... For four years I have been told, by those whoâve worked in the administration and those whoâve visited it as volunteers or contractors, that the Obama White House isnât organized. Itâs just full of chatter. Meetings donât begin on time, thereâs no agenda, the list of those invited seems to expand and contract at somebodyâs whim. There is a tendency to speak of how a problem will look and how its appearance should be handled, as opposed to what the problem is and should be done about it. People speak airily, without point. They scroll down, see a call that has to be returned, pop out and then in again. It does not sound like a professional operation. And this is both typical of White Houses and yet on some level extreme. People have always had meetings to arrange meetings, but the lack of focus, the lack of point, the sense that they are operating within accepted levels of incoherenceâthis all sounds, actually, peculiar. And when you apply this to the ObamaCare debacle, suddenly it seems to make sense. The White House is so unformed and chaotic that they probably didnât ignore the problem, they probably held a million meetings on it. People probably said things like, âWeâre experiencing some technological challenges but weâre sure weâll be up by October,â and other people said, âYes, itâs important we launch strong,â and others said, âThe Republicans will have a field day if weâre not.â And then everyone went to their next meeting. And no one did anything. And the president went off and made speeches. Because the doing isnât that important, the talking is. * * * The president is interested in Ronald Reagan, and in the past has seemed mildly preoccupied with him, but he misunderstands him. Mr. Obama shows every sign of thinking Reagan led only through words. But Reagan led through actions, as every leader must. The words explained, argued for and advanced those actions; they gave people a sense of who it was who was acting. But Obamaâs generation of the left could never see or come to terms with the fact that it was, say, the decision to fire the air traffic controllers, or the decision to take the hit and bleed out inflation, that made Reaganâs presidency successful and meaningful. With an effective presidency, everything is in the doing. The words are part of the doing and at some points can be crucial to it; at some interesting points they even are the doing, such as looking at the Soviets and declaring that we knew what their system was and wouldnât accept any but an honest interpretation of it, and yes, that constituted a change of attitude and approach. That took words. But itâs never all words, it canât be. Itâs making the right decision and carrying it throughâexecuting it. Mr. Obama learned only half of Reaganâs lesson. And hereâs something odd. The first President Bush, George H.W., learned half the lesson too, but the other half. Bush managed, executed and decided his way through the peaceful fall of the Soviet Empire and the reunification of Germany. But he couldnât, for reasons characterological and having to do with his own highly refined sense of the demands of diplomacy, explain to people exactly what he was doing, why he was doing it and how. And so a feat of great historical weight and magnitude, deserving of a Nobel Prize for peace and utterly ignored by that silly committee, is half forgotten. Whereas Mr. Obama won that prizeâfor words. ...