Over the weekend, as he berated the Israeli government for its opposition to the proposed Iranian nuclear deal, President Obama attempted to strike a literary note. Condemning Jerusalem’s supposed flip-flopping on the merits of the deal, the president sarcastically said, “you know, consistency is the hobgoblin of narrow minds.”
President Obama’s copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations must be missing a page: He mangled the extremely well known Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” That he botched a quote is not, in and of itself, a huge deal: we all slip up from time to time. Besides, President Obama’s disdain for art and literature is well chronicled.
Yet this was no more “speak-o.” The president actually completely mangled the meaning of the Emerson quotation, and did so in a revealing way. Emerson’s point was that unthinking consistency — consistency, say, in the face of changing circumstances, or consistently clinging to discredited ideas — is a mistake. But the president went much further, suggesting that consistency itself for the narrow-minded.
Well, at least that explains his position(s) on gay marriage.
