The Leadership Trait That Barack Obama and Dick Cheney Share - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/the-leadership-trait-that-barack-obama-and-dick-cheney-share/276916
How is it that President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney, who appeared on Fox News Sunday defending the NSA’s vast surveillance program, find themselves on the same side of so many highly controversial national security debates? They subscribe to different ideologies, belong to opposing political parties, and differ dramatically in background and temperament.
Their grassroots supporters are deeply at odds. They see America’s role in the world differently, speak about it differently, and made dramatically different judgment calls on the Iraq War, perhaps the most consequential foreign-policy decision undertaken in the years after 9/11 (certainly the most costly). So what explains the once surprising number Cheneyesque national-security policies Obama has, by now, embraced?
There is, of course, no single explanation: policies adopted by the Bush Administration constrained Obama in certain ways, and everyone who heads the executive branch shares some incentives.
But I do think a significant explanation is underappreciated.
For all their substantial differences, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama share one leadership trait: they trust their own judgment so thoroughly, and value it so highly, that they recklessly undermine all institutional and prudential restraints on their ability to exercise it whenever they see fit. Indeed, like Kobe Bryant at the end of a playoff game, they both harbor a barely suppressed, supremely arrogant belief that behaving in this way is their responsibility, or even their burden.