Obama University @ 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

The excessive audacity of the junior Senator from Illinois (as well as its symols) have been well documented by now. Whether it's the mock presidential seal, the replacement of the American flag with a campaign logo on the tail of his plane, or his announcement of becoming a "symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions," it's become clear that Barack Obama is treating this summer more like a victory tour than a time to campaign, as Dana Millbank explains in the Washington Post today:

"Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee ... Some say the supremely confident Obama -- nearly 100 days from the election, he pronounces that "the odds of us winning are very good" -- has become a president-in-waiting. But in truth, he doesn't need to wait: He has already amassed the trappings of the office, without those pesky decisions."

Jodi Kantor of the New York Times has been writing a series of pieces detailing segments of the presidential candidates' biographies. Today, she published a story about Barack Obama's days as a law school professor in Chicago, his third profession at the time along with being a civil rights attorney and State Senator. Kantor expounds on the Obama dichotomy as an academic:

"As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled. Most scores on his teaching evaluations were positive to superlative. Some students started referring to themselves as his groupies ...

"While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s evenhandedness, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime."

This description of Professor Obama is exactly the description of Democratic presidential nominee Obama: someone who likes the sound of his own voice and basks in his own popularity, while also being uncommitted to anything substantive. This lack of committment on taking strong stands has been shown throughout the campaign, including his multiple reactions to Jeremiah Wright and shifting positions on the future of Iraq.

Candidate Barack Obama isn't what concerns me; what I'm actually afraid of is Professor Obama, and how this academic mindset along with his university friends that make up his policy team might actually govern. The reason he has one of the most liberal voting records in the United States Senate is not because of his impulsive need to be popular; it is because academia takes a much higher priority than sound decision-making. Let's take a look at why having an Oval Office filled with professors would be detrimental for America.

First and foremost, the typical academic seeks credit and recognition before he or she seeks good solutions. The competition is always about who can write the next great book or the next ground-breaking journal article. Yes, compeition is good, but in the public policy world, it has to be balanced with collaboration, something university professors are not used to doing. What can having people like Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe in the White House lead to? Excessive partisanship, both internally and externally.

I've written in previous posts about how Barack Obama, the seemingly post-partisan candidate, is getting most of his support (as well as much of the inside-the-family rancor) from those who are most partisan: the netroots of the Left. And while many will blame our current President for the increase in partisanship inside the Beltway, at least we saw George W. Bush reach out to Democrats to find innovative solutions to education and immigration, among other issues. John McCain has defined his Senate career by being someone who is approachable by all sides (although he was willing to compromise on some issues with which I fervently disagree.) With academics taking over the Oval Office, there is no guarantee that an Obama administration will collaborate wtih anybody, no matter who is in the majority.

The typical academic also tends to delve too much into the theoritcal and metaphysical. This is especially dangerous in making foreign policy and national security decisions. Sure, Obama will brag that he has the support of many former high-ranking officials in the military. But how much influence will someone like Harvard professor Samantha Power have, who in all her writings on foreign policy makes bald assumptions and assertions about geopolitical environments and the intentions of political leaders?

The basic mantra of foreign policy and national security is to assume nothing. Academics tend to, and willingly so, get caught up in trying to come up with a unifying theory that explains everything that happens in similar situations and the nature by which decisions might or might not be made. A commander-in-chief surrounded by theorists hampers his ability to make decisions that are both time- and substance-critical. Academics fall easily into metaphysical traps when it comes to finding public policy solutions because they know they're not in a position of a decision-maker.

As much as Barack Obama talks about it, "change" is something that academics hate. What I mean is that academics often operate in a static world, a vacuum. Now, everybody knows that all politicians across the political spectrum have short term mindsets and think that the world that exists today will pretty much be the world that exists ten years from now. Real businessmen, and the most successful businessmen, think of what could happen 10, 20, even 50 years from now and plan for contingencies; they recognize that our globally integrated economy is both unpredictable and dynamic. Any economic policy team needs people who know how to manage in any situation, not people who have delusionally-optimistic ideas of social "equality-of-condition" without taking into account the fact that things change. Academics don't realize that "change" is really just a part of life; academics can't cope with it because change makes their previous work irrelevant.

When it comes to one specific issue, I am scared of the "open-ended constitution" mindset of Barack Obama's law school buddies, and how that might shape the next era of the Supreme Court. Antonin Scalia said it best when he described a "living, breathing-constitutionalist" judge as someone who goes home to his wife and says, "Honey, the most fantastic thing happened today. The constitution means exactly what I thought it should mean." Liberal academics who treat the constitution more like a "users' manual" than actual law with standards of text and intent will leave a lasting legacy in this country that I do not look forward to.

This of course is all speculation of what the faculty would look like at Obama University @ 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. What is clear is that the academic component of the Obama team has much influence with the candidate. John Heilemann described the Obama campaign as "too controlled and too controlling" in a response to the candidate's trip to Europe in New York Magazine. Kantor explains this further:

"Mr. Obama was in the business of complication, showing that even the best-reasoned rules have unintended consequences, that competing legal interests cannot always be resolved, that a rule that promotes justice in one case can be unfair in the next."

I graduated from a "mucky-muck" school that I mentioned in this post, and I admit that I am a bit of a policy wonk. The "business of complication" is not a bad thing to take in moderation when it comes to vetting policy. But this academic mindset that has fully soaked into Barack Obama is dragging a campaign that is desparately trying to define a "presidential voice" and implanting that into the candidate. In my mind, it's the president who makes the voice, not the other way around. It's not the elitism of the liberal academics that surround Obama that bother me; it's the potential for them to cause real damage to this country because, quite frankly, the country isn't the first thing that they're thinking about.