It’s All Academic: Does President Obama Even Care?
September 12, 2009 / 12:02 pm • By Dr. Melissa ClouthierFDR passed socialistic programs through as a caring alternative to the misery people were experiencing. It was wrong-headed and resulted in the exact opposite consequences–as nearly all government interventions do–but his motivation was perceived as caring deeply and so people gave him a lot of rope.
Barack Obama’s words ring hollow. They do ring. The sound just doesn’t resonate. His smooth baritone vibrates and when the noise is gone the substance is forgotten.
Why is this?
It seems that people don’t believe that he cares. His words and deeds don’t match up. So people are starting to ignore the words in favor of what their eyes are telling them. This is what they see [from my Pajama's Media column today]:
Barack Obama seemed right. Processing his words through the frontal lobe, they sounded good. Since he wasn’t pressed or questioned, since even Bill O’Reilly seemed beguiled by Barack Obama’s verbal deftness, he rarely had to prove or defend. He was always given enough rhetorical wiggle room. He still is given that room, by the the press anyway. But something always felt wrong. It wasn’t a primal reaction to the “other,” like Olbermann and Garafalo like to claim. It was something ethereal, because Senator Obama had no concrete policies or past accomplishments besides community organizing upon which to stand. His associations aroused some suspicion, but to most they seemed trivial and the press was uninterested.
His associations seem more important these days — at least to the voters. And they’re providing concrete evidence of why some voters felt discomfort before.
The intangibles manifest now because the rhetorical rubber is meeting the policy road. President Obama still tries to have it all ways, but the constraints of legislation do not let that happen. His words matter now and his actions have consequences.
While the unemployment rate continues to rise, the president extends his indulgent Martha’s Vineyard vacation. Worse, when he returns to work, he promptly goes golfing. Forget the optics of such actions. The actions themselves are callous.
Now 9/11 is here. Who can forget it? Evidently, President Barack Obama can. It’s not just that he seems to want to diminish it with a National Day of Service — turning attention away from those lost and the new era we live in — it’s that he seems to not think the day matters all that much. It was cruel to send Air Force One through Manhattan with a military escort plane over the Statue of Liberty. The people were terrified, and this fear was wrought by their own president’s administration.
Anyway, I write more over there and I’d appreciate your thoughts and comments. The comments there, already, are very thoughtful and thought-provoking. Someone called Backwards Boy says:
Obama’s aloofness is a result of two things: the refusal to acknowledge reality in order to guard a large but fragile ego, and a lack of empathy toward his fellow man.
Obama’s ego drove him to seek approval in the first place he could find it: among those with politically radical ideas. Since radicals were prominent in his family structure at an early age, it’s not surprising that he sought to surround himself with like-minded people in college and later in professional life. His crippling need to be accepted prohibited him from questioning any of the tenets of radicalism, lest he be rejected by the accepting group.
His lack of empathy prevents him from seeing the other side of any argument. He cannot place himself in anothers’ position, for to do so threatens the position of the ego as always being correct in each and every little thing. The concept of the ego being wrong is devastating, and the psychological machinations that the ego uses to protect itself are endless, even to the point of actively rejecting reality.
Mind you, these faults don’t reduce you to the level of drooling or prevent you from holding down a job, but they serve as subtle barriers to healthy relationships. If you’ve ever tried to be friends with someone whose guard is always up even when it doesn’t need to be, you know what I mean.
This detachment means 3 and 1/2 more years of instability, I’m afraid. I’ve written before that President Obama also seems a man conflicted within himself, or rather, has no sense of self. So his person makes it difficult to determine who you are in relation to him. That makes it very difficult for Americans to settle down and relax with his leadership.
