The President We Deserve?

Image: U.S. President Obama walks to speak about the Affordable Care Act at the White House in WashingtonIn 1920 H.L Mencken wrote prophetically, “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.”

Like the long tradition of antidemocrats from Plato to Founding Father Fisher Ames, Mencken believed that a democratic leader would reflect the self-interested aims and passions of the necessarily mediocre mass of voters. The disaster of Barack Obama’s administration invites reflection on the truth of this proposition.

Obama’s narcissistic self-regard by now is obvious to all but the most besotted of tingle-down-my-leg, smartest-president-ever, trousers-crease-bedazzled Obamaboppies, as Mark Steyn calls them. Obama’s favorite words are “I,” “me,” and “my,” except of course when he’s dodging responsibility for his failures, as he did recently when he blamed his intelligence agencies for his own neglect of the growing threat from Islamic State in northern Iraq. He’s still blaming George W. Bush for many other failures, most recently when he blamed him for the lack of a status of forces agreement with Iraq––something he really didn’t want so he could brag, as he did in 2011, “The tide of war is receding. Now, even as we remove our last troops from Iraq, we’re beginning to bring our troops home from Afghanistan . . . Our troops are finally coming home.” A year later he made this political calculation explicit when he said of the SOF agreement during the foreign policy presidential debate, “What I would not have done is left 10,000 troops in Iraq that would tie us down.”

Dodging accountability and refusing to confess one’s mistakes are classic signs of the egomaniac. So too is seeking out audiences that uncritically accept one’s own estimation of personal greatness. That’s why the president prefers fund-raisers to governing. It’s not just about garnering money for his party; it’s also about bathing in the waves of adulation from the carefully selected audience of fans. That’s certainly more gratifying than sitting through the Presidential Daily Briefings, 56% of which he missed in his first term, and 62% in his second. George W. Bush, in comparison, almost never missed the PDB.

And when someone does get by the gatekeepers and asks an even slightly challenging question, Obama gets a bit snappish, as those convinced of their own brilliance are wont to do. For example, when asked at a recent town-hall gathering about double-digit rate-increases for health care, he sniffed, “The question is whether you guys are shopping effectively enough.” It’s your fault, not mine. So too when his handlers can’t control the questions, as in presidential debates. There he relies on juvenile snarkiness to defend his amour propre. Remember when he responded to Mitt Romney’s warning about Russia, which recent events have proven prescient? “The 80s called, they want their foreign policy back,” he jeered with the air of a junior-high witling.

Overestimating one’s abilities, however, is the most obvious indication of crippling self-regard. Way back in 2008 Obama sent us a very clear signal of what would make him a dangerous president: “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” Such a preposterous statement, proven false by the events of the last 6 years, points us to the reasons for those failures––his unwillingness to listen to advice from anyone other than his servile courtiers. As former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta writes in his new book, Obama and his spaniel advisors refused to listen to Panetta and military commanders about the importance of leaving a residual force in Iraq. Instead, the administration gave up on securing an agreement it didn’t want in the first place, choosing the self-flattering political narrative about “ending the war” over the long-term strategic dangers of walking away from the still fragile political order in Baghdad.

But why should Obama question himself, when his closest and most trusted advisor, Valerie Jarrett, has gone on record with astonishing claims about the president’s brilliance? The following statement from 2010 is one of the most embarrassing displays of toadying I know of outside a Versailles fop or a Hollywood press agent:

I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.

We know now that this whole encomium is false in every detail––except for the claim that Obama “knows” that all Jarrett’s claims are true. In a position as powerful as the presidency of the world’s greatest economic and military power, such self-delusion is lethal.

Obama’s claim to his own brilliance, reinforced by enablers like Jarrett, brings us to the issue of intelligence. With his typical hyperbolic sarcasm, Mencken uses the word “moron.” But the problem with Obama is not his level of intelligence, which I suspect is above average. Rather, Obama’s mind has never been properly trained. Like physical strength, intellectual development needs resistance. The novice needs to be regularly scolded that his callow opinions and interpretations are badly argued or uninformed, and then sent off to improve them. Does anyone think that an affirmative action admit like Obama was ever subjected to such ego-wounding criticism? I’ve been in the university for 40 years, and I’ve seen repeatedly the anxious cossetting, inflation of ability, tender solicitude for feelings, and unwillingness to apply rigorous standards when it comes to minority students, what George Bush has called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” All Obama has had to do is show up, and white people have done the rest.

Back in 2008 we had an example of this dynamic when esteemed presidential historian Michael Beschloss––a Harvard-trained holder of numerous prestigious fellowships and visiting scholar positions––claimed Obama had the highest I.Q. of any president ever, without having a clue about what his I.Q. actually is. For the rest of us, there is scant evidence of this brilliance. No college transcripts, no LSAT scores, no peer-reviewed articles, nothing other than a couple of books of uncertain authorship.

We do have, however, Obama’s astonishing blunders like “there are 57 states; Canada has a president; ‘Austrian’ is a language; America is ‘20 centuries’ old; Arabic is spoken in Afghanistan. He’s called the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) the Maldives, and declared it would be ‘unprecedented’ for the Supreme Court to invalidate a law passed by Congress,” as Jack Kelly has written. And let’s not forget the “intercontinental railroad” and the reference in the 2009 Cairo speech to Muslims in 15th century Córdoba decades after they had been driven away. Such mistakes bespeak not a stupid mind, but a lazy and untrained one completely lacking in Socratic self-awareness of how much it doesn’t know but only thinks it knows.

Obama will be history in 2 years, so the real question is whether Mencken was right when he said that such a president reflects the “inner soul” of a democratic people. Has narcissistic self-regard become a defining characteristic of the American people, as Christopher Lasch argued in his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism? Is the electorate dominated by what Rush Limbaugh calls the “low-information voter,” as Ilya Somin documents in Democracy and Political Ignorance, published last year? In short, is the antidemocratic charge that “Among the common people [is] the greatest ignorance,” as the Athenian called the Old Oligarch wrote around 450 B.C., really true?

The next 2 elections may give us an answer to that question. Perhaps the residual common sense of Americans, once awakened by increasing crises at home and abroad, will reassert itself, and prove Abe Lincoln correct: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” Let’s hope the future proves Lincoln a better prophet than Mencken.

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  • Bamaguje

    “I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is . . . And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually” – Valerie Jarret.

    Spoken like a worshiping sycophant.

    “As former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta writes in his new book, Obama and his spaniel advisors refused to listen to Panetta and military commanders about the importance of leaving a residual force in Iraq” – Bruce Thornton.

    Why would he listen? The exceptionally brilliant Obama knows more about foreign policy than all his advisors put together.

    • Elizabeth capecod

      You said it all.

      • KevinBattspuv

        my Aunty Chloe got a nine month old GMC by working part-time off of a pc online…Learn More EARN NOW

        • kevinstroup

          I defecate in your aunt’s mouth.

      • Lanna

        And Leon Panetta is smart enough to know that under this administration we are being destroyed…”He said in the interview with Bill OReilly, we can’t take another 2 and a half years of stalemate.” Why have advisors, if he thinks he doesn’t need the advice….its all for show….Obama has an agenda to fulfill.

  • RAM500

    Jarrett, knowing she’s the real boss, flatters Obama to put him in a better mood to take orders.

  • El Cid

    Very good. Very well said. It is frightening to think that Americans want a vapid narcissist as a President.

    Thanks for the Córdoba reference. I didn’t hear it. I believe Córdoba was captured in 1236 by Ferdinand III and never lost again. I’m afraid the reference may be prophetic as the battles of those days, Christian vs. Muslim, are coming back to Europe.

  • Gee

    I challenge the claim about merely being an untrained mind. He has a law degree and is suppose to be an expert on the Constitutional law.

    “it would be ‘unprecedented’ for the Supreme Court to invalidate a law passed by Congress,” – that is not the statement of a untrained mind at all, when it is in your own field of specialization. That is pure stupidity.

    • cree

      I wonder if that statement was pure propaganda. Is hard to tell with all his other idiotic statements. Either way, is bad news for us non-elites. And, most of what comes out of his mouth are continuous pathological lies.

  • kasandra

    Excellent column. Even assuming for the sake of argument that Obama is highly intelligent, intelligence can be a highly overrated commodity. I’ve read that FDR’s I.Q. was about 105 which is low normal. But no one would deny he was an effective leader. You can debate his policies but he listened to advisors, was willing to try different things and jettison those that didn’t work, did not blame others for his failures and was not the Ditherer-in-Chief like the the current WH occupant. Similarly, I don’t know President Reagan’s I.Q. but I suspect it was somewhere in the normal range and he was the greatest president of my lifetime and I go back to Truman. So, even if Obama does have the highest I.Q. of any president (which I sincerely doubt), as a president he clearly sucks.

    • Virgil Hilts

      It is worth understanding that I.Q. is not so much a measure of what you have…but of how far you have come. Hard work and committed diligence can often trump inherent intellect. because. like Barak, he doesn’t USE it…he flashes his ego and castigates his opposition….with great animus and derision. MOCKERY is NOT one of the traits from “How to Win Friends and Influence People. Barry’s version of that revered work would be titled, “How To Assault Your Enemies and Humiliate the Rest.”

      • kasandra

        But ridicule is one of the recommended traits from “Rules for Radicals,” his Bible.

        • Virgil Hilts

          YEP! He’s a jerk…and a puppet wherein others pull the strings.

      • Dan Knight

        Good point Virgil – It’s talent, which is cheap. The real mark is those who work, and apply their other virtues to capitalize on their talent. Too many talented people live on their laurels and do nothing but complain or blame. They would rather snipe or back stab than earn merit on their own.

        • Virgil Hilts

          YEP! It is almost a proverb in the history of men that there are so many who had great potential…but never applied themselves.. In President ‘Ebola’s case…his potential has been bent toward facilitating lies, innuendo, derision, division and downright EVIL! He is a destructive narcissist.

          • Dan Knight

            Yes, it’s a shame. I remember when you-know-who ran those commercials, ‘A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste,’ but it turns out they want mindless leaders as well as mindless followers.

    • http://raycaruso.com Ray Caruso

      Reagan was the opposite of Barack Obama: a very smart man reluctant to show off his intellect. The evidence, however, is there for those who care to look deeply. For instance, he taught himself to read at age five and he wrote his own first inauguration speech, which reflects his profound knowledge of history, philosophy, and economics. And that’s to say nothing of his ability as a communicator. Not every intelligent person is an effective and persuasive public speaker, but no dumb person ever is.

    • Pericles

      In a President IQ is less significant than character. Obama’s narcissism is so profound that the higher his IQ the more dangerous it makes him.

  • Demo P. Seal; PouponMarks

    Two flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Mental illness is not always readily apparent.

  • bob e

    in your face fraud, with a cast of thousands .. senators, congressman, judges
    everyone complicit in the big con .. barry o’fraud .. the supreme court
    just thru out all the cases presented against o’fraud .. considering they
    back him & the health care law which is 1/6 of the economy, these may be
    only little things ..?? like his identity.. check out who is on the supreme court with a google …lots a dykes, hispanolics & commies of all stripes .. we are never gonna get out of the sewer .. never ..

  • shmo123

    Excellent Mr. Thornton. One of the best encapsulations of Obama’s character I have ever read. I always chide Obama supporters when they talk about his “intelligence” and ask them how they come to that conclusion. His entire academic history is locked up, and he’s published nothing. More importantly, the intelligence Obama displays is average at best; what he is completely lacking is character and wisdom, and he proves that almost daily.

    • Pericles

      Agreed. Lacking in character, wisdom and most of all, courage and common sense.

  • Bumr50

    Jarrett, of course, was speaking about herself while holding the marionette strings.

  • watsa46

    Those people who did not vote,, because they did not like Obama did actually vote for him. In French there is a say: ” Qui ne dit mots consent”. The one who says nothing agrees.

  • kevinstroup

    We have devolved into a seriously immature, incompetent people. So yes, we do deserve him. He fits us to a tee.

    • cree

      That’s a matter of opinion which doesn’t include me.

      • Dan Knight

        Agree, I’m not one of them, and neither are my friends. It doesn’t include a lot of us … but then again it does:

        That’s the problem with half the population living in printed money fantasy. It’s the rest of us living in reality who have to break through the rose colored blinders.

        Keep up the good fight!

  • Maynard

    Your title, “The President we deserve” is correct. Read your Bible, especially Daniel where he says we will have “the basest if men” as leader because we denied God. Suck it up! The prophcey has come to pass.

  • Pericles

    “…his unwillingness to listen to advice from anyone other than his servile courtiers.”

    There is one courtier who never receives the attention she merits, the Iranian-born Valerie Jarret, referred to as Obama’s ‘left brain’. She is the Wizard behind the curtain but no one seems very interested in knowing this.

    Obama’s policy towards Iran is very much influenced by her and it is not inconceivable that they both wanted our troops out of Iraq in order to avoid a potential conflict with Iran in and over Iraq. Guess what? Today Iran is our ‘ally’ in the effort to remove ISIS from Iraq! Are Obama and Jarret incompetent or brilliant? Or just lucky that things worked out the way they wanted?

  • Pericles

    Jarret: “He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

    True enough. Ordinary people could not produce the kind of stagnation we see in our economy, the kind of punishment already inflicted by Obamacare, with far worse to come, and a world so unstable that the possibility of WWIII is not a fantastic proposition. The list of failures and ineptitude demonstrated by this superman is long and sordid. Or haven’t you noticed, Valerie?

  • Pericles

    “Does anyone think that an affirmative action admit like Obama was ever subjected to such ego-wounding criticism?”

    So we may have Affirmative Action’s first monster, narcissistic, destructive, unremorseful and not bound by any moral restraints or dictates. Are there others in the queue?

  • Pericles

    “No college transcripts, no LSAT scores, no peer-reviewed articles, nothing other than a couple of books of uncertain authorship.”

    Obama is a myth. The superman the progressives created and worship does not exist. What we have is an ordinary man with an eloquent tongue and a charming manner. But eloquence is not brilliance or competence and charm even Putin possesses. He is unfit for the office and 6 years of failures, debacles and scandals have established this conclusion beyond reasonable doubt. The Left keeps pushing and protecting the myth because it cannot afford to have people realize that the emperor has no clothes and because their own fortunes depend on him to a very large degree.

    • Avspatti

      He reads well . . . from the teleprompter.

  • Pericles

    “Such mistakes bespeak not a stupid mind, but a lazy and untrained one
    completely lacking in Socratic self-awareness of how much it doesn’t
    know but only thinks it knows.”

    Humility is one of the most admirable traits in humans, especially in successful and accomplished ones. So are integrity and honesty. Obama possesses none of these traits but their opposites in abundance. There is nothing admirable or respectable about his character. Those who adore and worship him do not see the real man. They see the myth and superman they created in their own minds.

    • cree

      Spot on an in total agreement.

      • Pericles

        Thanks for responding.

        • Avspatti

          Humility is totally absent in our Dear Leader.

  • Pericles

    “The next 2 elections may give us an answer to that question.”

    Actually, if not for the elections in 2010, the 2008 and 2012 elections would have answered that question. The question now is, will the 2014 and 2016 elections be like those in 2008 and 2012 or those in 2010? Let us hope and pray that 2010 becomes the paradigm. Conservatism and Common Sense were victorious in 2010!

  • Jason Vickers

    Raised and mentored by progressives, socialists, leftists, and communists. What did we expect to get?> At least those of us who were paying any attention.

  • johninohio1

    I tried to post this once, but it didn’t take. If it comes up twice, my apologies:
    George Bush may have used in a speech, the phrase,“ soft bigotry of low expectations.” , but it was his speech writer, Michael Gerson who coined it. It’s brevity and rhythm make it difficult to imagine it dropping from the ‘numb’ lips of GWB.

    On another point, there is an old play on Lincoln’s aphorism that I think is appropriate: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, and for all intents and purposes, that is sufficient.”

    I have come to the conclusion that about 1/4 to 1/3 of the American people are absolute idiots, but in the past, we merely wrung our hands over ‘only a fraction of the eligible voters were voting.’ As if it was somehow essential that they do so. Fortunately for us, the idiots tended to stay home in their complacency. But now, they’ve become a major constituency of the Democrats, plus the fact that the voting age was dropped a few decades ago from 21 to 18, because ‘if they can fight in Viet Nam, they should be able to vote’. Yeah, another non sequitur. So now, we have people who’s brains have not fully developed yet (20 being the age according to scientific research), nor have they been fully educated yet, being goaded into voting on social networks by Democrats.

    So, combined, yes, we’re getting the politicians 51% of the population deserve, but the rest of us don’t deserve. No justice, no peace! One day, that will be the battle cry of the 49%.

  • Nabukuduriuzhur

    With 2014 poised to be stolen like 2012, what’s the point? For three straight weeks after the 2012 election it was one story of voter fraud after another.

    And absolutely nothing was done.

    In Oregon, Romney was declared the winner when all precincts had been counted, then 15 minutes later Obama had 54%.

    Why should anyone even vote if that kind of thing is done? The evidence is that Romney carried every state except California. But it certainly didn’t show up when you had precinct after precinct’s votes altered.

    • Dan Knight

      We must keep trying … though we face defeat. Remember the Spartans! Never Give Up, Never Surrender!

      • JDinSTL

        Change tactics

        • Dan Knight

          Yes, good idea!

  • Douglas Mayfield

    It is possible that the Republicans can reawaken the ‘residual common sense of Americans’, but in order to do so, they will have to provide serious intellectual and moral opposition to the Democrats, something which they have failed to do for many years, particularly in the last two Presidential elections.
    In recent years, the Republicans have controlled the House and so the federal purse strings. Have they defunded Obamacare? Have they done one damned thing to reduce the deficits? They have not.
    The Democrats do not have to win in 2016. Their candidate, Hilary or otherwise, can simply show up and watch the cowardly, ‘me too’ semi-socialist, RINO lose.

  • Michael Garfinkel

    This smug, arrogant and ill-tempered jerk has been elected twice to the office of the presidency.

    What more needs to be said, or demonstrated about the electorate?

    Case closed.

  • Randy Townsend

    Obama’s intellect is irrelevant. This man was elected because of skin color. Thanks to a backlash against the prospect of a third Republican President, the history of two terms being the norm for same party Presidents, and the nauseating adoration the MSM heaped on this unqualified pretender (backed up by not so subtle allegations of racism if you didn’t support him), America socially promoted a man who had accomplished nothing of note to the WH. The media is preparing the push to get Hillary into the office next, yet another example of how far our country has fallen….

  • Paddy S

    SUPERB Bruce, absolutely brilliant takedown of his royal majesty.

  • JDinSTL

    And, out of 315 million Americans…. we elected him – twice.