Sam Schulman compares Obama to Hamlet in the March 9 issue of The Weekly Standard.
To the untutored eye, the Obama administration can seem merely lazy. Economic stimulus? Let Nancy do it. Give a heavyweight like Bob Gates a job that would affront the dignity of a Guildenstern–make him plead with the Europeans to help us in Afghanistan, but force him to admit that his boss hasn’t made up his mind about whether to protect NATO members against the new Iranian/North Korean missiles. Close Guantánamo one of these days soon, decide even later what to do with its population. But it’s not laziness; it’s the way that a Hamlet thinks the world works. To a Hamlet, a leader like himself “who can inspire the American people to rally behind a common purpose” issues a decree. And that’s all that needs to be done.
For Hamlet and Obama, leadership is something that one can imagine or speechify oneself into. Hamlet feels that the only thing that stops him from being as effective a king as Fortinbras–or the Player-king–is that he lacks their sincerity and self-delusion. Obama thinks that being FDR is a matter of making FDR-like speeches–so FDR-like that Richard Cohen had a vision of an amber cigarette-holder while Obama spoke! He needn’t bother to study how FDR connived, threatened, charmed, lied, and manipulated to get his way.
But is this really the key to understanding Obama? It might be, but who knows? I’ve called him an empty suit, but really, I don’t know if that’s the key, either. We’re all trying to figure him out.
Obama is not the first president to be in way over his head. Several others have been, too. And some of those soon learned to swim.
IBut in this case it’s new territory not just for him, but for all of us. We’ve never before elected a president who was so lacking in both administrative and legislative experience. So we’ll all have to keep coming up with our theories to explain him and his actions. Eventually, it may become clear just which one has the most explanatory power.