LOTM @ #18: I’ll try to take up your invitation though diagnosing someone who is not your patient is fraught with difficulty.
As Shelby Steele pointed out in “A Bound Man,” Obama has many contradictions in both his public and his private identity. Part hipster, part ex-pat, part Muslim, part radical Christian, part leftist, part establishment, part alienated, part privileged, he seems to be a man without a center. Any decision he takes risks disappointing or even violating one or another of his parts.
He seeks attention yet complains when attention is paid to him (such as the fuss he makes over the coverage of his expensive dates with Michelle during the worst economic times in decades). He plays hardball and surrounds himself with Chicago Rules types, but is extremely thin skinned when it comes to Fox News and even Edmunds.com’s criticism of the cash for clunkers program. He can give a prepared speech but freezes when the teleprompter malfunctions.
He has affiliated himself with very strong personalities, from Bill Ayers to Reverend Wright to Michelle to Rahm Emmanuel. But I wonder whether he has a single real and true friend — someone before whom he is not “on” and someone with whom he can truly be himself, whatever that is.
He seems most comfortable in the universe of hypotheses. That suits his utopian views and is consistent with the fact that as Editor of the Harvard Law Review he did not commit himself to writing anything of significance. To have written and published would have pinned him down to something tangible and therefore not hypothetical.
I believe he is lost in the tangible and comfortable only in the hypothetical. That is why the campaign fit him so well and governing fits him so poorly. And as such, he is vulnerable to the different pressures not only of his many internal parts (noted above) but also to the different agendas of his advisors.
His strongest advisors are focused mostly on remaking domestic America in their vision. The practical consequences of this for America’s position in the world are mere hypotheses to them. And all that suits the President because I believe his view of America is that it is too powerful and didn’t understand or accept him. And if I am right that he felt himself to be some sort of “alien creature” in the eyes of what he thought mainstream America was, then he would want to cut that tyranny down to size. The reason European criticism of American Exceptionalism appealed to him is that it was congruent with his own experience of alienation.
He seems to be drawn into poking others in the eye but then complaining when they poke back. In that sense he is like an inwardly cowardly bully who wants his way but also is afraid of conflict. And making a decision inevitably precipitates conflict.
My assessment is that Obama the man has only hypothetical convictions and tries to avoid the consequences of real and practical decisions. I base this not only on his dithering (good phrase wws) on Afghanistan but the way all his other leadership has turned out.
He could have had a health plan adopted if he had been willing to stand up to some of the disparate forces within his party and crafted something that would have been less comprehensive but more practical, and would even have gotten a handful of Republican votes. But living in the hypothetical world, and being unwilling to put his foot down and antagonizing some of his allies, he has allowed the process to drift and be taken over by Pelosi and Reid. No leadership here.
And same with cap and trade. A practical General would have laid out the sequence of battle, lined up the troops, established the logistical support, and than acted. But President Obama has little experience with logistics, is afraid to antagonize any of his troops (though willing to alienate those on the other side whom he might need later), and is paralyzed when it comes to transforming the hypothetical into the practical.
So I assess him as having a set of serious character flaws. He has no core, he lives in the hypothetical, he is a bully against those weaker than himself and a coward who runs from conflict with those stronger than himself. And he is deeply internally divided, and thus subject more than most to the influences of those around him, especially Michelle.
None of this necessarily negates the theory of incompetence and inexperience. Nor does it negate the theory of anti-American consipracy. And it also does not negate the theory that he is a pawn of other more sinister forces. But I think it does clarify a lot of the seemingly inconsistent behavior on his part. He talks a good game (the world of the hypothetical) but does not walk the talk (because he is too divided and too conflict-averse to make a decision for which he will have to take real responsibility).
Part of this is the curse of excess academia. I agree with the others who have made those points. (And I use Wilson and Carter as examples when friends say that the most important thing in a President is his intelligence.) The relatively inarticulate, like Harry Truman, Eisenhower, and George W. Bush, who are better at the practical than at the theoretical tend to make better Presidents. (I also say to those who claim that articulateness is the most important trait of a President, and say that to justify their vote for Obama, that Reagan was the most articulate President of all.)
So we have a man as President who has a fragmented identity, who is a bully but also a coward, who lives in utopian hypotheticals and has great trouble in the world of practicality attached to responsibility. He is more vulnerable than most to the whims of his advisors (remember he didn’t have a father and therefore strong men will fit that empty place), and has great difficulty improvising when he does not have a polished script. And he seems to hate the risk of being wrong or of being responsible for unexpected consequences.
There is no polished script for a war, especially one as complex as Afghanistan. So his default seems to be “delay and conquer.”
I don’t really know how certain this character analysis is — remember that none of us writing here at BC really know the man. But thinking this through does help me understand something of his moves the past nine months.
But it seems to me that every time America has been paralysed or indecisive it has been bad for the world. “Lost in thought” is not a good place for a President to be.
