJs start building at an early age. When it comes to their own areas of expertise -- and INTJs can have several -- they will be able to tell you almost immediately whether or not they can help you, and if so, how. INTJs know what they know, and perhaps still more importantly, they know what they don't know."
INTJs are perfectionists, with a seemingly endless capacity for improving upon anything that takes their interest. What prevents them from becoming chronically bogged down in this pursuit of perfection is the pragmatism so characteristic of the type: INTJs apply (often ruthlessly) the criterion "Does it work?" to everything from their own research efforts to the prevailing social norms. This in turn produces an unusual independence of mind, freeing the INTJ from the constraints of authority, convention, or sentiment for its own sake.
INTJs are known as the "Systems Builders" of the types, perhaps in part because they possess the unusual trait combination of imagination and reliability."