A little insight into our President

So occasionally you get a glimpse of who a person really is. A couple weeks ago, Israeli PM Netanyahu met with President Obama. They had a little session for the media where they sat on large high-backed puffy chairs and fielded questions together while leaning towards one another as if having a tete-a-tete. Whatever. At one point, a reporter asked if there was linkage between Iranian negotiations and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Obama sort of took the question abstractly and suggested that if there was any "causal linkage" at all, it ran from the peace process to the Iranian nuclear negotiations (his argument that solving the Palestinian/Israeli dispute will lead to reduced tensions, etc. Netanyahu gently corrected him - so gently you barely noticed - to dispel the use of the word "linkage."

Mr. Obama is not a foreign policy expert. Apparently he didn't know that "linkage" is an incredibly loaded word both in nuclear negotiations and particularly in the context of Arab-Israeli negotiations. I think by his second term, Bill Clinton would have known that "linkage" was a code word. Obama didn't. I'm surprised I didn't see this remarked upon elsewhere, but I may just have missed it. So this showed me about Obama's lack of foreign policy experience.
At this White House meeting, I thought I could see Netanyahu realizing that Barack Obama could easily go "off the reservation." If an American president were to begin thinking afresh about US-Israeli relations, it could indeed by quite disturbing for Israeli expectations. The rhetoric of the past fifty years has served to ensnare and entrap all the participants into webs from which they do not extricate themselves. When every word is fraught with meaning, real communication stops.

But his answer, broad and theoretical, yet turning on the use of a word, was also telling. He really does think like a trained legal scholar. I am not projecting too much when I say it was pretty obvious to me that he was taking the question as if he was at oral argument. That's also interesting to me. I suspect he reponds well to that sort of discourse.

What surprised me the most was this: Had the word linkage been a legal term of art, like "standing" or "jurisdiction," he would not have blithely used it without a host of caveats. Yet out of his field, he lumbered in verbally where angels fear to tread. I get the impression that Obama thinks he's capable of understanding things such as foreign policy without specific training or expertise. This may run to other kinds of policy areas as well, and likely does. Now, it is a bad thing for a President to lack intellectual curiosity and simply defer to experts (see Reagan, Bush I, Bush II). It is a good thing to be open to thinking, debating, and being willing to examine timeworn customs afresh. It is a very good thing to propose reimagining policy, indeed the whole world, from first principles. That is the great virtue of youth.

But it is also a bit dangerous to assume that superior intellect and reasoning capacity is a substitute for learning and experience. That is the hubris of youth. Most of the time, I see that President Obama is wise in knowing how and what to learn from wiser people. But he still has this greenness about him. Second-term Obama will have gray hair.