Divider-in-Chief (4 page)

The only concession Obama has made to growing doubts that Bush can be blamed for everything is to blame him more obliquely. An example was in one of his weekly radio addresses in June 2011. “I wish I could tell you there was a quick fix to our economic problems,” he said. “But the truth is, we didn't get into this mess overnight, and we won't get out of it overnight. It's going to take time.”
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Having embraced the campaign motto “Forward,” you'd assume the Obama campaign would stop looking backward to blame Bush. But you'd be wrong. Obama was still indirectly blaming Bush in June 2012. At a campaign stop in Golden Valley, Minnesota, Obama said, “We're still fighting our way back. Our economy is still facing serious head winds.”
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Obama and his allies have a tendency to blame the public for the administration's failures. Liberal comedian and million-dollar Obama contributor Bill Maher has complained that Americans “are not bright enough to really understand the issues.”
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In early 2010, when Obama was having a hard time advancing his agenda,
Slate
's Jacob Weisberg wrote a piece called “Down with the People: Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis.”
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He wrote, “The biggest culprit in our current predicament” is “the childishness, ignorance and growing incoherence of the public at large.”
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Joe Klein of
Time
magazine couldn't believe the American public could oppose Obama's stimulus package. He said the opposition was “yet further evidence that Americans are flagrantly ill-informed... and, for those watching FOX News, misinformed. It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens. It is impossible to be a citizen if you don't make an effort to understand the most basic activities of your government. It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you're a nation of dodos.”
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Obama has also gotten into the act. He told Massachusetts donors that Democrats' problems can be chalked up to the fact that people are “hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country is scared.”
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Obama has a habit of blaming his political troubles on voters' ignorance and impulsiveness. When he started losing primaries to Hillary Clinton in 2008, he told a group of San Francisco donors—in comments that are now notorious but remain revealing about Obama's base assumptions—that Midwesterners cling to guns, religion, and xenophobia as a way to explain their frustrations.

More recently, the president explained his poor fundraising performance in May 2012 to donors on an Air Force One conference call, implying the people's ignorance is to blame: “In 2008 everything was new and
exciting about our campaign.... And now I'm the incumbent president. I've got gray hair.” Rather than accepting responsibility for people's angst over the economy and their inclination to hold him at least partially responsible, Obama patronizes and shifts more blame: “It turns out change is hard, especially when you've got an obstructionist Republican Congress.”
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Obama holds a remarkable distinction as a president who appears less presidential with every passing year. As professor James W. Ceaser has noted, “Obama has reversed the usual process of growth and maturation, appearing today far more like a candidate for the presidency... than he did during the latter stages of his campaign.”
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The president's ego and blame-shifting are among his most obvious characteristics: he will readily claim credit for success, no matter how implausible; but when things go wrong, he'll shift the blame, point his finger, and, above all, attack his opponents. Many Americans did not see Obama for what he was in 2008, listening only to his siren song of hope, change, and reconciliation. It will be harder to fool them in 2012.

E
go is Barack Obama's defining characteristic. It is also his greatest liability.

At the Catholic Charities Al Smith dinner in New York in October 2008, Obama joked, “If I had to name my greatest strength, I guess it would be my humility. Greatest weakness, it's possible that I'm a little too awesome.”
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The joke elicited raucous laughter from the assembled guests. It was funny because it contained an admission from Obama that he is often a little too full of himself.

In his book
From Promise to Power
, David Mendell linked Obama's robust ego to his mother. She worried that her biracial son would lack self-esteem without his father present. So she went to great lengths to shore up Obama's confidence. “As a consequence, there was no shortage of self-esteem,” Obama once told Mendell with a wry smile.
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As a candidate in October 2008, Obama said, “Like any politician at this level, I've got a healthy ego.”
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Obama's staff members have remarked on his high estimation of himself and his abilities. When David Plouffe,
who would become Obama's campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, then-Senator Obama told him straightforwardly: “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I'll hire to do it.”
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Obama said something similar to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign's political director. “I think that I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director.”
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To be fair, given the way Obama was treated during his political rise by liberals and the media, it's easy to see why he'd be so self-assured. Take just one example from the 2008 election:
Newsweek
editor Evan Thomas called Obama a “brave” and “great teacher” who “stands above everybody.” Thomas later elaborated, saying, “I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above—above the world, he's sort of God.”
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According to the book
Game Change
, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Obama surrounded himself with aides who treated him like a deity: “After his election as Senator a lot of requests came in for him to speak, many of them fundraisers for other candidates.... His aides were ‘praying it wouldn't go to Obama's head; his ego was robust enough already. They even conferred on the senator a new nickname: Black Jesus.'”
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Obama was held in even higher esteem abroad. After having held office just two weeks, Obama was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. When the committee awarded him the prize in October 2009, it highlighted Obama's “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
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Obama's ego prompted him to make many audacious promises, such as his claim upon receiving the Democratic nomination:

Obama's towering ego and unflinching self-confidence were no doubt helpful in getting him to the White House. But those characteristics often and easily tip into arrogance and overconfidence. It's clear he no longer feels the need to win people to his side; rather, he tries by sheer force of his personality to compel others to follow him.

In July 2009, the Chicago White Sox's Mark Buehrle pitched a perfect game—only the twenty-first Major League baseball pitcher ever to achieve that feat. Barack Obama is a White Sox fan, and he took the opportunity to call Buehrle to congratulate him. Obama, according to administration press secretary Robert Gibbs, told Buehrle, “Maybe [the perfect game] was because I wore the White Sox jacket at the All-Star Game.”
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It was a joke, of course, but, like the joke he made at the Al Smith dinner, it revealed an uncomfortable truth: that Obama is so self-centered, he takes credit for successes that have little or nothing to do with him.

Obama always puts himself center stage. Dinesh D'Souza, in his book
Obama's America,
offered a prime example of Obama's ego, of how everything is always about him, writing:

On a more serious note, Obama was scandalously silent when Iranian citizens risked, and some lost, their lives to protest Iran's sham elections in 2009—yet he still took credit for the protests. Senior Obama advisers let it be known that Obama's Cairo speech a few months earlier had, according to them, inspired the protesters.

“There clearly is in the region a sense of new possibilities. I was struck in the aftermath of the president's speech that there was a connection. It was very sweeping in terms of its reach,” one senior administration official told the
Washington Post
. Obama said that “obviously after the speech that I made in Cairo we tried to send a clear message that we think there is the possibility of change” in Iran.
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Another example: even after he blocked the Keystone oil project, Obama took credit for expediting construction of a portion of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. “President Obama claiming credit for speeding up the Keystone pipeline is like Al Gore saying he invented the Internet,” said Oklahoma Republican congressman John Sullivan.
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Team Obama has even gone so far as to take credit for
Republican
victories. Republicans won governor races in New Jersey and Virginia in 2009 that were commonly viewed as repudiations of Obama. But Obama senior adviser David Axelrod argued that the Republican in the Virginia race, Bob McDonnell, won because he ran “not as a Sarah Palin Republican, but more as a Barack Obama centrist.”
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This after Obama and the left tried to defeat McDonnell by playing up the Republican's unmistakably Christian, conservative values.

Almost everyone acknowledges that Obama made the right decision in pulling the metaphorical trigger to kill Osama bin Laden. But Obama
and his allies seem to believe Obama should also get credit for pulling the actual trigger in the assassination.

Immediately after the raid, in May 2011, Obama repeatedly said that he wouldn't release photos of Osama bin Laden's dead body. “It is important to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool,” Obama told Steve Kroft of
60 Minutes
.
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“We don't trot out this stuff as trophies... we don't need to spike the football. Given the graphic nature of these photos it would create a national security risk.”

But though he never released the photos, Obama constantly reminds voters about his decision, often politicizing it. In an ad called “One Chance,” Bill Clinton says Obama took “the harder and the more honorable path” in ordering the bin Laden assassination. Then subtitles appear that ask, “Which path would Mitt Romney have taken?” Obama himself has even implied Romney would not have given the go-ahead.
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“It's now sad to see the Obama campaign seek to use an event that unified our country to once again divide us in order to try and distract voters' attention from the failures of his administration,” said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul.
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Serving and former U.S. Navy SEALs criticized Obama for taking credit for the killing and then exploiting it for his re-election campaign. Ryan Zinke, a former commander in the U.S. Navy who spent twenty-three years as a SEAL and led a SEAL Team 6 assault unit, told
Daily Mail
reporter Toby Harnden, himself a veteran of the Royal Navy: “The decision was a no brainer. I applaud him for making it but I would not overly pat myself on the back for making the right call. I think every president would have done the same. He is justified in saying it was his decision but the preparation, the sacrifice—it was a broader team effort.”
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Zinke suggested that Obama was exploiting bin Laden's death for his re-election bid. “The President and his administration are positioning him as a war president using the SEALs as ammunition,” he said. “It was predictable.”
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Even some liberals condemned Obama's politicization of the bin Laden killing. Arianna Huffington, who runs the left's premiere news website, the
Huffington Post
, told CBS: “We should celebrate the fact that they did such a great job. It's one thing to have an NBC special from the Situation Room... all that to me is perfectly legitimate, but to turn it into a campaign ad is one of the most despicable things you can do.”
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