The self-esteem presidency

Those of us who support Sarah Palin are fond of, among other things, pointing out the various predictions she made during her RNC speech which are being realized during the Obama administration. There are a number of them, including her warning of higher deficits and her invocation of a candidate who couldn’t bring himself to use the word “victory” when discussing Iraq and Afghanistan, but only when talking about his own campaign—that’s why the speech makes such good material for Palinites now. Of all the things she said, though, I think the most important was this:

The American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of “personal discovery.”

I think that was an important line because whether that was Gov. Palin’s insight, that of the scriptwriter with whom she worked, or came from someone else, it was the sharpest and most pointed insight offered during the campaign as to what we were really in for with an Obama victory. It was a fair shot from the McCain campaign; like him or loathe him, there’s no question that along with arrogant ambition, Sen. John McCain is driven by a deeply-ingrained desire, even need, to serve this country. I don’t question that President Obama wants to do what’s best for the country, but I think he operates out of a very different spirit.

Back before she herself succumbed to the infatuation, Kathleen Parker dubbed Barack Obama “the Messiah of Generation Narcissism.” In the process, she made a couple good points about him and what his ascent says about our culture—points which she would no doubt deride now were they to be made by, say, Gov. Palin, but hey, you gotta pay for that seat on Air Force Won.

To play weatherman for a moment, [Obama] is a perfect storm of the culture of narcissism, the cult of celebrity, and a secular society in which fathers (both the holy and the secular) have been increasingly marginalized from the lives of a generation of young Americans.

All of these trends have been gaining momentum the past few decades. Social critic Christopher Lasch named the culture of narcissism a generation ago and cited addiction to celebrity as one of the disease’s symptoms—all tied to the decline of the family.

That culture has merely become more exaggerated as spiritual alienation and fatherlessness have collided with technology (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) that enables the self-absorption of the narcissistic personality. . . .

Whatever the Church of Obama promises, we should not mistake this movement for a renaissance of reason. It is more like, well, like whoa.

One factor Parker didn’t mention in that column was the emphasis of the last few decades on artificially inflating the self-esteem of children, which has led to such things as grade inflation (including school districts that, as a matter of formal policy, forbid giving children Fs) and the philosophy that children should not be allowed to fail. This has been a crucial contributing factor to the culture of narcissism that Lasch identified, and has produced a great many chronological adults who believe success is a birthright which they should be able to achieve without trying too hard.

In light of that, consider this telling insight from a piece in the New York Review of Books:

It’s apparent that Obama is still learning the differences between campaigning and governing. And sometimes his inexperience shows. His speeches on health care on Labor Day and before Congress a few days later drew on his old rhetorical skills and finally showed some passion, and the one before Congress was his most effective so far in combining both rhetoric and explanation. But it was of interest that Chuck Todd of NBC reported that before he gave those speeches Obama’s staff had had to get him “fired up” to take on his critics. Obama, whose high self-esteem is well known among close observers, had previously assumed that a “following,” a “movement,” would be there without his having to do much to stimulate it.

We have a President who doesn’t think he should have to work in order to achieve political victory. This might be why the only political victories achieved to this point under his administration have been the ones Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid could achieve largely without his help.

This really shouldn’t be surprising, though; up through this past January, Barack Obama has been able to achieve most of what he wanted without really working all that hard. As Ed Lasky writes,

Barack Obama has displayed a disturbing pattern of work ethics: shirking work; claiming success when he was not entitled to do so; hiding his failures; and claiming the work of others as his own—when it was successful. These are not character traits that we should associate with Presidents.

This is, of course, a serious charge; but read the article, because Lasky substantiates it from case after case. Of those, the most speculative but perhaps the most revealing is the case of Dreams from My Father, the memoir (published when he was but 34) which has been used as one of the main pieces of evidence for President Obama’s supposed superior intelligence. As I noted some time ago, there’s good reason to doubt that he in fact wrote the book; the Anchoress captured it well when she pointed out that writers write, it’s what they do—the demands of life have their effect, but when they can, what they can, they write—and that aside from that book, Barack Obama’s life shows little evidence that he’s truly a writer. Indeed, what we have of his writing from his time at Columbia and Harvard Law (what little we have) ranges from workmanlike to dismal.

That’s why Jack Cashill of American Thinker has been arguing in increasingly greater detail, with mounting evidence, that in fact Barack Obama did not write Dreams from My Father—Bill Ayers did. Cashill’s argument has now received unexpected support from Christopher Andersen’s biography, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. As Ron Radosh lays it out,

Andersen writes in his book that after Obama finally got a new contract to write a book, Michelle Obama suggested that her husband get advice “from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.”

Obama had not as yet written anything. But he had taped interviews with family members. Andersen writes: “These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers.” . . .

Andersen also writes, quoting a Hyde Park neighbor of Obama: “Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together. It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both.” . . .

Finally, Christopher Andersen concludes: “In the end, Ayers’s contribution to Barack’s Dreams From My Father would be significant—so much so that the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’s own writing.”

Now, it is of course true that (like everyone else these days), Andersen is working from unnamed sources (though he has said that he confirmed this information from two independent sources in Hyde Park); this could prove to be as bogus as the claim last year that George W. Bush had the CIA fabricate evidence justifying the war in Iraq. That said, Andersen is only substantiating an argument which can already be made, and made quite well, from evidence in the public domain; “the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes” do in fact “bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’s own writing.” As such, while we cannot take the point as proven, it’s entirely reasonable to conclude that the balance of the evidence supports the conclusion that Barack Obama probably was not the primary writer of Dreams from My Father—that this is, rather, yet another case of him taking credit for someone else’s work in order to make himself look good.

What we have here, I think, is a man who does what he likes to do and just never really gets around to buckling down to do what he doesn’t like to do. He does what makes him feel good, but doesn’t have the appetite for the hard, grinding work that is usually necessary to produce real accomplishments. As such, the only real accomplishments he has to show are the ones he can produce by doing what he likes. He likes going around and talking to people, he likes kicking ideas and arguments around with people who agree with him, and so he’s an effective and energetic campaigner; as such, he has the accomplishments that can produce—namely, election to various offices. If people question his résumé, he embellishes it. When it comes time to do the work for the offices to which he’s been elected, he “works from home,” takes credit for the accomplishments of others, votes “present” to duck the tough questions—and when things go badly, covers it up or finds someone else to blame.

The end result of all this is someone who’d rather campaign for President than be President; and since he was elected nearly eleven months ago and took office eight-and-a-half months ago, this is a problem. Even liberals are starting to complain about it. But no one should be surprised; this is a man of high self-esteem who expects success to come to him because he’s wonderful, not because he’s worked hard for it. Maybe the light will come on and he’ll rise to the demands of the office yet, who knows; but for now, given his résumé, what other sort of presidency should we have expected?

We should have seen it coming. Gov. Palin certainly did.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

Update: Add SNL to the list . . .