Frank Rich, Review of "The Promise"

‘Why Has He Fallen Short?’ | The New York Review of Books

I won't have time to read "The Promise", and it was tough to skim through this review. It is most interesting to note the liberal thought tenets:

• Liberals are smarter, BO is smartest of all, human intelligence is "the deal" -- forget spirit, emotion, intuition, etc ... liberals are smarter, liberal leaders are smartest of all, that is certain to be the answer to all our problems very soon.
  
• It all CAN be done by pulling on the right government levers -- once you have a smart enough rat pushing the levers, nirvana is at hand.
  
• "the masses", especially those that fall into the evil of conservatism, are too stupid to understand, or often even to be manipulated to the correct path. They fall prey to "ideologues", "partisans", religion, etc ... they lose the true and saving faith in the garden of liberal earthly delight, which the truly wise know is "just around the corner" (see that rat pushing those levers??? ....) 

There is always a certain happiness and passion to liberals when they are out of power -- their certainty that they have all the answers is so solid it defies any doubt when they are looking on from the sidelines, or quarterbacking on Monday morning. The only thing that stands between them and great joy is that damned "less than liberal" in power at the time.

Once they sit down to the daily task of pushing and pulling on those levers of power with Delphic brilliance, there is a certain panic, depression and confusion that descends upon them. "The damned conservatives have broken the machine too badly!!!" ... "This is FAR worse than we thought, we must re-double and triple our efforts to spend money, to regulate, to legislate, to pontificate, and to demonize !!!" ... "Why, oh why can we not find the right lever? The evil conservatives must have hidden it. Nirvana was right at hand, we could see it! But now there are all these damned problems!" ... their travails would be humorous if it wasn't the levers of power in a real nation, OUR NATION that they are randomly pushing, pulling and abusing with no clue of reality.

One often wonders how one can last past 30 as a liberal. It just seems like the real world would have bitten you in the ass by then and convinced you that "brains ain't everything". Brains are nice, but even Einstein is dead -- much better to try to branch out a bit.