Barack Obama and His Personal Reality

Last month, the mainline liberal magazine, The New Yorker, ran a lengthy – and interesting – piece by a reporter who accompanied the President on a recent political fundraising trip.

 

During the travels, the reporter had several opportunities for conversations during which Obama came across as relaxed, candid and thoughtful.

 

My reading of the article left me with the impression that the President was genuinely speaking his mind to a fellow liberal.  It was an unclouded view as to how he thinks.

 

Most of the media commentary has focused on Obama’s attribution of racial prejudice to some of those who oppose his policies.  But in the next breath, he acknowledged that some support him because of race, too.

 

But that portion of the article was really only an illustration among many of his views.  More revealing, I thought, was his description of himself as a non-ideological president who is focused on finding practical solutions to the nation’s problems.

 

Does he believe that self-characterization?  I suspect that, at the very least, he wants to.  Why say now what he truly doesn’t believe?  He will not be running for political office again.

 

The cynic can say with abundant evidence that President Obama has made a career of saying what is politically appealing but practicing something else.

 

Barack Obama, the candidate, promised hope and change and to be the “post-partisan” president.  That’s not the record of the past five years. 

But is it unusual for anyone to have a view of himself which is not shared by others?  Hardly.

Who wants to think ill of himself?  To the extent that a person feels compelled to take action contrary to his genuine beliefs, his self-regard will  incline him to rationalize the apparent contradiction.  So, as an example, the President blames Republican intransigence, not his own, for gridlock in Washington.

Obama’s insistence on his still being non-ideological seems incredible – and insincere – given Obamacare, and other Administration programs and proposals from the liberal wish list.  Maybe he’s just a hypocrite.

 

But look at things from his perspective.  A man of the left is usually arrogant.  The President certainly fits the mold.  As such, he knows what’s right.  Policy should not be affected by conflicting beliefs (“ideology”).  Therefore, doing the right thing cannot be an appropriate subject for debate.

 

Of course the President would reject this analysis.  Above all, he chooses to see himself as fair and open-minded.

Thus he says, with a straight face, that he is sympathetic to Ronald Reagan’s antipathy to the expansion of government:

“This is where sometimes progressives get frustrated with me   because I actually think there was a legitimate critique of the welfare       state getting bloated, and relying too much on command and control,       top-down government programs to address it back to the seventies.       It’s also why it’s ironic when I’m accused of being this raging socialist       who wants to amass more and more power for their own government.”

Does he not see the disconnect between these words and Administration actions?  I don’t think so.  He wants to believe what he wants to believe despite the inherent contradiction among them – mental gymnastics psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”.

 

In the same vein, the article quotes Barack Obama at the end as endorsing limited Executive authority:

“The President of the United States cannot remake our society and that's probably a good thing... not probably, it's definitely a good thing."


                            It's not as if he hasn't tried.