Obama's Worst Mistake

According to Alexander Mallin of ABC News, President Barack Obama told Fox News Sunday this morning that his "worst mistake" was not having "a plan for the day after" the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. This is a perfectly respectable answer, but it also conceals a far worse mistake. This was the mistake of assuming that he was governing a population that consisted, for the most part, of rational people. Indeed, the very fact that he was being interviewed by Fox News, which owes its survival as a network, to the very defiance of rationality, suggests that he fumbled a great opportunity. Yet that lack of rationality has engendered one of the most ineffective governments that those of my generation have witnessed. It is hard to tell whether Obama could not reverse this situation because he simply could not see the beast for what it was worth or because he was too well-mannered to do anything about it. The result seems to be that the ill-mannered have taken Obama's failure as an opportunity to rule the roost; and now the rest of us can only fret over what might happen if one of them succeeds.