Wretchard, I think your comment at 11:43 yesterday presupposes a maturity of personality development that all data indicates to be lacking in Obama. His narcissism and the associated myopia and emotional fragility were all implicit in his decision to run at all, given his complete lack of real-world qualification for the job. The grandiosity of that move, even given the assumed ass-kissing that the Left might have done to get him to agree, is truly unfathomable.

Since then, of course, we have been treated to no end of Emperor’s New Clothes moments confirming what Krauthammer so eloquently documented a couple of weeks back, that this is no ordinary politician brand of narcissism. He is a man without a true self, whose (emotional) abandonment by his mother early in life has left him like the Wicked Witch in Snow White. He must search unremittingly for acknowledgment and adulation, doing whatever is needed to obtain it, and thereby never developing a sense of who he really is. One doesn’t just grow out of a personality disturbance like this.

He is a REAL empty suit, and there is no way for him to grow out of this without crashing and burning, like a severe alcoholic, and maybe not even then. So a commonsense move like the one you suggest is not in the cards — unless maybe it’s way down the road, after Michelle and the kids leave him, he spends his time at Betty Ford, and he then does penance by caring for the Clintons in their nursing home days.