Low-Information Leadership
...And this president wasn’t. I think part of the reason he wasn’t careful is because he sort of lives in words. That’s been his whole professional life—books, speeches. Say something and it magically exists as something said, and if it’s been said and publicized it must be real. He never had to push a lever, see the machine not respond, puzzle it out and fix it. It’s all been pretty abstract for him, not concrete. He never had to stock a store, run a sale and see lots of people come but the expenses turn out to be larger than you’d expected and the profits smaller, and you have to figure out what went wrong and do better next time....

...From what I have seen the administration is full of young people who’ve seen the movie but not read the book. They act bright, they know the reference, they’re credentialed. But they’ve only seen the movie about, say, the Cuban missile crisis, and then they get into a foreign-policy question and they’re seeing movies in their heads. They haven’t read the histories, the texts, which carry more information, more texture, data and subtlety, and different points of view. They’ve only seen the movie—the Cubans had the missiles and Jack said “Not another war” and Bobby said “Pearl Harbor in reverse” and dreadful old Curtis LeMay chomped his cigar and said “We can fry a million of ‘em by this afternoon, Mr. President.” Grrr, grrr, good guys beat bad guys. ...

ObamaCare and the Totalitarian Mindset
...We find it not only wrongheaded but sinister (in every sense of the word). Waldman argues that journalists have a "responsibility" to provide "audiences with practical information that could help them navigate the new system"--and not just that, but to provide such information "repeatedly or people won't get it."...

...Is there any doubt that Waldman wants ObamaCare service journalism to serve a hortatory purpose, not merely an informative one? That is, he wants news organizations to encourage their audiences to sign up because that would boost the likelihood that ObamaCare proves successful (politically, economically, or by whatever other measure one might devise).

Any self-respecting journalist, no matter how liberal, will recoil at that notion. Service journalism whose purpose is to serve the government is not a "responsibility" but an abomination....