And I am very wary of indulging in a favorite pastime of the left which is to psychoanalyze Republican candidates to their discredit. On the other hand, can one truly understand Richard Nixon if one does not put searchlight on the Demons? Can one understand the near superhuman drive of Lyndon Johnson without seeing a super human ego? The distinction between Nixon and Johnson on the one hand and Obama on the other hand is twofold: the former two have real accomplishments to their credit and Obama, as I try to point out in my reply below, does not. Nixon and Johnson in their own way betrayed personal foibles which illuminated their psychological conditions. But Obama does not philander, does not drink, at least in excess, maintains a healthy workout regimen, in public at least is always in possession of his savoir-faire, and his worst personal character flaw seems to be an occasional furtive cigarette.
Indeed, the opposite is true, he asked almost perfect pitch for his audience. If one listens to the replay of the old public radio tape of his calling for a civil rights movement to redistribute wealth, one would swear one was listening to it professional announcer on National Public Radio. When he addresses SEIU Or Acorn he can get down for the struggle. He has no difficulty whatever in appearing presidential. The man is a chameleon-a sign of a sociopath.
The article poses a warning which I think bears attention:
As things go badly wrong and adulation turns into antagonism, we may see a very different side of Obama than he has succeeded in presenting to the public during the past two years.
I have been posting for a long time that I see danger in Barack Obama getting us into a war when his personal power is challenged. This, of course, is contrary to the views customarily expressed here on Free Republic that Obama is neutered by his ideology and his foreign policy will be a reprise of Jimmy Carter's, but on steroids. I think that you this is a real danger in the man which the author points alludes to.
Here is the reply:
To those conservatives who indulge a psychological need to disparage the talents of Barack Obama, this article should serve as a well earned slap in the face.
To those conservatives, like myself, who are arm chair bean counters in the game of handicapping elections, let this article be a disquieting wake-up call that many of our assumptions upon which we hope conservatism will build a come back may be as ill-founded as the bluster of those who downgrade Obama's talents.
First, the matter of Obama's talent, or better put, his charisma. Sometime ago I wrote a post which I think captures Obama and explains why his combination of charisma and shallowness make a very dangerous political combination, but one with undeniable electability:
"I think he is a narcissist who survives and prospers not by addressing problems but by manipulating people. Narcissists like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama are not stupid, they are wonderfully clever and exceedingly effective in reading their victims and manipulating them.
I think that Barack Obama has a worldview provided to him, posthumously, by Saul Alinsky which gives him a framework for analysis. In other words, Obama does not "analyze", rather he "sorts" and puts data into their appropriate slots provided by the philosophy of Saul Alinsky. He has learned a vocabulary which enables him to contrive a front of effectiveness, a seriousness of purpose and depth of character which is all a sham.
Think of Barack Obama as the professional coordinator at its Alinsky meeting. For those old enough, think of Barack Obama as the leader of an EST meeting of the 1970s. These experiences give him an eschatology, a vocabulary, a forensic ability to manipulate, and ego satisfaction. What was he doing as editor of the Harvard Law Review if he was not producing actual work? He was acting out as a community organizer with the shtick modified to fit a new venue. If one examines his career at every level the pattern is the same. As a constitutional law lecturer he produced no written work but he was evidently perfectly fit to the culture of the law school. In the Illinois Senate he voted present but ingratiated himself with the Daley machine. He barely passed go in the United States Senate but he knew the vocabulary and he passed muster with the likes of George Soros. In each instance, Barack Obama behaves as a narcissist, very shallow, producing no work product, but selling a great package.
If one takes away the Marxist belief system provided to him or reinforced in every step of his development from his mother to Frank Marshall Davis, to Columbia University, the Harvard Law school, William Ayres, to Reverend Wright, one is left with a truly hollow man. That is why Obama is such a dangerous ideologue. There is no Obama apart from a lifelong sham, a compensation for always being advanced beyond his competence because of his race and his ability to manipulate. He simply cannot stop the act and get off stage because there is nothing but the act.
Obama is a man without a soul and without a spiritual compass. His relationship to Reverend Wright reveals that he has no real spiritual quality to him for there could hardly be a more right apostasy in the church which he attended for 20 years. It has nothing to do with spirituality and everything to do with ego satisfaction. It is the opposite of the Judeo-Christian message.
Obama cannot abandon his radicalism because there is no other there there. He is a massive compensation system. His body is a life-support system for his narcissism and the narcissism is utterly dependent on the received wisdom from Saul Alinsky and the rest of them."
Viewed from the perspective of this article, one might properly question whether I got it wrong about Obama relying on his ability to manipulate rather than upon him a capacity to produce honest results. Reading the article, it appears that Obama's success was primarily a public-relations phenomenon in enlisting black McDonald's owners and black radio station owners. The worry is that the voter registration drive is a model of both public-relations sensitivity and dynamic management skills in organizing and harvesting the black vote. If I got it wrong, if it is the latter, if the Chicago voter operation is truly an example of honest results, it is ominous in the extreme.
This interpretation is ominous because we can find parallels to the 2008 election and to Obama's course of governing. The enlistment of black radio station owners and the attempt today to kill talk radio by forcing it into African American hands stands as an example.
The article speaks of Obama's training 700 registrars. This echoes my remarks about his forensic skills and narcissistic needs merging as was the case for EST trainers of the 1970s. This explains much of Obama's need daily, actually by count more than daily, to appear on television. It also confirms the foolishness of those who complain that Obama cannot speak without a Teleprompter.
Is Obama only a narcissist, a Bill Clinton style sociopath, or is he the real deal as his supporters claim, a man who has unperceived talents to produce honest results and organize a Chicago voter drive, a successful primary campaign, a successful presidential election campaign? Parenthetically, it is interesting to note that when pressed for a single qualification which entitled Obama to be president, his supporters fell back on his ability to run a campaign.
G. Before we conclude that Obama has wonderful organizing skills, let us note that in each of these three incidents, all three of them campaigns, Obama was working with race. In the voter drive it was 100% a race effort. In the primary campaign it got down to a nasty slugfest over race between Obama and the Clintons. In both the primary and in the election campaign Obama enjoyed virtually 100% black voter loyalty. Equally important, in those two campaigns he enjoyed unprecedented media support and that media support was predicated on race.
Conservatives clearly will observe that Obama's alleged organizing skills are not so apparent when it comes to governing. But let it be considered for a moment that the governing of the Obama administration still rests on only two legs: the race card and the Saul Alinsky world view.
