Obama's Learning Curve Is Flat

Here we are, almost 5 full years into Obama's presidency, and he still doesn't understand what the job of President means.

While every president has to deal with a learning curve when the enter office, no two are the same. Some take to it quickly, either because they have previous experience as head of government (a state governor or city mayor), a military commander, or previously served as Vice President. Others take longer because of limited time in an office with this kind of responsibility. And yet others never really get it and the learning curve never really bends towards competence.

Of these three types, it appears President Obama is among the third group. This far along into his presidency and he's still making rookie mistakes. is learning curve is very long and at this rate he still won't “get it” by the time he leaves office in 2017. At least those are the indications many are seeing and it isn't making anyone feel that's he'll get any better at his job.

What deficiency of Obama’s education and of the education of those who surround him accounts for administration officials not knowing what is perfectly well-known to most ordinary Americans?

While this quote pertains to his failure in regards to ObamaCare, it applies equally to a broad range of issues Americans have to deal with every day. This has to be one of the most disconnected presidents we've had in a century. (Woodrow Wilson wasn't exactly enamored of the American people and disdained the Constitution at every turn as he saw it as more of a hindrance to his agenda than the foundation of our nation.)

Obama's errors illustrate his disconnection with the realities of governing and his response to those errors show that he didn't understand why his efforts failed.

Contrary to the president’s breezy attitude suggesting that these drastic miscalculations were not knowable in advance, we know that all were foreseeable because all were perspicaciously foreseen by critics from the beginning. (The only possible exception is the staggeringly inept rollout of the HealthCare.gov website, the magnitude of which caught even the president’s toughest critics off guard.)

It’s a cliché that democracy is messy and difficult; it’s a truism that politics demands the cutting of deals and the hammering out of trade-offs; it’s common knowledge that implementing public policy and conducting diplomacy involve unforeseen obstacles and intricate maneuvering that are hard to grasp from the outside.

Yet all this keeps catching Obama and his aides by surprise. Team Obama’s surprise, however, is really not all that surprising.

It isn't like Obama has been proposing anything new as on more than one occasion he's merely repackaged initiatives and programs that have been tried before and failed, figuring that they would work this time merely because he wants them to. That will be his downfall as more than a few people in this country understand what he's doing and why he'll fail. Much of that understanding comes from common sense, experience in the business world, an understanding of history, or straight up arithmetic.

For all the time he's held the office of president, he's actually learned very little about how things work in the world. Whether it is willful ignorance or egoism on his part is irrelevant. The end result is that he's still a minor league rookie in a major league contest and he's losing. Unfortunately we're losing with him.