DeLong's Nightmarish Dream

Brad DeLong offers one of the oddest and most unsettling possible salutations to the new Obama Adminstration. All will be well, says Brad, because these guys are perfect in almost every way:

1. The bench is very deep right now. Practically everyone competent and qualified for high executive office has come over to the Democratic Party over the fourteen years since the coming of Gingrich. Thus there are a huge number of superb choices available for every position.

2. Everyone being considered for high federal office is intellectually honest: they understand not just the advantages of their own views, but their flaws and disadvantages as well; they understand the pluses of views opposed to theirs. Policy will be reality-based: it will depend upon our collective best guesses as to the way the world works, and not the idiosyncratic intellectual hobbyhorses of ex-AEI staffers.

3. Everyone knows that the American people have elected Barack Hussein Obama and Joe Biden--not their staffs. Everyone knows that the jobs of staffers will be to present Obama and Biden with the options, their pluses and minuses, and then strive to implement their choices as best they can. The policies of the Obama-Biden administration will be Obama-Biden policies.

4. Everyone thinks it would be a great honor to work for the Obama-Biden administration.

5. Everyone knows that the bench is deep, and that their chances--however qualified they are--are low.

6. Everyone's knows that this is bigger than any of us, and that the right attitude is to ask for an oar, find a place on a bench, and start rowing. There is an awful lot to do.

What do you think of when you hear this kind of talk? You know the answer to that one; you think of Shakespeare's Hamlet--or more precisely, Hamlet's Hamlet: the model of Renaissance manhood: intelligent, cultivated, energetic, warm-hearted and full of good intentions. All he wants is a well-ordered nation and a loving family.

And yet by the end of act five, the stage is littered with corpses, including his own. Brad, baby! Where's your sense of tragedy? Where's the touch of ingratiating humility? Where is your distrust of know-it-all arrogance, of moral complacency--of all the sub-vices of pride that can drive even The Best and the Brightest (remember them?) to disaster? Where's that little voice on the shoulder telling you that you may be full of , um, you know.

Don't get me wrong, baby: this is a great day for King and Country, and we have more reasons for hope than at any time in the last eight years. But along with the shock of the new, let's have just a smattering of awe.

Footnote:

hubris

hyoobriss

• noun excessive pride or self-confidence.

— DERIVATIVES hubristic adjective.

— ORIGIN Greek, originally denoting presumption towards or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis.

Go ahead, look it up (link).