Wall Street Journal has an article about Obama's strategies on how he's trying to get things done. Unfortunately, it looks like he's taking his tips from "South Park."
Consider the 1998 "Gnomes" episode -- possibly surpassing Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" as the classic defense of capitalism -- in which the children of South Park, Colo., get a lesson in how not to run an enterprise from mysterious little men who go about stealing undergarments from the unsuspecting and collecting them in a huge underground storehouse.
What's the big idea? The gnomes explain:
"Phase One: Collect underpants.
"Phase Two: ?
"Phase Three: Profit."
Lest you think there's a step missing here, that's the whole point. ("What about Phase Two?" asks one of the kids. "Well," answers a gnome, "Phase Three is profits!") This more or less sums up Mr. Obama's speech last week on Guantanamo, in which the president explained how he intended to dispose of the remaining detainees after both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly against bringing them to the U.S.
The president's plan can briefly be described as follows. Phase One: Order Guantanamo closed. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Close Gitmo!
Granted, this is an abbreviated exegesis of his speech, which did explain how some two-thirds of the detainees will be tried by military commissions or civilian courts, or repatriated to other countries. But on the central question of the 100-odd detainees who can neither be tried in court nor released one searches in vain for an explanation of exactly what the president intends to do.
If you've never seen the episode, go to southparkstudios.com season 2 to get an idea. It's a long used internet meme that was used for awhile to describe the internet bubble popping, but now can be pretty much applied to any bad business decision.
The rest of the article is interesting, in that pretty much any issue that Obama has faced, he has applied this strategy. I had never thought of it this way, but this perfectly describes how Obama is running his administration -- he thinks of the beginning and end result, but doesn't put out a plan to get to the end result, just lets it hang there.
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