In my last post ("The Fallout From July 13, 2009") I mentioned Best of the Web's accusation that Obama's comments in the wake of the Ft. Hood murders seemed to suggest his "cool" was indifference rather than control. I would argue that Obama has had many incidents that support that. In fact, much of what he has done suggests not only that he is not all that concerned with specific issues, but also that he feels both entitled to the presidency, and that he should not be required to do much to gain the office.

The evidence for this entitled attitude goes back to his days in state politics. Many have mentioned his tendency to vote "present" (except on the few issues about which he has an almost obsessive interest), but few have thought what that means. The man bothered to get elected, to hold office, but once there felt he had to do nothing. His platform, his promises, meaningless. The office existed solely to ennoble him, give him a title and status, and give him entry into social circles where he could engage in typical Chicago corruption. Of course, he didn't even really "strive" for the seat. He was promised the seat by the Chicago machine, and when it seemed a challenge may arise, his flunkies raised legal challenges to exclude the potential rival. So perhaps there is a reason he feels entitled.

Similarly, his senatorial seat seemed to be little more than a way of entering national politics. He didn't have any better voting record there, and he seems to have seen the seat as little but a means to make a plausible bid for the presidency, a seat to which he also seems to feel entitled. And as president, though he seems obsessed with passing a few specific initiatives, most of his actions have been either simple expedient applications of liberal orthodoxy (spend to stop a recession) or were driven by congressional demands (the $400 billion budget). Even things he claimed to have been strongly held beliefs have been largely ignored (withdrawing the troops, cap and trade), or dropped in favopr of paying off political allies and friends form Chicago (eg. the Olympic lobbying efforts) Outside of health care, very little seems to hold his interest. It makes one wonder why he even wanted to be president.

Nothing illustrates this strange lack of commitment better than the episode during the campaign when his teleprompter broke and Obama was reduced to "ah" and "um" and "er." Now many made fun of this and brought up his teleprompter reliance, but no one (including me) thought through the truly bizarre aspect of this. First, it was a campaign speech, the sort of boilerplate he had been giving for months at that point. Yet the man recalled too little to continue. Any other candidate would have bothered to memorize at least the highlights, and practiced enough to fake at least part, but Obama was apparently indifferent enough that he had not bothered to commit any of it to memory.

More peculiar, the speech was about his political platform, ostensibly what the candidate believes. Yet he had trouble recalling what he believed. Of course every candidate lies to some degree, does not present his beliefs honestly. But every candidate I have heard speak has recalled his platform to a sufficient degree to at least  muddle through a speech without prepared text. Yet Obama had real trouble answering basic questions and presenting his platform. It appeared the man had not bothered to commit even the bullet point version of his platform to memory. He was simply a blank, a text reader who felt entitled to the office, but had no real investment in what platform got him there.

All of which makes me reconsider one thing I have said regularly since Obama appeared in the primaries. I used to claim he was clever for managing to ride through the primaries without a platform, that by allowing voters to read into him what they wanted he could manage to get ardent support from people with differing ideologies, as they saw in him what they wanted. But maybe it wasn't so clever. Perhaps Obama really is just so empty that he really has no content (or very little), and the ink blot he presented ("The Candidate as Inkblot") really was Obama, an empty shell others can fill as they wish.

We haven't elected a president, we elected a spokes model.

POSTSCRIPT

I know some think Obama came to office intending to remake the US into a socialist utopia, but I think the truth is much more boring, but just as frightening. Obama came to office with little or nothing in mind. He just thought he should be president. Maybe he was committed to health care reform, or maybe he picked it up from congress. His interest in even that does seem to flag, so it is hard to believe he feels as strongly about it as he did about BAIPA in Illinois, for example.

What confuses observers is that, while Obama seems relatively indifferent to most causes, he does have a tendency to impose solutions far to the left of even the mainstream Democrats, basically always turning to solutions easily characterized as "socialist". But the explanation is simple. Obama's beliefs, such as they are, are informed by socialism. So, when he casts about for a "practical" solution to a problem he can't ignore or pass off to someone else, he finds a socialist answer. And so we get the massive bailout, the takeover of the automakers, and perhaps even health care nationalization.

My thought is, he doesn't want to create a socialist US, he just wants "to be president", but to stay in office, he has to "do something", and given his political beliefs, that "something" tends toward socialism.