Blame Game

In his neighboring column last week Yonoson Rosenblum wrote about the “danger of being too quick to don the cloak of victimhood” as illustrated by President Obama’s belief that racism is to blame for his precipitous slide in popularity among Americans. He went on to note that the frum community while often faced with very real and irrational prejudice by outsiders would do well not to blame all external critique on antireligious bias. Such an attitude prevents us from reflecting on the changes we actually do need to make and also prevents us from changing the perceptions held by those who may be antagonistic out of ignorance rather than malice.

Both points are well-taken. I believe that beyond his apparent incompetence as a national leader on both the domestic and foreign fronts Mr. Obama’s single greatest liability — one apparent to keen observers from the outset of his national prominence — is his chronic inability to admit mistakes and concomitant need to be forever shifting the blame for his failures to a host of imagined factors and parties. When this happens in the home and workplace we all recognize such immaturity for what it is and take the steps necessary to address it. When it happens incessantly in the Oval Office we’re in real trouble.

On the eve of the 2008 presidential election I contrasted the vehement opposition of Barack Obama with the unflagging support of John McCain for President Bush’s fateful decision to implement an ultimately successful surge when the Iraq war seemed like a hopeless morass. “On the single most crucial foreign policy decision of this decade” I wrote “one that required a great deal of wisdom farsightedness and courage to make Senator McCain was spectacularly correct. His opponent? Not only was Senator Obama wrong he couldn’t find it within himself to admit this even as the empirical facts piled up. To this day Obama has never once mouthed the words ‘I was wrong’ on the surge nor come to think of it on anything else of import — and that’s perhaps the most troubling thing one can know about a nation’s leader.”

As for the need to be at least selectively receptive to the criticisms — however mean-spirited — leveled at our community I once cited here the Hoover Institute scholar Shelby Steele’s analysis of the black community as being “too proud to explore [its underdevelopment] for all to see” choosing instead to impute its failures to discrimination. I drew an analogy between that attitude and our own temptation “to write off all criticism of the frum community — whether of our financial dealings our driving behavior or otherwise — as just so much anti-Semitic fantasy.”