Posted by
Andrews on Monday, March 23, 2009 9:55:03 AM
In
Carol Liebau's column today there was an interesting comment:
One sometimes suspects that Obama makes such an effort to seem like a
regular guy because, on some level, he suspects he isn’t – and because
he doubts Americans’ capacity to support or relate to him unless he
constantly shores up his everyman credibility.
What makes this particularly interesting is
a series of posts I wrote on the underpinnings of both liberalism and all authoritarian systems, as well as charges from the campaign trail of Obama's arrogance.
As I wrote in "
The Citizen Dichotomy", the basis for all interventionist theories is the idea that the average citizen is incompetent, either foolish, evil, or simply easily mislead. As he cannot be trusted to to manage his own affairs, man needs to have his life managed by the state. What goes unspoken, for obvious reasons, is the question how, if the state is run by the same incompetents, it can manage any better than incompetent individuals. As the answer is "because we are smarter than the rest of you", which might offend those buying into the theory, no one speaks it aloud. But, make no mistake, this assumption of a competent elite who should run things is implicit in every interventionist system. As, if there is no elite, how does one justify subjugating one class of people to another? If all are equally competent or incompetent, why should one's decisions rank as less important than the other's?
From his behavior on the campaign trail, it is obvious Obama not only holds to this theory, but sees himself as part of the intellectual elite fit to rule over the rest of us. He may have backpeddaled when he saw his numbers drop, but his comments about Pennsylvanians "clinging to G-d and guns" was an honest expression of his thoughts. He saw those plebeian voters as ignorant rubes who would allow their economic misfortunes to drive them to such barbarous solutions as religion and guns, while he alone could see the "big picture" and chart a course through those troubled waters. Nor was this the only instance, just the most obvious.
So, in this case, I think Mrs. Liebau is onto something. Obama may not,
as I accused, be simply chasing fame in a sort of insecure, juvenile way. She may have something in her allegations that he is trying to convince the rest of us, and maybe even himself, that he's just a "regular Joe" and not the isolated genius that he imagines himself to be. Sadly, this insight makes me wonder, is ti worse to have a juvenile president foolishly chasing applause? Or an arrogant dolt who thinks he is so far above us that he must constantly prove he's "just one of the guys" lest we be frightened by his G-d-like intellect? Is absurdly exaggerated hubris or complete immaturity a worse trait in a president?
POSTSCRIPT
This arrogance is one of the reasons I think Obama may not have been too caught up in the rhetoric of Rev. Wright. Being so far "above" things such as religion, I doubt he bought into much of the spiritual message, such as it was, and feeling isolated in his belief of his own genius, I doubt he felt much solidarity with anyone on racial lines. Instead, I think he adopted Wright's faith as yet another means to prove he was just a "regular Joe", in this case, that he was an "authentic" black man. He may have agreed with some fo what Wright said, at least in as much as it matched with his own political views, but I doubt he drew much from Wright. On the other hand, that may be more disturbing, that Obama thought the route to appearing "an average Joe" was to spend 20 years in a racist, separatist congregation.