Saturday, September 29, 2012 :::
Jonah Goldberg noted a few days ago that Obama doesn't seem to have learned very much -- most notably, he thinks his biggest problem is that he has spent too much of his effort on governance and not enough on giving speeches.
This ignores some things that Obama has learned. He learned that under the modern regulatory structure, "shovel-ready jobs" really don't exist. I don't have solid documentation, but he seems to have been more alert to recent natural disasters than during the BP oil spill. He apparently came to regret his administration's failure to support protesters in Iran. He has stopped meeting with foreign leaders without preconditions. Finally, I'm not sure whether he's a better chief executive now than he was early on, but he at least has had some experience.
He hasn't made as much progress as I would like, but he hasn't been completely unaffected.
::: posted by Steven at 10:12 PM
