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American Narcissus
The vanity of Barack Obama
Nov 13, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 10 • By JONATHAN V. LAST
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Why has Barack Obama failed so spectacularly? Is he too dogmatically liberal
or too pragmatic? Is he a socialist, or an anticolonialist, or a
philosopher-president? Or is it possible that Obama’s failures stem from
something simpler: vanity. Politicians as a class are particularly
susceptible to mirror-gazing. But Obama’s vanity is overwhelming. It
defines him, his politics, and his presidency.
It’s revealed in lots of little stories. There was the time he bragged
about how one of his campaign volunteers, who had tragically died of breast
cancer, “insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama T-shirt.” There
was the Nobel acceptance speech where he conceded, “I do not bring with me
today a definitive solution to the problems of war” (the emphasis is mine).
There was the moment during the 2008 campaign when Obama appeared with a
seal that was a mash-up of the Great Seal of the United States and his own
campaign logo (with its motto Vero Possumus, “Yes we Can” in Latin). Just
a few weeks ago, Obama was giving a speech when the actual presidential seal
fell from the rostrum. “That’s all right,” he quipped. “All of you know
who I am.” Oh yes, Mr. President, we certainly do.
My favorite is this line from page 160 of The Audacity of Hope:
I find comfort in the fact that the longer I’m in politics the less
nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame
seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to
the steady gaze of my own conscience.
So popularity and fame once nourished him, but now his ambition is richer
and he’s answerable not, like some presidents, to the Almighty, but to the
gaze of his personal conscience. Which is steady. The fact that this
sentence appears in the second memoir of a man not yet 50 years old—and who
had been in national politics for all of two years—is merely icing.
People have been noticing Obama’s vanity for a long time. In 2008, one of
his Harvard Law classmates, the entertainment lawyer Jackie Fuchs, explained
what Obama was like during his school days: “One of our classmates once
famously noted that you could judge just how pretentious someone’s remarks
in class were by how high they ranked on the ‘Obamanometer,’ a term that
lasted far longer than our time at law school. Obama didn’t just share in
class—he pontificated. He knew better than everyone else in the room,
including the teachers. ”
The story of Obama’s writing career is an object lesson in how our
president’s view of himself shapes his interactions with the world around
him. In 1990, Obama was wrapping up his second year at Harvard Law when the
New York Times ran a profile of him on the occasion of his becoming the
first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. A book agent in New York named
Jane Dystel read the story and called up the young man, asking if he’d be
interested in writing a book. Like any 29-year-old, he wasn’t about to turn
down money. He promptly accepted a deal with Simon & Schuster’s Poseidon
imprint—reportedly in the low six-figures—to write a book about race
relations.
Obama missed his deadline. No matter. His agent quickly secured him another
contract, this time with Times Books. And a $40,000 advance. Not bad for an
unknown author who had already blown one deal, writing about a noncommercial
subject.
By this point Obama had left law school, and academia was courting him. The
University of Chicago Law School approached him; although they didn’t have
any specific needs, they wanted to be in the Barack Obama business. As
Douglas Baird, the head of Chicago’s appointments committee, would later
explain, “You look at his background—Harvard Law Review president, magna
cum laude, and he’s African American. This is a no-brainer hiring decision
at the entry level of any law school in the country.” Chicago invited Obama
to come in and teach just about anything he wanted. But Obama wasn’t
interested in a professor’s life. Instead, he told them that he was writing
a book—about voting rights. The university made him a fellow, giving him
an office and a paycheck to keep him going while he worked on this important
project.
In case you’re keeping score at home, there was some confusion as to what
book young Obama was writing. His publisher thought he was writing about
race relations. His employer thought he was writing about voting rights law.
But Obama seems to have never seriously considered either subject. Instead,
he decided that his subject would be himself. The 32-year-old was writing a
memoir.
Obama came clean to the university first. He waited until his fellowship was
halfway over—perhaps he was concerned that his employers might not like
the bait-and-switch. He needn’t have worried. Baird still hoped that Obama
would eventually join the university’s faculty (he had already begun
teaching a small classload as a “senior lecturer”). “It was a good deal
for us,” Baird explained, “because he was a good teaching prospect and we
wanted him around.”
And it all worked out in the end. The book Obama eventually finished was
Dreams from My Father. It didn’t do well initially, but nine years later,
after his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention made him a star, it sold
like gangbusters. Obama got rich. And famous. The book became the
springboard for his career in national politics.
Only it didn’t quite work out for everybody. Obama left the University of
Chicago, never succumbing to their offers of a permanent position in their
hallowed halls. Simon & Schuster, which had taken a chance on an unproven
young writer, got burned for a few thousand bucks. And Jane Dystel, who’d
plucked him out of the pages of the New York Times and got him the deal to
write the book that sped his political rise? As soon as Obama was ready to
negotiate the contract for his second book—the big-money payday—he dumped
her and replaced her with super-agent Robert Barnett.
We risk reading too much into these vignettes—after all, our president is a
mansion with many rooms and it would be foolish to reduce him to pure ego.
Yet the vignettes are so numerous. For instance, a few years ago Obama’s
high school basketball coach told ABC News how, as a teenager, Obama always
badgered him for more playing time, even though he wasn’t the best player
on the team—or even as good as he thought he was. Everyone who has ever
played team sports has encountered the kid with an inflated sense of self.
That’s common. What’s rare is the kid who feels entitled enough to nag the
coach about his minutes. Obama was that kid. His enthusiasm about his
abilities and his playing time extended into his political life. In 2004,
Obama explained to author David Mendell how he saw his future as a national
political figure: “I’m LeBron, baby. I can play on this level. I got some
game.” After just a couple of months in the Senate, Obama jumped the
Democratic line and started asking voters to make him president.
Yet you don’t have to delve deep into armchair psychology to see how Obama
’s vanity has shaped his presidency. In January 2009 he met with
congressional leaders to discuss the stimulus package. The meeting was
supposed to foster bipartisanship. Senator Jon Kyl questioned the plan’s
mixture of spending and tax cuts. Obama’s response to him was, “I won.” A
year later Obama held another meeting to foster bipartisanship for his
health care reform plan. There was some technical back-and-forth about
Republicans not having the chance to properly respond within the constraints
of the format because President Obama had done some pontificating, as is
his wont. Obama explained, “There was an imbalance on the opening
statements because”—here he paused, self-satisfiedly—“I’m the president
. And so I made, uh, I don’t count my time in terms of dividing it evenly.”
There are lots of times when you get the sense that Obama views the powers
of the presidency as little more than a shadow of his own person. When he
journeyed to Copenhagen in October 2009 to pitch Chicago’s bid for the
Olympics, his speech to the IOC was about—you guessed it: “Nearly one year
ago, on a clear November night,” he told the committee, “people from
every corner of the world gathered in the city of Chicago or in front of
their televisions to watch the results of . . . ”
and away he went. A short while later he was back in Copenhagen for the
climate change summit. When things looked darkest, he personally
commandeered the meeting to broker a “deal.” Which turned out to be
worthless. In January 2010, Obama met with nervous Democratic congressmen to
assure them that he wasn’t driving the party off a cliff. Confronted with
worries that 2010 could be a worse off-year election than 1994, Obama
explained to the professional politicians, “Well, the big difference here
and in ’94 was you’ve got me.”
In the midst of the BP oil spill last summer, Obama explained, “My job
right now is just to make sure that everybody in the Gulf understands this
is what I wake up to in the morning and this is what I go to bed at night
thinking about: the spill.” Read that again: The president thinks that the
job of the president is to make certain the citizens correctly understand
what’s on the president’s mind.
Obama’s vanity is even more jarring when paraded in the foreign arena. In
April, Poland suffered a national tragedy when its president, first lady,
and a good portion of the government were killed in a plane crash. Obama
decided not to go to the funeral. He played golf instead. Though maybe it’s
best that he didn’t make the trip. When he journeyed to Great Britain to
meet with the queen he gave her an amazing gift: an iPod loaded with
recordings of his speeches and pictures from his inauguration.
On November 9, 2009, Europe celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of
the Berlin Wall. It was kind of a big deal. They may not mention the Cold
War in schools much these days, but it pitted the Western liberal order
against a totalitarian ideology in a global struggle. In this the United
States was the guarantor of liberty and peace for the West; had we faltered,
no corner of the world would have been safe from Soviet domination.
President Obama has a somewhat different reading. He explains: “The Cold
War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many
years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and
decided that its end would be peaceful.” Pretty magnanimous of the Soviets
to let the long twilight struggle end peacefully like that, especially after
all we did to provoke them.
So Obama doesn’t know much about the Cold War. Which is probably why he
didn’t think the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was all
that important. When the leaders of Europe got together to commemorate it,
he decided not to go to that, either. But he did find time to record a video
message, which he graciously allowed the Europeans to air during the
ceremony.
In his video, Obama ruminated for a few minutes on the grand events of the
20th century, the Cold War itself, and the great lesson we all should take
from this historic passing: “Few would have foreseen . .
; . that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or
that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human
destiny is what human beings make of it.” The fall of the Berlin Wall, the
end of the Cold War, and the freedom of all humanity—it’s great stuff.
Right up there with the election of Barack Obama.
All presidents are hostage to self-confidence. But not since Babe Ruth
grabbed a bat and wagged his fat finger at Wrigley’s center-field wall has
an American politician called his shot like Barack Obama. He announced his
candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, on the steps where Abraham Lincoln gave
his “house divided” speech. He mentioned Lincoln continually during the
2008 campaign. After he vanquished John McCain he passed out copies of Team
of Rivals, a book about Lincoln’s cabinet, to his senior staff. At his
inauguration, he chose to be sworn into office using Lincoln’s Bible. At
the inaugural luncheon following the ceremony, he requested that the food—
each dish of which was selected as a “tribute” to Lincoln—be served on
replicas of Lincoln’s china. At some point in January 2009 you wanted to
grab Obama by the lapels and tell him—We get it! You’re the Rail Splitter!
If we promise to play along, will you keep the log cabin out of the Rose
Garden?
It’s troubling that a fellow whose electoral rationale was that he edited
the Harvard Law Review and wrote a couple of memoirs was comparing himself
to the man who saved the Union. But it tells you all you need to know about
what Obama thinks of his political gifts and why he’s unperturbed about
having led his party into political disaster in the midterms. He assumes
that he’ll be able to reverse the political tide once he becomes the issue,
in the presidential race in 2012. As he said to Harry Reid after the
majority leader congratulated him on one particularly fine oration, “I have
a gift, Harry.”
But Obama’s faith in his abilities extends beyond mere vote-getting. Buried
in a 2008 New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza about the Obama campaign was this
gob-smacking passage:
Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong
opinions, but he also said, “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.” After Obama’s
first debate with McCain, on September 26th, [campaign political director
Patrick] Gaspard sent him an e-mail. “You are more clutch than Michael
Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, “Just give me the ball.”
In fairness to Obama, maybe he is a better speechwriter than his
speechwriters. After all, his speechwriter was a 27-year-old, and the most
affecting part of Obama’s big 2008 stump speech was recycled from
Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, with whom he shared a campaign
strategist. But it’s instructive that Obama thinks he knows “more about
policies on any particular issue” than his policy directors. The rate of
growth of the mohair subsidy? The replacement schedule for servers at the
NORAD command center? The relationship between annual rainfall in northeast
Nevada and water prices in Las Vegas?
What Scott Fitzgerald once said about Hollywood is true of the American
government: It can be understood only dimly and in flashes; there are no
more than a handful of men who have ever been able to keep the entire
equation in their heads. Barack Obama had worked in the federal government
for all of four years. He was not one of those men. More important, however,
is that as president he shouldn’t be the chief wonk, speechwriter, and
political director.
David Remnick delivers a number of insights about Obama in his book The
Bridge. For instance, Valerie Jarrett—think of her as the president’s
Karen Hughes—tells Remnick that Obama is often bored with the world around
him. “I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually,”
Jarrett says. “So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but
somebody with such extraordinary talents that they had to be really taxed in
order for him to be happy.” Jarrett concludes, “He’s been bored to death
his whole life.”
With one or two possible exceptions, that is. Remnick reports that “Jarrett
was quite sure that one of the few things that truly engaged him fully
before going to the White House was writing Dreams from My Father.” So the
only job Barack Obama ever had that didn’t bore him was writing about
Barack Obama. But wait, there’s more.
David Axelrod—he’s Obama’s Karl Rove—told Remnick that “Barack hated
being a senator.” Remnick went on:
Washington was a grander stage than Springfield, but the frustrations of
being a rookie in a minority party were familiar. Obama could barely
conceal his frustration with the torpid pace of the Senate. His aides could
sense his frustration and so could his colleagues. “He was so bored being a
senator,” one Senate aide said.
Obama’s friend and law firm colleague Judd Miner agreed. “The reality,”
Miner told Remnick, “was that during his first two years in the U.S. Senate
, I think, he was struggling; it wasn’t nearly as stimulating as he
expected.” But even during his long, desolate exile as a senator, Obama was
able to find a task that satisfied him. Here’s Remnick again: “The one
project that did engage Obama fully was work on The Audacity of Hope. He
procrastinated for a long time and then, facing his deadline, wrote nearly a
chapter a week.” Your tax dollars at work.
Looking at this American Narcissus, it’s easy to be hammered into a stupor
by the accumulated acts of vanity. Oh look, we think to ourselves, there’s
our new president accepting his Nobel Peace Prize. There’s the president
likening his election to the West’s victory in the Cold War. There’s the
commander in chief bragging about his March Madness picks.
Yet it’s important to remember that our presidents aren’t always this way.
When he accepted command of the Revolutionary forces, George Washington
said,
I feel great distress, from a consciousness that my abilities and
military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important Trust. .
. . I beg it may be remembered, by every
Gentleman in the room, that I, this day, declare with the utmost sincerity,
I do not think myself equal to the Command I am honored with.
Accepting the presidency, Washington was even more reticent. Being chosen to
be president, he said, “could not but overwhelm with despondence one who,
inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of
civil administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own
deficiencies.”
In his biography of John Quincy Adams, Robert Remini noted that Adams was
not an especially popular fellow. Yet on one of the rare occasions when he
was met with adoring fans, “he told crowds that gathered to see and hear
him to go home and attend to their private duties.”
And Obama? In light of the present state of his presidency, let’s look back
at his most famous oration:
The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this
challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I
also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people.
Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in
it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able
to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to
provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment
when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal;
this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored
our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment—this was the
time—when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may
always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.
The speech was given on June 3, 2008, and the epoch-making historical event
to which “this moment” refers throughout is Barack Obama’s victory over
Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. |
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