Recently, I’ve read more than one article by qualified doctors and therapists identifying Barack Obama as a narcissist. I read them with great interest, but also with a grain of salt. After all, these were serious charges. Could the President of the United States really be a psychopath? As one writer acknowledged, anyone who is successful in public life probably has a bit of narcissism in his/her makeup. But one analysis of Obama’s helter-skelter upbringing set the stage for serious consideration of the possibility.
Narcissists or Malignant Narcissists as one put it, are totally self-absorbed and lacking a conscience. They are so consumed with their own image that they have a hard time facing reality. They generally can’t understand why other people don’t love them as much as they love themselves.
I had put aside consideration of these factors for a while. I found it more germane to explore my numerous objections to his “progressive” policies. Continued government spending on top of a fourteen trillion dollar deficit tends to distract one from a politician’s personal quirks.
Now, however, we see virtually the whole Middle East in an uproar, including those trying to overthrow Kaddafi (speaking of narcissists), civil unrest in some of our own cities, a huge fight in Congress over a federal budget proposal, economies throughout the world on the brink of failure, and unprecedented natural disasters in Japan and elsewhere. All of these are events that would normally occupy the attention of a US President. But where is Mr. Obama? He’s playing golf and basketball. He’s choosing teams in the March Madness brackets. He’s going to make a speech in Brazil where a candidate in a recent election actually had changed his own name to Barack Obama. (How’s that for having your ego stroked?) And even otherwise liberal columnists have been asking where he is.
Now Obama is either way over his head and simply unable to cope with all this, or he’s psychologically unable to see what’s going on all around him and how it overshadows his own self interests. At any rate, this situation is enough to push me over the line into believing that the psychotherapists are really onto something.
Unlesss…that is, our “staller in chief” sees his real job as working with his many advisors using that blackberry of his to find the best ways to “take advantage” of these crises. For a malignant narcissist, taking over the world must be a lot more interesting than solving a budget problem.
TheMiddleofSomewhere 