President Spock
Jeffrey Lord | 12.15.09 @ 6:08AM
Obama's lack of emotional intelligence -- is the President dumb?
It is with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Little Prince
Why would a president do the following?
* Scare Americans to death by pushing a health care reform plan that looks to be constructed by Rube Goldberg with all the bureaucratic sympathies of a Kafkaesque novel.
* Back a Cap and Trade energy proposal that is so drastic in its results it would deal yet another wound to a staggering American economy.
* Take the notorious Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the master-mind of the murderous 9/11 and the first captured 21st-century war criminal to rank with Hitler on a scale of evil -- and skip the usual and traditional military tribunal in favor of a civilian trial in the middle of New York City.
* Pledge to close Guantanamo Bay, home to the most virulent strain of jihadists on the planet -- and transfer them all to a mainland federal prison. Then admitting an inability to do so by the stated deadline and firing the White House Counsel who said it was a good idea.
* Gift the visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown with a pack of 25 DVD's of American movies -- that cannot play on British DVD players. After which the eighty-something Queen of England is given an iPod containing, among other things, videos of Obama speeches.
* Go abroad repeatedly and deliver speeches apologizing for American conduct in the world.
What would ever in a thousand years make an American president do these kinds of things?
Ideology, you say? Well, sure. Doubtless some of these things -- health care, Cap and Trade, what to do with captured enemies like KSM and America's role in the world, draw forth the left-wing tendencies of today's American liberals. But the gifts to the British Prime Minister and the Queen? The Goldbergian nature of the health care proposals? The haplessness of the Guantanamo Bay fiasco?
There's something else at work here in the Obama mind well beside a leftist ideology. A something else that has been displayed before in the American presidency. For that matter, chances are fair-to-good you have seen this somewhere along the traveled road of your own personal life.
Barack Obama, you see, is really Mr. Spock -- the legendary first officer of Star Trek's USS Enterprise.
Spock? Why Spock?
If one is a Star Trek fan, one knows that the Vulcan Spock was quite famously a creature of logic -- and that was about it. Very bright, Mr. Spock. Respected to the max for his intelligence -- but as was repeatedly demonstrated, it was precisely his dependence on logic, on what was presumed initially as a superior intellectual capacity, that repeatedly caused problems for Spock.
What Mr. Spock lacked -- big time -- was what author Daniel Goleman called in his bestseller of the same name Emotional Intelligence. The telling subtitle of Goleman's book zeroes in precisely on Spock's problem -- and Obama's: Why it can matter more than IQ.
