(Via Instapundit) I almost agree with this:
Obama came into office drunk on his own hype. He thought that he was bigger than the job; that his charisma and cool alone could shape history. (“This campaign is about you,” his campaign’s website said. That’s a good tip-off: whenever someone says that it’s not about them, it’s always, always about them.) Now, he’s a human being: nobody — not me, not you, and not Barack Obama — can be anesthetized from the egomania that must come with reading about how his words and deeds can shape a generation’s legacy. But whose idea was it, after all, to send a man with such an astonishingly thin paper trail to lead Western civilization during a period of war and recession? Well, it was his. It was Obama’s idea. The thing about our system is this: you don’t inherit the job. It doesn’t fall into your lap. In the final analysis, you nominate yourself for the job. Obama kicked off his own campaign from Illinois in January 2007. He’d been in high office for two years, and already he’d decided that he was such an important figure that he really ought to be president.
Almost. I think that what happened to then-Senator Obama was that he figured that running for President in 2008 would at least give him a shot at the Vice President slot; or failing that, the governorship of Illinois in 2010. So he let the power-gamers running his campaign set up a strategy that would maximize his chances… and hoo, boy, did they ever! Then Hillary imploded, and then forty years of conditioned appearance-of-racism-avoidance reflexes took over in the Democratic party elite, and then, well, we maybe weren’t at our best in 2008, and you know the rest.
Moe Lane
PS: The suggestion to ‘get a dog’ is kind of funny, given that the President has one – which he promptly named after himself. I sometimes wish that I had taken a psychology course in college; it’d allow me to make pop-psychology comments on things like that with a straight face.
Obama is our first “playing president” President.
The diagnosis you’re looking for is “compensatory narcissism.”
A compensatory narcissist is one to all appearances who shares the traits of the classic narcissist. However, deep down he knows that he is not all of the things that he claims to be, so rather than being satisfied with puffing himself up he turns into a bully who builds his own public image by tearing down others. Because if he is not all that people believe him to be, then others must be taken down beneath what his honest belief his level is.
See:
– giving the finger to Hillary and McCain
– lipstick on a pig to Palin
– pretty much anything he has ever said about Republicans in general
– the self-satisfied smirk on his face every time he denigrates one of his opponents.
– the obsession with what his critics are saying about him; no matter what their station compared to his own.
Minor quibble: I think those “forty years of conditioned appearance-of-racism-avoidance reflexes took over” before Hillary imploded, and in fact were the REASON she imploded, as Rahm et al played them so skillfully.
Now, as to how BIDEN got on that ticket, that’s for greater minds than mine to ponder. Obviously, “not even vaguely a threat to overpower, intellectually or otherwise, the President” was a necessary qualification, but I wouldn’t think it was SUFFICIENT.
Let’s be fair. He might have been just trying to sell his books.
Prayerborne, Biden is better than Kevlar. Imagine yourself looking through a rifle scope with A Certain Person in the crosshairs, and thinking, “President Joe Biden, President Joe Biden…”
Regards,
Ric