What, Exactly, Does Obama Believe In?



What, Exactly, Does Obama Believe In?  When trying to compose my thoughts about this post, I centered on terms like oblivious, capricious, and denial, but no one of them seemed quite accurate or adequate to describe the essence of our president’s public persona.  He is clearly oblivious to the history of our nation and equally so to the real impact of his policy initiatives.  He is also capricious in the way he leaps from one position to another, with no apparent explanation or logic to explain these shifts.  Denial could be his middle name, considering his clear tendency to recognize no shortcomings whatsoever in the consideration of his ideas or ideals.  But even though each these terms accurately describes some of his actions, no single one is comprehensive in depicting his overall behavior as our President.  Barrack Obama is the living, breathing character (Narcissus) from Greek mythology that gazed at his own image in a pool and fell in love with him.

Whether he is prancing (yes, that is term I was looking for) down the steps from Air Force One or going from point A to point B while on camera, he is always performing.   It is like there is a real time camera in his head that is constantly trained on himself and he is primarily focused on that camera image, all else being secondary.  Watch him in a press conference (don’t get to do that too often, do we?), in a meeting with other people, or when making a speech.  The dramatic pauses that are his trademark, and that many laud as rhetorical genius, are nothing more than occasional glimpses at the camera image.  The need to constantly self-analyze his image must be driven by a significant personality issue that demands a “me first” approach to every waking moment.

While Obama is clearly not the only person with this condition, he has taken it to a whole, new level.  We all have egos and we are all aware of our perceived self image.  But perhaps Obama’s successes in life have validated his ego to the point that he accepts as fact the things that the rest of us simply wish for and seldom get to realize; the desire to be the smartest person in the room, the desire to say something witty at the right time and the right place, the desire to have the right idea or solution to a problem when everyone else is struggling with complexities.  Given his meteoric rise to the presidency, it is understandable that, at some point, he began to believe everything his adoring staff told him and all that his fawning press wrote about him.  At some point, he lost sight of the fact that true admiration and respect is earned by accomplishment and not by simply showing up and blessing people with your presence.  Watching him in his current European trip as he mingles with the leaders of other nations, he assumes the same demeanor that he assumed when smarmily telling Mitt Romney that the Russian threat is so very yesterday.  He seems to think…no, he is convinced…that simply gracing people with his presence is sufficient to convince them of his and his nation’s infallibility.  Needless to say, that stuff outlived its shelf life about a year ago. 

A man cannot accomplish in life what Obama has accomplished without having some remarkable strengths and abilities.  He has risen too far and too fast to be an anomaly.  But just as Bill Clinton was humbled by mid-term elections and came to realize that true governance is a product of co-operation and compromise, so too must Obama come to terms with his policy fallacies, his limitations as president, and his inherent imperfections as a human being.  He needs to turn that head camera off for a while and focus on the other people in the room.