Analogy

I was discussing our new president with a friend recently. We found we were both quite pleased with how much he has been managing to get done under very tough circumstances. My friend had some worries though. The more the president achieves, the more he is attacked by the opposition. The worry was that Obama would eventually find himself overly distracted by side-show attacks from a Republican opposition eager to see him fail.

My friend told me that he was reminded of a nature program he had seen on TV. A pride of lions was going after a lone elephant. Of course the elephant was far bigger than any of the lions. Individually it could have easily beaten any one of them in combat.

But the lions’ strategy was to continually pick away at the elephant – a bite here, a swipe of a claw there – until eventually the strength of their victim was worn down, and then they pounced and finished off the job.

I told my friend I thought it was a valid worry, but the situation in Washington is somewhat different. “How so?” he asked. I said, “This seems more a case of a lion being attacked by a pack of little elephants.”

6 thoughts on “Analogy”

  1. Interesting to see how two of the major participants the current debate over the direction of our nation’s future are identified in this blog post. “Our new president” vs. “side-show attacks from a Republican opposition eager to see him fail.” We might as well just describe the debate as a battle between “good” and “evil.” I guess we can tell which side is supposed to win. Or . . . we could acknowledge the different sincere and well-meaning viewpoints out there on all sides, and let the reader/public decide which should prevail based on the merits of their respective arguments. 🙂

  2. Good point. I didn’t say it was a good analogy. 🙂

    Of course it is necessary for any opposition party to keep any president in check. That’s a necessary part of any functioning representative democracy. I think my friend and I were mainly responding to the nature of some of the recent attacks against his initiatives. Constructive engagement would be so much more productive than knee jerk opposition.

    It may not be so much a problem of good guys versus bad guys as a structural problem in our system. In a president’s first term, any opposition party benefits from seeing him stumble, because it increases the changes he won’t make it to his second term. It’s frustrating because our country faces so many challenges right now, and this pattern is playing out at a particularly bad time.

    For example, the entire rhetoric surrounding the confirmation hearings of Sotomayor can only be described as “side-show attacks”. It’s hard to believe McCain really believes the things he’s been saying on that issue – I’d had a lot more faith in his judgement than to expect this.

  3. My own unsolicited analogy: Obamism and Cultism

    This is not, as the title might suggest, an attack on Obama. Mainly because it has nothing to do with his policies but rather the religious fervor with which he is followed and hailed. Those who support Him follow Him and defend Him with such strong and unbacked emotion that there seems to be a general consensus that if you don’t follow Obama, you are either Evil or Unenlightened.

    Of course, the unwashed masses do not want to be associated with either, so, they follow the leader and defend the leader with all the conviction and sentiment of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady.

    Just as in your tacit analogy, Obama==good guy…. those who question Him==bad guys

    I do agree with one statement that you made, that it is always better to have opposition for checks and balances. I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interest to have a 100% liberal executive/legislative government as I don’t think it’s good to have it 100% Conservative. It’s only by the constant struggle between opposing views that we really learn what drives both sides of the arguments. Sometimes we will be swayed, sometimes not, but if we listen and argue our points, we will at least better understand each other.

    What I don’t agree with is that this is a bad time for Obama to have to deal with the slings and arrows of his opposition. It’s a dangerous and slippery slope to allow the current state of the Union to allow a release of checks and balances. I would argue that debate is more important now than it would be in a more docile environment because the answers need to be good ones, not knee jerk “I want it and I want it NOW” Veruca Salt-like directives. (Ergo “you MUST sign this bill without reading or understanding it NOW because I said so, and by not believing me and signing it NOW the entire country will fall off the abyss.”)

    Here are the things that scare me about Obama: His knee jerk pronouncement of the closing of Gitmo. Clearly nobody thought this one through. I’m sure he’s regretting that now, but, politically, had to follow through to appear effective. Luckily, congress threw in a few roadblocks to give us some time to figure out what to do with that mess that he created. Also, the false sense of urgency to get the Stimulus Bill passed. I am not making a statement of whether it was a good bill or a bad bill. The part that really scared me was that there was a false sense of urgency to pass it, unread. This was the largest spending bill in the history of the world and it was voted on after only a few short hours to review? We are seeing the same thing with environmental legislation- We haven’t seen signs of global warming in a decade and we MUST pass legislation to stop it before the end of the year?

    I’m not arguing merits or lack of merits of the causes, but rather the false sense of urgency. It scares me that many, like you, believe that things are simply so bad that we must just follow blindly and not question, criticize, or otherwise hinder His progress…

    To blindly follow a god-like leader, to criticize others for criticizing him, to support and promote his mandates without reading or understanding them… This looks a lot like a Cult, tiny elephants and all…

  4. Oh gosh. You seem to think I’m uncritical of Obama. Which would mean you are starting from a radically false set of assumptions.

    I’m critical of quite a few of his decisions. It’s great that he’s getting push back from people who are articulating reasoned faults in those decisions. All I ask is that criticism of any administration’s policies be on the merits, not embedded into a pattern of “let’s look for something arbitrary to criticize just to score political points.”

    Also, it seems a little pointless to carp about a president backing away from campaign promises once the newly installed president has the added info that comes from having access to the State Department.

    Both Bush 41 and Bush 43 needed to back away from campaign promises once they were in the White House, as did Clinton, Reagan, etc. before them. It’s to Obama’s credit that he did revise his views once he had proper inside information.

    Some of the things you say here seem to be just for effect. There was indeed a tremendous amount of behind the scenes horse trading over the spending bill – it didn’t just magically appear out of the White House, untouched by the hands of Congress. Also, the statement “we haven’t seen signs of global warming in a decade” is simply false, if we’re referring here to the scientific consensus based on empirical data.

    On a more disturbing level, to accuse me – quite wrongly, as it happens – of blindly following Obama, with whom I disagree on quite a few things, as some sort of god-like leader, borders on the insulting. That kind of rhetorical strategy is probably best to be avoided, IMHO.

  5. I try watching Fox News to make certain to give due credence to popular media coverage. What is found there is ridiculous shouting matches and outnumbered opponents – talking on and on, hour after hour, day after day about relatively unimportant issues. This criticism extends to much of the Republican party, since Fox has attempted to absorb into its programming the figureheads of popular Republican media (Rush Limbaugh et al) and politics (Oliver North et al). Sean Hannity still gives smug touchĂ©s over new data from discredited John Christy and Roy Spencer (much because he lived near them), who have probably done more than anyone in the past decades to confuse the issue of global warming with their strongly voiced denial, backed by their faulty analytical results. To argue either side of the issue here, though, would be to blithely roll over such problems, such as you did by ignoring well-respected data from GISS. It is clear, however, that such actions confused an important issue – meaning that its resolution in favor of the opinion more strongly backed by Republicans should not be apparent. This, I believe, is what is meant when speaking of “attack[s] by a pack little elephants”, if it does seem a slight bit of disrespectful caricature.

  6. Ken,

    I’m not criticizing your analogy, just offering another. I think you should represent the various characters however you want. I’d do the same thing. Too much political correctness keeps us from saying what we mean.

    I didn’t mean to suggest that you, personally, were following a cult leader, but, a person as smart as you has to see that this is happening on a pretty large scale elsewhere. I’m sorry that you took it that way and that you took it as an insult. It wasn’t intended. The one place that I did make an assumption about you, personally, was based on your comment above regarding the difficult times and your personal frustration with the machinations of opposing views. I appologize and rescind if this was an incorrect assumption.

    Also, I didn’t carp about a President backing away from promises, but, just the opposite… That he made a point of fulfilling these even though I’m reasonably confident that he regretted it after being briefed.

    And seriously, do you think congress gave the stimulus bill it’s due diligence? Personally, I’m not a fan of this legislation and wasn’t a fan of the previous administration’s either… but, that’s another story. Fan or not, a reasonable amount of time for review would have at least given the impression that it was read and understood by those who voted on it.

    Ken, I haven’t read your blog in months… I forgot how much fun it can be. I’ll be back… 🙂

    Dan, I’m not a big TV watcher… I’ve never watched Fox News. I’ll have to tune that in some time, sounds crazy…

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