Party Of One

May 17, 2009

"Party of one." Those are words that the wait staff at posh restaurants don't like to hear, and they're words that the American public shouldn't like to hear. In this case, they describe not a dining patron unlikely to produce a big tip, but a President who, almost literally, can't see beyond himself to understand the implications of the things he mandates for the people he presumably leads. Our President is, in fact, a party of one, incapable of leadership, capable only of bullying the American people based on the regurgitated leftist ideological claptrap he's absorbed as he bounced around during his formative years.

He's made virtually every "major" announcement alone. He wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to fly out to Denver, Colorado, for instance, to sign the stimulus bill, something that would have been more appropriately done in the Rose Garden, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid - the people who put together and passed that legislative monstrosity without so much as consulting any Republicans, let alone reading it - by his side.

His idea of leadership goes no further than paying back the people Rahm Emanuel tells him are his supporters, particularly the labor unions, including, especially, Service Employees International Union, the United Auto Workers, and the National Education Association. For narcissistic as he is - and he is a classic narcissistic personality - at his core he stands for nothing . . . nothing, that is, except the need to present himself and the ideas he's been fed to a public whose adulation he's come to expect, thanks to a complicit press corps that worships him almost as much as the core of voters who swept him into office believing he would pay their mortgages and buy them new cars.

He's sponged his way to the top of politics by absorbing and internalizing the scurrilous vitriol of the Reverend Jeremiah Wrights and the Bill Ayerses and the Saul Alinskys, and, while he doesn't hesitate to throw his mentors under the bus when it's politically expedient, the fact is that he still adheres, at bottom, to their teachings. His "consciousness" is, at best, a mishmash of discredited anti-American, anti-spiritual ideological tripe . . . and therein might lie our salvation. It might be that Obama, hollow as he is at his core, will prove unable to sustain the remaking of America as a Third World nation that seems to be his goal.

The resignation of Louis Caldera represents a classic example of Obama's inability to admit that there are others in his administration who do excellent work. As Meghan Clyne points out in a New York Post commentary, "Bam's Scare Force One Scapegoat," the President, in his need to deflect criticism from its true target - his own office, which was "asleep at the switch" - in effect tarred the entire White House Military Office with the same brush in engineering Louis Calera's resignation. Ms. Clyne points out that the Military Office has done and continues to do yeoman work in managing everything from Air Force One to presidential motorcades to the Communications Agency, to mention only a few of their responsibilities. The fact that the President "hung them out to dry" - as he did Wright and Ayers - is emblematic of his narcissistic inability to accept responsibility for his actions.

The real irony in Obama's looking for a Supreme Court nominee who exhibits "empathy" is that, like most narcissists, Obama himself is incapable of empathy. His ability to feel stops at the boundaries of his own experience; his "emotions" consist of "feeling" only that which he projects on the world around him. In the most important sense, other people exist independently of Obama only as extensions of how he views the world.

To the extent that they glorify and gratify his desperate and insatiable needs, other people are welcome. To the extent they represent ideas Obama is incapable of entertaining or emotions he's incapable of experiencing, they're a threat to his fragile identity and cannot be countenanced. In this he's very much like virtually every tyrant the past century has produced, and for that reason he is an inadmissable risk to our way of life.