Daniel Greenfield: The Obama Who Would Be King

Prom King of the World?

"Obama’s Copenhagen trip made at a cost of at least a million taxpayer dollars not only failed to achieve anything, but embarrassingly emphasized his inability to draw the line between the duties of his office and his sense of political omnipotence. Throughout his campaign and term in office, Obama has acted as if an application of his charisma can solve any problem. And he has yet to grasp not only that it can’t, but that his job is in the White House, rather than the endless global Miss America competition he has chosen to embark on.

"Obama made Chicago’s Olympic bid his first priority, only squeezing in a half-hour session with General McChrystal who is in charge of the Afghan front that he had promised to commit all his efforts to on the campaign trail, after McChrystal embarrassed him by revealing that he had only talked once with Obama. Would anyone care to make a guess how many times Obama had spoken to those in charge of Chicago’s Olympic bid? Somehow I suspect it’s more than once. Or twice.

"Is he the leader of Chicago, the United States or the Free World? Obama himself can’t seem to decide that because he doesn’t think in terms of national duties or obligations, only of himself. His speeches filled with the constant egotistical refrain of 'I’s' and 'Me’s' are the product of a man who does not see himself in terms of his country, but sees his country in terms of himself.

"Obama cannot draw the line between his legitimate duties and random publicity, just as neither of the Obamas seem to have any concept of the dignity of their office. To them there is no dignity, only privilege and entitlement. They recognize that they have power, but they recognize no limitations on that power and treat it as an extension of their egos. The royal couple have a boundless appetite for flattery and none at all for self-discipline. The concept of 'Doing Your Duty' is wholly foreign to people who never worked legitimately for anything, who got plum positions thanks to a combination of political connections, racial huckstering and personal charm.

"Any position that they hold in their minds is an extension of themselves. That is why Obama does not see himself in terms of the Presidency or wonder whether he is up to the job. He sees the Presidency and all the privileges that come with it as part of his aura. Any problem he comes across, he treats as something that can be resolved with enough exposure to that aura. And when that doesn’t work, the Obama toolbox turns up shockingly empty.

"The media which has been well trained to feed the boundless egos of celebrities have found their perfect political match in Obama. They lavished their love on him. They depicted him with halos over his head. They lost any concept of the boundary between bias and worship, in the process coming to resemble the slavish doggy adoration of a state controlled press corps. And now some of them are slowly waking up to the realization that simply because you can manufacture image does not mean that you can manufacture reality. Like Obama the media had lost track of the limits of their power, the boundaries at which their control end and real life begins.

"The media, particularly on the television end of things, shares with Hollywood a boundless faith in the ability to create and recreate images, to make of reality what they will. To control the vertical and the horizontal, to change the focus and deluge your mind with a thousand images. And the audience, in the words of the famous Outer Limits opening theme was expected to, sit quietly and let the broadcasters control all that you see and hear. But that power fantasy, like all of the power fantasies that come out of Hollywood’s studios of fiction and New York’s studios of fact, was incomplete. Controlling image does not control reality. The media helped shape Obama’s image, but can do very little to improve his reality."