George F. Will is one of my heroes, and this week's Newsweek features an especially acerbic gem of analysis of Obamanon's First Hundred Days...Here are some of the highlights...
"A 19th-century historian called the Middle Ages 'a thousand years without a bath.' That oversimplified somewhat, but was interestingly suggestive. So is the summation of Obama's opening sprint as a hundred days without silence.
Ordinary politicians cannot comprehend that it is possible for the public to see and hear too much of them. In this sense, Obama is very ordinary. A few leaders of democracies have understood the importance of being economical with their demands for the public's attention...If Obama, constantly flitting here and there, continues to bombard the nation with his presence, he will learn how skillfully Americans wield the basic tool of modern happiness, the TV remote control with its mute button.
Calvin Coolidge, the last president with a proper sense of his office's constitutional proportions, was known, not coincidentally, as Silent Cal. His reticence expressed an institutional modesty: 'It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man.'
'Men,' Coolidge said, 'do what I tell them to do---why, is a great mystery to me.' Perhaps it was because he did not ask them to do all that much. Unless today's Congress can legislate that there shall henceforth be 36 hours in a day, and unless it can lengthen the year by four months---some liberals probably think Congress can--Obama will soon learn what happens when government's circuitry becomes overloaded."
-George F. Will
