In a recent column assessing President Barack Obama’s judgment (after six years in office), the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens asked, “What does Obama Know?” Stephens brutally concluded that among U.S. presidents, Barack Obama “stands apart is in his combination of ideological rigidity and fathomless ignorance. What does the president know? The simple answer, and maybe the truest, is: not a lot.”
Stephens’ column addressed the “foundation of knowledge” underpinning the president’s analysis of political problems and hence his policy prescriptions. Obama is indeed ideologically rigid; Stephens nails that. Obama is a clinical study in no-give domestic political grandstanding — and this is where, in my view, Stephens’ conclusion that the president is abysmally ignorant is akilter.
