Posted on 10/19/2011 3:59:05 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A few months ago, I had dinner with a journalist who knows President Obama somewhat well and admires him in several respects. He told me something that didn’t particularly surprise me – but which was useful to have confirmed. This person’ said Obama is enormously thin-skinned, he remembers and keeps track of negative things said and written about him, and he is a person filled with many more grievances and resentments than one might imagine. He feels sorry for himself – and he is inclined to lash out, in his own emotionally contained way, at even slight criticisms.
I was reminded of that conversation in hearing this exchange between Ed Henry of Fox News and the president.
Henry asked Obama a question related to Iran and, in the course of it, quoted a critical comment about Obama made by Mitt Romney. To which the president responded, with a faux smile, “I didn’t know you were the spokesperson for Mitt Romney.”
For a reporter to ask a president a question that includes a quote from a person from the opposite party is about as common as the sun rising in the east. So what explains the president’s snarky response?
The answer, I think, goes back to what my dinner companions said: Obama is exceedingly thin-skinned. Beyond that, he expects to be coddled by, if not worshiped by, the press. And of course Obama carries a particular resentment for Fox News, which doesn’t treat him as the world-historical, Lincoln-like figure Obama sees himself as.
In their book The Battle for America 2008, Haynes Johnson and Dan Balz wrote this:
[Chief political aide David] Axelrod also warned that Obama’s confessions of youthful drug use, described in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, would be used against him. “This is more than an unpleasant inconvenience,” he wrote. “It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. You don’t relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty. When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched,” he said of Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate opponent.
Obama has flinched ever since – and he’s flinching now more than ever.
I have commented several times before that as Obama’s presidency collapses, he will have a terrible time processing it. He is becoming increasingly petulant and exasperated, blaming others for his own failures, and even seeing conspiracies (Ed Henry is carrying water for Mitt Romney) where none exist.
It’s a sad thing to watch Barack Obama morph into Richard Nixon.
He’d have to gain a lot of competence to morph into Nixon... and that’s not compliment to Nixon.
Whats the difference between Nixon and Obama?
Nixon was not a crook and did not go to jail.
Obama is a crook and will go to jail.
Why is that?
At least Nixon started from the point having the right position on a lot of issues. Is there anything worse than a paranoid commie? I guess it would be one who has complete police powers.
“The people have a right to know if their president is a crook.” - R. M. Nixon
Nah...he’s not morphing into Richard Nixon, he’s just reverting back to Barry Soetoro.
Obama is the black Forrest Gump—without all the accomplishments.
Barack Husseinouse Obamanixon
is he on anti-depressants?
“He likes his blackness even if he is a mulatto because he hates whites; he likes his ideology,marxism and the overthrow of the USA; he likes his homosexuality, just like his own; he likes transsexuals just like the first wookie; he hates Jews, just Obama....” Do get the underlying thread of the first sentence??????????????????????????????
While Dick had his paranoia problems he at least had a grip on foreign affairs.
This weenie hasn’t a clue
Nixon knew enough to resign, even LBJ knew enough
to get out while he could. Obama will fight to
the last bunker and go down buried by his own
delusions.
folks at his meetings need to start yelling you are a lying commie....
I think the most we can hope for is deportation if he cannot provide substantive proof of citizenship after Jan 2013.
His two career opportunities will be as a MSNBC personality (reporting from the Havana studio) or run for president of Kenya.
Nixon was golden compared to this destructive jerk.
I think, if he loses, he will have a very hard time processing it. For the rest of his days, he will spout off about how tough it was...because of what Bush left him. Blame Bush will be his legacy.
Well put.
“folks at his meetings need to start yelling you are a lying commie....”
Calling him a liar doesn’t bother him one bit...a badge of honor. What I would like to see, in a ‘townhall’ setting, is somebody get up and question his intelligence. He would become unglued.
Is there one?
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