Not An Idiot

I just read economics correspondent David Leonhardt's interview with Obama in the New York Times magazine, and all I can say is that it sure is nice to have a President who isn't an idiot. One can no more imagine W sitting for a hour long one-on-one with an economics correspondent than singing Don Giovanni, but Obama did. His answers to Leonhardt's question are typically long, thoughtfull, and well-informed. The last paragraph shows the pragmatist in sharp relief against the ideologue with the singularly stupid gut:

What I’m very confident about is that given the difficult options before us, we are making good, thoughtful decisions. I have enormous confidence that we are weighing all our options and we are making the best choices. That doesn’t mean that every choice is going to be right, is going to work exactly the way we want it to. But I wake up in the morning and go to bed at night feeling that the direction we are trying to move the economy toward is the right one and that the decisions we make are sound.

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