Obama the con
Here’s my new PJ article about the ways in which Obama resembles a con artist. Let me count them.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Here’s my new PJ article about the ways in which Obama resembles a con artist. Let me count them.
Neo,
Great article. I have been comapring Obama to the stereotypical con-artist for the past 18 months.
Unofortunately, he and the stereotype both have one thing in common, as you point out, they both have “marks” who desperately want to believe the scam. The evidence of Obama’s sympathies has been there and in clear light since he started campaigning.
The good news, however, is that (as Charles Krauthammer pointed out) even with 2 unpopular wars, an unpopular president, the worst fiscal crisis since 1929, and now also with legions of voters who wanted to believe, Obama still prevailed by only 7% of the vote. Perhaps ther’s hope for us yet.
Some further thoughts, if I may.
As Obama is being unmasked by his actions as our President, I also see the Left being unmasked by their own actions over the past 18 months.
Sarah Palin was reviled and excoriated by women’s groups who were believed by some to have equal rights for all women as their goal.
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are being unmasked as race hustlers (“I want to cut his n##ts off”).
Liberal gays who want “equal rights” eviscerating any who oppose thembecause they “know where you live.”
Robert Gibbs who laments how partisan the political world has become and seems to fondly remember a time 5 years ago when people didn’t compare the president to Hitler.
It goes on and on, but just as we peel back the layers of an onion, I believe that the Left is finally being seen for what it really is; i.e., an intolerant, condescending and bigoted political movement that has tried to use lofty moral precepts to diisguise a power-by-any-means goal. This is not unlike the stereotypical Mafioso who goes to church and communion, but will slit a throat the minute he’s crossed.
It’s the last fleeting attempt to rationalize away what you know is coming – but do not want to believe.
The same type of thought process that happens right before you are about to be in a high speed auto accident or an airplane crash, realizing that you are probably going to die, but hoping against hope that there is some possibility that the outcome will be different.
This is just the same, except the process is slowed to where we can really see the mind use pretzel logic.
Many of these sycophants treat Obama as if he were a child.
Something to that I think.
I don’t recall being deceived by Obama.
I expected him to be what he is. Ayers, Wright, his mother, etc…
What else were we to expect of him?
The problem in the election was that the Republicans fielded a completely inept candidate, John McCain.
McCain really isn’t a Republican. He failed to attack Obama as a radical leftist out of fear of being called a racist.
I don’t see that Obama was hiding anything.
ST,
A lot of people were deceived.
Yes, it is unfortunate.
It was frustrating to watch. Economics, the meaning of words, all went out the window.
Nyom, Peggy Noonan, Althouse, many others – all lost senses because Palin clearly identified the economic prescription. She was more on message than John McCain yes.
But think about it… the young are learning an important lesson right now.
The U.S. STOLE from them. Generational theft hits them hard !!!
Unemployment among the young is extremely high. 52%
Baby Boomers who took out interest only loans and believe in free shelter, food, health at the expense of everybody else are giving generation y’ers a crash course in economics…
And then again – many others are apathetic again as they should’ve been all along. 🙂
“You can’t con an honest man.”
There may be exceptions to that aphorism, but I can’t think of any, certainly not in the 2008 presidential election.
Marc Ambinder’s column the other day, The Best Speech Obama’s Given Since…Maybe Ever is a current example of the ‘throb.
Today, at Ft. Hood. I guarantee: they’ll be teaching this one in rhetoric classes. It was that good. My gloss won’t do it justice. Yes, I’m having a Chris Matthews-chill-running-up-my-leg moment, but sometimes, the man, the moment and the words come together and meet the challenge. Obama had to lead a nation’s grieving; he had to try and address the thorny issues of Islam and terrorism; to be firm; to express the spirit of America, using familiar, comforting tropes in a way that didn’t sound trite. An excerpt from the elegiac address, below, and the full text, after the jump.
It wasn’t a bad speech — who knows, it may have been Obama’s best — but a great speech? A speech to study, a speech to remember, a speech rivaling the Gettysburg Address, Teddy Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena”, FDR’s on Pearl Harbor, JFK’s Inaugural Address, William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance … sorry, no.
Ambinder and his supporters in the comments give no examples of specific, memorable language or images. It’s just a great speech because their legs tingled. Pathetic.
Both the con and Obama offer something the mark fiercely desires and show characteristics s/he desperately wants to see.
which then begs the question who gave the population such a desire by working on them since the 30s?
Well, the point I’m making is that Obama didn’t try to con anybody.
His supporters conned themselves.
Under duress, he sort of repudiated Rev. Wright.
He tried to explain his alliance with Bill Ayers by just waving it away.
The press was determined to elect him precisely because he was black, so they refused to engage in a public airing of his past associations and ideas.
Why would anybody be conned by that? Unless, of course, they want to be conned.
Everything was out in the open. If you’ve read Steve Sailer’s book about his upbringing, especially the stuff about his mother, there are absolutely no surprises in Obama’s behavior.
But, then again, I’ve got a leg up. I live in a far left community full of women like Obama’s mother. I know exactly what they are up to.
Obama’s mother was an absolutely ferocious loon, American hater and communist. He was fully indoctrinated in her lunacy.
Rising through the quota system, Obama has amassed incredible confidence. Why not? Competence and achievement were never demanded of him. He really believes in his infallibility and brilliance.
I predicted (only to my girlfriend of course) that Obama would precipitate a constitutional crisis that would lead to his impeachment and conviction. Nothing has happened to change my mind.
His attempt to enlist the media in an attack on Fox News was the first shot across the bow. Believe me, he still thinks that was the right thing to do.
and you CAN con an honest man, you just use a different con. the easiest way to con an honest man is to get a donation for charity.
watch paper moon and the bible con, its a classic and real… but remember, these were tiny cons, mostly parlor tricks…
madoff is more of an expert con… one that required help of other states, and others from an underground. its too big for one man…
then you have the LARGEST swindle in all history…
Socialism… where you con honest people in masse appealing to the charity con… wrap the whole thing in an ideology similar to the invention of a religion by another betting man…
and to pull it off.. you create a system in which those who know what a great con looks like or where they can fit in, just do so…
and the rules change to make more of them, as well as to obfuscate the good peoples ability to judge and discern, and hold accountable…
maybe this time when they win, they will be able to afix their style of living in a kind of permanence as the good people are slowly bled anemic and demographically are removed leaving the prize to them.
perhaps no higher life exists because once mind of a sufficient nature gets dominant enough, the size grows till ill can pool in ways in which less success does not allow… the rare can become common in zones, and concentrated can eat like acid through the very structures that everything leans on.
no matter how fancy our inventions, or rather the more fancy our inventions, the less far we get from the stone age… we are never really but a short walk back there…
their idea that its better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
so smart, i give them this retort of my own:
Tis better to serve in something that to rule over nothing
cons against the honest can become institutions
His supporters will never abandon him. They have mortgaged their own credibility, their honor, their very souls in his support. If Obama goes down, what would be left of people like Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Oprah Winifrey, or the run-of-the-mill liberal with a “COEXIST” sticker on her Prius?
Nothing. If Obama fails, these people will have to face their own emptiness, their own idiocy, their own gullibility, and their own dishonesty.
They won’t do that. They’d rather watch America crash and burn than admit their own faults — or Obama’s. He’ll fiddle while Rome burns, and his audience will clap and comment on what a superb player he is.
If Obama fails, these people will have to face their own emptiness, their own idiocy, their own gullibility, and their own dishonesty.
Tri, there’s an alternative, a well-trodden path among leftists – blame someone else. “Everything would have been great now, dogs and cats would be living together in harmony, but for for evil __________ (fill in choice of scapegoat here).”
Ask the kulaks how that works out. Actually, Chavez looks about set to do the same thing in Venezuela.
Displacement of blame is a core skill for leftists, owing to selection bias; if they didn’t have – and exercise – that skill, then they would realize that collectivism doesn’t work, and would no longer be leftists.
His supporters will never abandon him.
Some will. I found my way out of the Chomsky camp; I think others can manage to leave Obama.
That said, the abilities of humans to compartmentalize, deny, distort, blame and double-think are unplumbed.
Leftists are hardly the only people to manage these tricks. I daresay that few of us could have survived our childhoods without them.
His supporters conned themselves.
Well, that’s the point, that’s how cons work.
And I’ll stick to my guns that anyone who voted for Obama because they believed that a first term senator from the Chicago political machine on a first-name basis with Black Power and Weather Underground leaders, with only two years in the Senate, no executive, business or military experience, no accomplishments aside from two self-serving memoirs, was going to cause the seas to sink, the sick to be healed, the red and the blue, the white and the black to be unified, the world to enter a new paradigm of mutual respect, and supporting Obama was to become a mini-messiah, was fooling himself or herself.
It’s sweet-smelling dishonesty, but it is dishonesty.
Excellent article Ms. K.
“7” Allow me to recommend Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. I think you will enjoy it.
“Shouting Thomas” can you envision what could cause a conman/law professor to mess up so bad he would earn himself an impeachment? The party orientated government website, Czar system, and so on only seem to arouse those who were non-believers to begin with.
Shouting Thomas: Obama’s aims were clear to those who were looking, and who were not seduced by his charm. But those aims were not necessarily overt—he either lied outright about some of them, or minimized them while stating contradictory aims that were lies. Many people on this blog had him figured out before the election (and if you look at my posts in the last two months or so prior to the election, you’ll see an escalation of apprehension about what Obama was revealing about himself; by election time, for example, he had disclosed his socialist propensities in his talk to Joe the Plumber).
However, there were a huge number of people who were conned, including a great many of the Independents who voted for him. Some of them have caught on so far and some have not.
If you’re onto the con you tend to be immune to the charm, and vice versa.
Trimegistus: What would be left of them? Why, they’d become neo-neocons, of course!
ACORN has filed suit against the government (on the basis of a half-assed “bill of attainder” argument) for cutting off its funding.
Not sure what to think about this. Simplest explanation is garden-variety gross stupidity, which God knows Bertha has in abundance.
Alternatively, it’s a shot across Barry’s bow, saying, in essence, “We know where the bodies are buried. Do you really want pre-trial discovery?”
But, of course, Barry and the Dems can hardly reverse themselves now and reinstitute funding for ACORN, which argues in favor of the gross stupidity scenario.
Then again, the funding cutoff expires in December. Maybe the idea is to let it expire on the QT.
Then still again, who the hell would be stupid enough to think that no one would notice resumption of funding to ACORN? Or be stupid enough to bet that Breitbart & Co. don’t have at least one more tape warming up in the bullpen? Resuming funding to ACORN and then having another tape appear could end political careers.
So…I’m in a quandary. Its resolution depends on just how perspicacious/stupid the various dramatis personae actually are, and that’s imponderable at this remove.
Bob from Virginia: Thanks!
As for the Sowell book, it’s a favorite, already listed here on my Amazon recommended reading widget.
My prediction that Obama will be impeached and convicted is just a hunch.
But, I’ll ask the question that is so obvious nobody has asked it. What would Obama have done next if the other networks had agreed to conspire against Fox News?
Obama is facing only one adversarial media institution. He’s got all the others in the bag. Why does he feel the need to go after his only effective opponent? How far would he go to silence his one effective opponent?
So, what issues would lead to the constitutional crisis? I’d suggest, an overall contempt for the law and for freedom of speech.
If the U.S. continues to suffer terrorist attacks on its soil, and Obama continues to refuse to even respond to those attacks, what will be the public response?
And, what about that pile of money Obama raised to run for President? Where did it come from? This is probably the critical issue. Slowly, we’ll find out.
Where DID that money come from?
There’s a story to be told about Obama’s election. Why haven’t ambitious reporters and/or historians started looking under the rocks yet?
That was good. I enjoyed the way you built the argument from previously defined points, and available evidence, leaving the conclusion inescapable to an intellectually honest reader.
In reading your piece I never had a “Wait, that’s not true, but I agree with you generally….” moment. I think Conservative Opinion is getting well-honed by “war-gaming” against fair, and unfair, liberal attacks: you write for people who don’t agree with you.
There is nothing I enjoy more than some well-written, persuasive, intellectual, conservative apologetics. That means Not You, Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck. I have the same reaction to those guys as I do to Frank Rich or Paul Krugman: “Wait a minute, that’s not really true….”
Your writing reminds me of Neal Boortz. That’s a good thing.
Con-men and beggars regard politicians as gods. They all create elaborate stories that encourage their targets to hand over money, to chase greed or improve self-image. Only politicians (and macro-economists) require their targets to fill out their own paperwork, while half the targets berate the other half for not giving more.
( A variation from The Political Dictionary: Macro Economics )
Neo,
I enjoyed your article very much — in fact, it left me wanting more.
Hi Neo,
One aspect of Con Men is that they can’t transfer their charisma to others. The con is deeply embedded in the persona of the person. This characteristic is shared by both Bill Clinton and Obama.
In both cases, when they go out and campaign for other Democrats, who invariably do not have the charisma of the One, the charisma can’t be transferred, and the campaigning doesn’t really work. The candidate that Obama campaigns for still loses.
For this reason, Obama may very well end up being another Bill Clinton. He will be well liked, as long as he doesn’t have enough power to pass anything in congress. Obama is well liked as a person, but even the people who like him don’t want him near legislative power.
Luckily for his admirers, Obama will never have to lose personally. The people in his own party (who lack the charisma) will lose power, which will eliminate Obama as a threat. Then he can continue to be a successful president, who is well liked. The people will still have the warm glow of Obama to make them feel better.
James
Commenters and pollsters consistently note how much Obama is well liked as a person. How do they come by that? How can anyone like him as a person if they do not know him personally? I really think that this is a dodge to avoid saying they DON’T like them.
I don’t know Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, or Neoneocon, for that matter as “a person. My appraisal of them must come exclusively from what they do or say or write in the public eye. I know them only through their actions, and I do not like the actions of two of the aforementioned three.
> he’s not pulling the old Spanish Prisoner scam.
Sure he is.
The Prisoner in this case is the environment.
Cap-n-Trade is the payoff.
P.S. it’s good, but you should flesh it out more, here, I think. It seems too brief.
heh. Those two above are me.
BTW — “The Spanish Prisoner”, a delicious David Mamet suspenser based on the con of the same name, is available again on DVD and from NetFlix.
I don’t think you should dismiss the likelihood of a significant “Bradley effect” on Obama’s likeability numbers. If people are worried about seeming racist with regard to their vote, it would be far more likely that they would worry about seeming racist when the question is simply likeability.
liberals are idiots who are told by con artists that they are genius
if only i was a socipathic sadist, i could actually enjoy all this and then get a good position.
james, the charisma CAN be transferred.
take some time, if you can find it, historical analysis of those who fell out of favor with hitler.
they will show that hitler was very careful in deciding who was near him.
a particular man who was the subject, (and i am sorry i dont remember the origin, but only the clips and dialogue), was seen early.
hitler would shake his hand.. when they were walking and the crowd, he could touch hitler, or hitler would touch him. there is pych stuff you can read on it.
later out of favor, you can see the man trying to tuoch hitler, and hitler moving not letting him. and in another scene trying to stand close.
we have it all the time. ever go by a business who spent the money to have a dinner with someone? they tend to put a picture up of all their associations.
the concept is “guilt through association”
so he CAN transfer that… but only for those the charisma works… or who dont have an image of the other already…
and dont forget the 5 followers in the group who will blindy do this, and so skew others who dont wan tto go against the group.
Stan,
Your mention of the “Bradley effect” in this regard is provocative. You could well be spot on.
BO’s whole persona is a con.
His supporters worship him as the most intelligent president ever. But, he does not engage his opponents. He speaks from a teleprompter on EVERY public occasion. He refused dinner invitations by Sarkozy and, I think, Gordon Brown. Could it be that he was advised (I don’t think he is able to come to this conclusion on his own) that he was not smart enough to hold his own around the dinner table?
He antagonizes his opponents as a device to enable him to avoid having to actually debate the merits of his positions with them. He left it to Congress to draft his signature bills (the stimulus and health care) and related time after time what was contained in HIS bills without really knowing. (“You lie!”) It was as if his wishes would automatically become part of the bills.
As he antagonizes more and more world leaders and they become less dependent on us (or just write us off), we will start to get the real skinny on this guy. He can ‘t hide forever.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/international_con_man_barack_obama
alex: life imitates art.