Baking: Not Easy

I suggest that the President take up baking. Here is why: It seems like a simple thing to do--you decide what you want to make, you collect the ingredients you need, you get out your pans and blender and measuring devices, and you just follow the less-than-rocket-science level of difficulty directions. But it isn't simple at all. The recipe is written in a kind of code that requires experience to decipher. If you can't decipher it, you will screw up -- not a lot, maybe just one small step of the process. But in baking, that's all it takes to make a mess of the project.

So baking is humbling. It's a one-strike-you're-out kind of enterprise, a zero tolerance for error domain. And humility in the face of challenge is a healthy thing. It counsels caution, patience, attention to detail and appreciation for the known masters of the trade, from whom one may learn a great deal, if one knows how.

As a rule of observation, I'd say that the President, like most people, is humble about some things and not others. With a politician, however, it's hard to tell, because politicians, for good reason, have to be concerned about their optic -- how they appear. if they appear too cocksure (in America, at least), people don't like that. We're still Jeffersonian at heart in many ways. On the other hand, if they seem too uncertain or, worse, in a malaise, the American people like that even less. They want leaders who lead. So in trying to strike the right balance, a politician has to always second-guess what the public traffic will bear, and this makes it hard for any of us to know the real feel within a man like Barack Obama, or George Bush, or Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan, and so on.

I think the President is humble about a lot, because it follows from his appreciation, so evident in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, of Reinhold Niebuhr. It shows in other ways, too--particularly his inclination to analysis, to hard work, when it comes to dealing with public policy problems. People who are not humble in that way, like George W. Bush, trust their gut and think that's enough. You do have to trust your gut, but that's NOT enough. President Obama is not apparently humble about other things; sometimes he seems to strut his intelligence -- but again, that could be just optic management. I don't know the man, so I don't know the answer--and that's the only way, I think, anyone can know it.

Anyway, baking helps a person find the balance between self-confidence and humility, because even very good cooks, like me, can be terrible bakers, like me. Once every so many years, I try to bake something, and pretty much fail. Not fail abjectly, but fail all the same in getting whatever it is--strudel, a pie crust, a jelly roll, and so on--to some out like it's supposed to come out. I tried again this morning -- a 1-2-3-4 Yellow Cake recipe from Joy of Cooking. Because I did not clean off the blender whirrers well enough before trying to whip the egg whites into soft peaks, the cake did not rise properly. That's just one little detail, and the recipe does not remind one to do this, either. But screwing up one little detail is all it takes to mess up a process requiring, oh, about 15 or 20 steps. Maybe more.

Same goes for public policy. If you're trying to do something even halfway hard, and most big things we want to do are way more than halfway hard, all you have to do is mess up one thing -- have one duck not in its row -- and the implementation will either not go as intended, or will fail outright. Say, a war. Say a war in Iraq. Or even a war in Afghanistan. Obviously, one thing all recipes have is enough steps to get you to a successful conclusion. It doesn't say "Mission Accomplished" anywhere in Joy of Cooking, as far as I know, and I've read pretty much the whole thing over the years. Nor does it mention "Phase IV." But, pretty clearly, before you can consider any policy a success, you have to define what the thing is supposed to look like in the end. No baker ever won praise for making it through three-quarters or even seven-eighths of a recipe. No policymaker should either.

The next time a President goes though a 94-day review trying to respond to a resource request from a commanding general, or goes about making strategy for a change in a proper way, it would be a good idea to try the 1-2-3-4 Yellow Cake recipe some evening in the White House kitchen. You can learn a lot from screwing up a cake. Really; even if you can roast a duck.