The Rawness

I found a great piece by Sam Vaknin, Ph.D and narcissism expert, diagnosing Obama with extreme narcissism. It’s really worth the time it takes to read it in detail, as I think he makes a very plausible case that I think is at least worth consideration, given the impact the man will have over our lives over the next four years.

Admittedly, if one’s sole source of Obama information is the media and their hagiographic portrayal of the man, it may seem to be a very off-base portrayal, but as someone who just finished Obama’s autobiography last week, I do think that you can find support for many of Vaknin’s claims in Obama’s own words. (My review of Obama’s autobiography will be the next installment in the series by the way) If you read between the lines of the recent Inauguration Day coverage however, you can still find evidence of the man’s narcissism amidst the glowing coverage.

Barack Obama, even though he’s actually accomplished very little so far in his political career when compared to most president-elects, has never been one to shy away from grandiose comparisons. He frequently invokes JFK and Lincoln every chance he gets. But lately his Lincoln invocations have hit a fever pitch.

In his first post-election press conference, four days after the election, when asked what he was doing to prepare for his upcoming presidency Obama responded “I have re-read some of Lincoln’s writings, who’s always an extraordinary inspiration.” Since then, Obama has been directly and indirectly invoking Lincoln’s name in numerous news interviews on the road to his inauguration, like on “60 Minutes:”

In Barack Obama’s appearance last month on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” the conversation turned to the president-elect’s long-time love of Lincoln.

“There is a wisdom there,” Obama told interviewer Steve Kroft, “and a humility about his approach to government, even before he was president, that I just find very helpful.”

Even his method of choosing his cabinet is supposedly based on Abraham Lincolns “Team of Rivals” strategy, as the media loves to remind us.

As we inch closer to Inauguration Day, however, it’s getting really out of hand. Obama announced he was planning to get sworn in on the same bible Lincoln got sworn in on:

From the [Obama] transition team:

“Washington, D.C. – On January 20th, President-elect Barack Obama will take the oath of office using the same Bible upon which President Lincoln was sworn in at his first inauguration. The Bible is currently part of the collections of the Library of Congress. Though there is no constitutional requirement for the use of a Bible during the swearing-in, Presidents have traditionally used Bibles for the ceremony, choosing a volume with personal or historical significance. President-elect Obama will be the first President sworn in using the Lincoln Bible since its initial use in 1861.

That’s bad, but not unprecedented. Other Presidents have used bibles previously used by their predecessors for inauguration ceremonies.

But then it kept getting more obnoxious, as Obama announced that he would recreate Abraham Lincoln’s train ride into DC:

Barack Obama has evoked Abraham Lincoln ever since launching his campaign at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill.

Now he plans to arrive in Washington the same way that Lincoln did in 1861, with a train trip that will include stops, speeches and crowds along the way.

On Jan. 17, Obama and his family will start the day with an appearance in Philadelphia, where they will board a chartered Amtrak train. The train will stop in Wilmington, Del., where the Obamas will be joined by Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. Then comes a stop in Baltimore before the group’s arrival that evening in Washington.

“He’s replicating the last leg of Lincoln’s inaugural journey to Washington,” said historian Harold Holzer, author of “Lincoln President Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861.” “This guy’s reverence for Lincoln has no bounds.”

Never mind the fact that many consider Lincoln’s train ride into DC to have been a debacle, as several historians and Lincoln scholars have pointed out:

Obama might want to rethink exactly which parts of Lincoln’s legacy are worth emulating, and which are not…Lincoln’s train journey can be viewed as rather a mixed bag of success and failure. Some Americans of his day thought Lincoln’s off-the-cuff speeches from the back of train weren’t terribly inspiring. Parts of the journey were disorganized, and his final arrival in Washington DC was actually rather a debacle, with some of his detractors accusing the president-elect of cowardice.

But wait, it gets worse. Now Obama is even planning to eat like Lincoln at the inauguration dinner:

The luncheon that will be served in Congress’s Statuary Hall to the president-elect and vice president-elect and their families — as well as congressional leaders, justices of the Supreme Court and pending members of the Obama Cabinet — will be modeled after foods that Lincoln ate and enjoyed.

The first course will even be served on replicas of the china picked out by then-first lady Mary Todd Lincoln at the beginning of her husband’s term in office…

The luncheon’s appetizer will be seafood stew in puff pastry — scallops, shrimp, lobster — served as a nod to the 16th president’s love of stewed and scalloped oysters.

The main course — duck breast with sour-cherry chutney and herb-roasted pheasant served with molasses sweet potatoes and winter vegetables — is a nod to the root vegetables and wild game that Mr. Lincoln favored growing up on the frontier in Kentucky and Indiana.

The apple cinnamon sponge cake dessert is a nod to Mr. Lincoln’s love of apples and apple cake.

A backlash has already begun among historians, as documented in this Politico piece (worth reading in full):

Obama’s frequent invocations of Abraham Lincoln ? a man enshrined in myth and marble with his own temple on the National Mall ? would not at first blush say much about his own instincts for modesty or self-effacement.

And now there are early rumblings of a backlash to Obama’s ostentatious embrace of all things Lincoln, with his not-so-subtle invitations to compare the 44th president to the 16th, the “Savior of the Union.”

Simply put, some scholars think the comparisons have gone a bit over the top hat.

Sean Wilentz, a scholar in American history at Princeton, said many presidents have sought to frame themselves in the historical legacies of illustrious predecessors, but he couldn’t find any examples quite so brazen.

“Sure, they’ve looked back to Washington and even, at times, Jackson. Reagan echoed and at times swiped FDR’s rhetoric,” said Wilentz. “But there’s never been anything like this, and on this scale. Ever.”

Eric Foner, a Columbia historian who has written extensively on the Civil War era, agreed that comparing one’s self to Lincoln sets a rather high bar for success, and could come off like “a certain kind of hubris.”
“It’d be a bit like a basketball player turning up before his first game and saying, ‘I’m kind of modeling myself on Michael Jordan,’” he said. “If you can do it, fine. If you’re LeBron James, that’ll work. But people may make that comparison to your disadvantage.”

As it happens, Obama may find this an entirely apt comparison.

“I’m LeBron, baby,” he told a Chicago Tribune reporter at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. “I can play on this level. I got some game.”

I predict that this is just the beginning, and that the longer Obama is in office, the more the afterglow will wear off and his narcissism will become more apparent. Narcissism is not necessarily a bad thing, though, unless it’s so extreme that it leads to hubris and arrogance, causes one to overreach and impedes progress and teamwork (something many of Bush’s critics claim happened to Bush). To run for high office or shoot for such lofty goals in general requires a high level of self-regard to begin with; I don’t believe anyone runs for President without a little bit of narcissism. (Hell, even to create a blog requires a certain amount of narcissism) I do think, however, that Obama’s narcissism is incredibly transparent and way out of proportion to his actual accomplishments, and the fact that the media and public gives him such a pass on it is truly disturbing.

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