The New Neo

In the comments to yesterday’s post about Obama’s immunity, a discussion developed about Obama’s intentions. It began with this comment by “southpaw,” and the back-and-forth went on for some time:

[Obama’s] whole act was supposed to win over the world and he would be looked up to as the reluctant leader- the healer, the reasonable one, the great organizer. These admissions of US wrongdoing, selfishness, and insensitivity were meant to impress the world and win him goodwill, and respect- not the opposite. talking down the US was designed to increase his personal prestige and influence. The fact that he diminished us in the process was an after thought, not the main goal. we are just another expendable entity to inflate his galactic sized ego.
I think this explanation is a lot more consistent with his narcissism and naé¯veté, than to believe he wanted to preside over the demise of US influence and power as an actual goal…

First of all, why do we care which it is? I spend a lot of time discussing what I think might be on Obama’s mind—what his motives and goals might be—and none of it changes what Obama actually does as he moves through his lengthy (and seemingly interminable) presidency. Well, I still think it’s good to understand what one is fighting in order to even try to defeat it. In order to add my own contribution, however small, to that endeavor, I write these posts.

I also think it’s usually a bad idea to underestimate one’s opponent. Overestimating isn’t a great idea either—it can lead to stagnation and despair. But thinking Obama is merely a narcissist doesn’t do any good, in my estimation. He is indeed a narcissist, as has been abundantly clear from the time he began to campaign for the presidency (and probably even before, although most of us including me weren’t paying attention back then), and it’s an overarching element of his personality. But he is not just a narcissist: I submit that he is a leftist ideologue as well as a narcissist.

The two are hardly mutually exclusive; they can co-exist quite nicely most of the time. Obama wants to elevate himself, and he wants to undermine the traditional role of the US in the world and replace it with a new role for this country as a leftist nation among many other leftist nations. As such—and with Obama gaining worldwide prestige as leader and transformational trailblazer—the US would become far more cooperative with the larger international community.

Obama sees his role on the world stage, not just as the head of the US and with power derived from its power, but with his own larger status as a major international figure, above it all. That was his goal even before he was elected, as his behavior and speeches made clear.

What other presidential candidate would even think to deliver a speech like Obama’s in Munich in July of 2008? Let’s revisit it in a Spiegel piece whose title quite aptly combines the two ideas, leftist internationalism and narcissism “Obama’s Berlin Speech: People of the World, Look At Me” (in the speech Obama did everything but call his audience “comrades”):

Obama began his speech with sentences about what he claimed not to be — at least for this one Thursday in Berlin: He was neither appearing here as a candidate nor a typical American. Instead, he claimed to be a “proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world.”…

…In the final minutes of his address, Obama called out to the audience: “We must come together to save this planet.”

“This is the moment to give our children back their future. ”¦ This is the moment to stand as one.”

“This is our time.”

“Let us remember this history, and answer our destiny.”

What American presidential candidate—or even American president, for that matter—has ever gone abroad and given a speech to 200,000 people and referred to himself as a “citizen of the world”? If you can find one, please let me know.

But the most telling remarks of all may have been Obama’s response to a question about American exceptionalism early in his first term:

…[E]arlier this year, while attending the European summit of the Group of 20 major economic countries, the president was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism. He replied, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Not exactly the way Mr. Reagan would have answered…

President Obama’s reference to British or Greek exceptionalism suggests a belief that the United States doesn’t stand alone with a particular greatness but that every nation is great in its own way and America is simply one of many nations with something cool to offer.

This kind of multicultural, politically correct, “we’re all unique in unique ways, every kid must win at dodgeball” thinking is the basis for his economic and foreign policies, from his schemes to nationalize the auto, banking, and health care industries to his lollygagging on behalf of those fighting for greater freedom in Iran.

It is the rationale for his Vesuvian explosion of big government and the much higher taxes required to finance it. It also explains Mr. Obama’s irrepressible urge to apologize for past perceived American injustices and ill-conceived foreign “meddling.” In Mr. Obama’s kaleidoscopic left-wing view, no nation is better than any other, no country can tell another country not to have nuclear weapons, and we’re all socialists now.

In other words, American exceptionalism was so last century.

Obama never thought that jettisoning American exceptionalism would mean that his own image and prestige would suffer. Au contraire; it would be enhanced on the world stage as a result. He believed (and almost certainly still believes) that the world will applaud the reduction of traditional American power, and its transformation into a sort of international peacekeeping unit in cooperation with the UN and other bodies such as the World Court. That means the world will applaud him.

Does Obama think he looks bad on the world stage right now? I don’t have the answer, but my guess is “no, not really.” That may seem odd—the opprobrium right now is so widespread and so strong—but that’s another strange thing about narcissism. It can allow a person to deflect or deny criticism—to ignore it or think it’s temporary and meaningless, to believe that one can pull any situation out of the fire by the sheer force of one’s brilliance.

Commenter “T” asks an excellent question:

I really don’t know how intentional the foundation of this [foreign policy] implosion was, but I’d bet good money on one thing: that Obama never thought he’d be diminishing his own persona to the international laughingstock he is becoming.

For the life of me I can’t understand how he believed that he could retain any grace, dignity or respect after reducing the prestige of the country he supposedly leads. If you lead a lesser nation, you are a less important head of state. Did he really (narcissistically) believe himself to be immune?

It’s a good question because there’s a lot of logic there. Under normal circumstances, it would be hard to believe that a president would imagine he could enhance his own prestige—or at least have it remain substantially intact, if already high, as Obama’s was from the start—by reducing the status and power of his own country. After all, doesn’t a president derive that status and power from that of his country (do we know the name of the president of Tanzania)?

But Obama’s circumstances are not normal, and he knows it. I’ve written before about Obama’s belief in the power of his actual person and his empty words devoid of any deeds or backup, and how that belief has been justified to a large extent by the trajectory of his life until now. For most of his adult years he has gotten kudos merely by walking into a room and speaking, and this enabled him to reach the highest pinnacle of American power, the presidency, with a resume that would not have been nearly enough to have catapulted another man into the same position or anything like it.

And until recently, this was true on the world stage as well. When Obama took office, world opinion about his gifts and potential was extraordinarily high. He got the Nobel Peace Prize for merely showing up, and whatever you or I might think of such a dubious honor and how unearned it was, much of the world (and certainly Obama himself) was highly impressed.

Obama seemed to belief in Obaman exceptionalism while simultaneously denying American exceptionalism and also apologizing for his country—remember wife Michelle’s statement about how Obama’s imminent nomination was the first time in her adult life she was really proud of her country? So the country’s pride and prestige was derived from its elevation of Obama, not the other way around.

You might ask whether Obama (and Michelle) actually believed this. My answer is that they both gave, and still give, every indication that they did and do. Variations on the theme have been repeated almost endlessly in an over-the-top manner that would probably embarrass more modest people but that don’t seem to cause even a flicker of shame for Obama and his wife. Some narcissistic bluster is merely a cover-up for feelings of inferiority. But Obama’s bluster feels and sounds like the real deal.

For example, during the 2008 campaign, when most of us were first getting to know Obama, this astounding statement of his on the subject of his foreign policy expertise made a deep impression on me. Now of course I wouldn’t have expected presidential candidate Obama to have owned up to his being a completely untested neophyte in that sphere. But something about the sheer preening juvenile brazen arrogance of his remarks (his college trip to Pakistan qualified him for the presidency?) smacked of being a lot more than a sophistic argument made for show.

Simply put, Obama seemed to truly believe his own bull and to believe others would believe it too. And hasn’t he been more or less correct until recently?

Here’s what Obama said back then:

…[T]his is supposedly the place where experience is most needed to be Commander-in-Chief. Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world. This I know. When Senator Clinton brags ‘I’ve met leaders from eighty countries’–I know what those trips are like! I’ve been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There’s a group of children who do native dance. You meet with the CIA station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of a plant that [with] the assistance of USAID has started something. And then–you go.

You do that in eighty countries–you don’t know those eighty countries. So when I speak about having lived in Indonesia for four years, having family that is impoverished in small villages in Africa–knowing the leaders is not important–what I know is the people. . . .

I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college–I knew what Sunni and Shia was [sic] before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. . . .

Nobody is entirely prepared for being Commander-in-Chief. The question is when the 3 AM phone call comes do you have somebody who has the judgment, the temperament to ask the right questions, to weigh the costs and benefits of military action, who insists on good intelligence, who is not going to be swayed by the short-term politics. By most criteria, I’ve passed those tests and my two opponents have not.

In April of 2008 I wrote:

…[A]lthough youthful exuberance and innocence can be charming even in an adult, youthful arrogance and ignorance never is.

Is Obama really this unaware, or is he faking it to appeal to the youthful demographic? I haven’t a clue, but I fear it’s the former…

Whether or not you believe (as I do) that part of Obama’s intent was to reduce US influence and prestige in the international arena, or whether you believe it was not planned but was an accidental result of his own incompetence, there is plenty of evidence that, either way, Obama believed that his own reputation would remain mostly undamaged. That might seem to be a contradiction for some people, but not for Barack Obama.

[NOTE: If you want to see the sort of thing that helps Obama believe that his reputation will remain intact somehow, just take a look at what Andrew Sullivan has to say today.]

That’s Peter Wehner’s opinion:

In the first year of his second term, the president has failed on virtually every front. He put his prestige on the line to pass federal gun-control legislation”“and lost. He made climate change a central part of his inaugural address”“and nothing has happened. The president went head-to-head with Republicans on sequestration”“and he failed. He’s been forced to delay implementation of the employer mandate, a key feature of the Affordable Care Act. ObamaCare is more unpopular than ever, and it’s turning out to be a “train wreck” (to quote Democratic Senator Max Baucus) in practice. The most recent jobs report was the worst in a year, with the Obama recovery already qualifying as a historically weak one. Immigration reform is going nowhere. And then there’s Syria, which has turned out to be an epic disaster. (To be sure, Mr. Obama’s Middle East failures go well beyond Syria”“but Syria is the most conspicuous failure right now).

In watching the Obama presidency dissolve before our eyes, there is a cautionary tale to be told. Every presidency falls short of the expectations that the candidate sets. But no man has ever promised more and delivered less than the current occupant of the Oval Office.

I respect Peter Wehner greatly. But I disagree with him greatly here. Not on the facts, but on their meaning. Wehner is thinking conventionally about the meaning of success and of failure. If you look at each of these issues in a conventional way, he is correct that Obama has not been successful. But this is not a conventional situation.

I believe Obama has been very successful, although at the moment his formidable ego might be smarting a bit because he’d have preferred to have won the battles Wehner lists and be basking in the glow of his previous adulation squared. But his failures are relatively minor compared to the more major battles he’s already won, and each failure doesn’t seem to stay in the mind of the easily-distracted public very long. And don’t forget he still has three and a half years in which to revisit those fights and perhaps win them this time.

Here are Obama’s major successes:

(1) Weakening the US on the world stage

(2) Withdrawing from Iraq and substantially withdrawing from Afghanistan

(3) Passing Obamacare and fostering the general increase in government dependency, helping to create a docile public that is increasingly and reliably and perhaps permanently supportive of Democrats

(4) Discouraging efforts to set up checks on voting fraud, to the long-term benefit of Democrats

There are two major thrusts to Obama’s policy goals, the foreign and the domestic. In each case, they represent fundamental transformations of what has gone before. They can be summarized as (a) weakening America and (b) entrenching and norming the leftist influence on the voting public. Both missions have been substantially accomplished. It really doesn’t matter if Obama’s personal popularity and influence falls (although I don’t see his poll numbers sinking nearly as much as they should be), although of course he’d rather they didn’t. But he knows that he is set for life anyway: he never has to run for office again, a large segment of the American public (and the world) still reveres him, he will have enough money to do whatever he wants, and he will be free to go round the globe making interminable speeches—which is one of his favorite activities anyway.