We're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.
Barack Obama, 2010
We can teach our children the hazards of tribalism. We can teach our children to speak out against the casual slur. We can teach them there is no ‘them,’ there’s only ‘us.’”
Barack Obama, 2014
Psychological Projection: the act or technique of defending oneself against unpleasant impulses by denying their existence in oneself, while attributing them to others
One of the formidable
challenges in attempting to fathom just what kind of person the 44th
President of the United States is and what he actually believes is to reconcile
the many stunning displays of self-contraction that emanate from his ubiquitous
oratory such as the one cited above. This particular example is richly ironic
with Mr. Obama’s tenderly expressed concern for the “hazards of tribalism” for our children, coming from a man who
conducts his politics as tribal warfare (Chicago style), holds his opposition
in open contempt as benighted and corrupt, and routinely slurs them,
sometimes casually, sometimes with great calculation. Consider our “post-partisan” President in 2011 drawing
clear invidious boundaries of “us”
and “them”. In stark contrast
to his aspirations for Americans to
be healthy and employed, the Republican plan in his words was “let’s have dirtier
air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance. So far at least, I feel
better about my plan” – sarcasm in the service of moral
superiority.
Mr. Obama with his immense self-regard
seems to have a strong affinity for first person pronouns – I, me, we, us. “I have become a symbol of the possibility
of America returning to our best traditions” Obama confessed to
House Democrats back in 2008. These pronouns are not just his vehicles
of self-infatuation they are also particularly useful to him as instruments of
misdirection and obfuscation. Obama typically launches his insults, defamations
or slurs with the “I”s, to set his
starting point, the absolute, pristine clarity of his vision and purpose then
to move to enlarge the moral universe of which he is the center and to complete
the population of the community of the virtuous with his “we’s and “us’s”. Consider
his comments after the Newtown school shooting, April of 2013.
“When Newtown happened, I met
with these families and I spoke to
the community, and I said, something
must be different right now. We’re
going to have to change. That’s what the whole country said.”
“I
met… I spoke… I said…” – which evokes in pathetic
comparison another triptych from a much earlier time and from a leader of many
fewer words: “I came. I saw. I conquered.” (veni, vidi, vici). Caesar came, saw and announced that he had conquered:
Obama met, spoke and announced that he had “said
something.” In this case, that “something”
whatever it might be, must be different”, however that might
be. And lest we doubt the urgency, “right
now.” As with many of the President’s pronouncements, we know at the
end of them what we knew at the beginning, that he is a very important person
who says things, many things.
The key point, however, is the
misdirection. “We’re going to have to
change.” Who exactly is the “we”
that must change? There is no “we”.
He (Obama) doesn’t have to change nor do his camp followers. The “we” in this clumsy, egotistical verbal
bramble suddenly, however, turns into the voice of the “whole country” an absurdity given the fact presumably obvious to
the President that the whole country is and has long been bitterly divided
about guns. Obama clearly has change in mind, no mention of hope, and it is for
“them”, the rural Pennsylvanians and
the like he singled out during his 2008 campaign who did not vote for him,
those “white folks”, as he calls
them, who “get bitter [and] cling to guns
or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Here then is one of Obama’s more
memorable and condescending slurs that gives full register to the deep
grievances that fester within and occasionally slip out when he talks
unguarded to his own “folks”. Worth mentioning in this
regard is that candidate Obama’s vicious stereotype was delivered in San
Francisco in front of his glitzy Hollywood adulators and sycophants, the
genuine “we” and “us” who stand apart and far above the
back woods, fundamentalist, shotgun toting bigots who cannot rise above their
antipathy. This time when he spoke in California there was definitely an
“us” and a “them”.
Mr. Obama disapproves not only of gun
owners, except the ones that guard him and his family, but drivers of SUV’s,
and people who deviate from his norms of diet and home heating temperatures.
And so, “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much
as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect
that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not
going to happen.”
Again,
the phony “we,” along with one of his
signature non-sequiturs, the misdirection to conceal his staggering sense of
moral omniscience and his megalomaniacal drive to order everyone else’s life.
“WE can’t drive…” etc.
really means “YOU … will drive, eat and adjust your thermostat
according to my high standards and requirements in these matters.”
Behind these deceptive words one senses the channeling of Erich Honecker with
an East-German-like mentality of someone who lives in a fundamentally
bifurcated world of I-we, the enlightened who give the orders versus you-them, the unwashed and
benighted who do what you are told.
Barack Obama, however, is never more
duplicitous and deceitful than when it comes to the topic of race.
“I don’t believe it is possible to transcend race in this
country. Race is a factor in this society. The legacy of Jim Crow and slavery
has not gone away. It is not an accident that African-Americans experience high
crime rates, are poor, and have less wealth. It is a direct result of our
racial history.”
This, of course, is Obama speaking his
real mind, albeit in his typical inelegant, sophomore-ish style. No
misdirection or obfuscation in this. By itself and out of
context there is nothing remarkable about this comment. It reflects a
perspective on race relations in this country that is widely held in certain
circles, particularly on the part of the Left, the “diversity” industry and the
grievance-mongering, race-careerist friends of Obama like Al Sharpton.
But then contrast this peevish and
pessimistic plaint with the soaring rhetoric that put much of the nation in a
swoon back in 2004.
“There's not a black America and white
America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of
America.
True today; false tomorrow: welcome to
the post-modern world and the post-modern Presidency. That was then and this is
now. So much for the The One, who besides healing the planet was going to
escort America into an era that would transcend race and partisanship.
What we know now is that the President is the opposite of what the
candidate appeared to be, and that much of what he says with the constant
self-referencing is a continuation of the spectacular deception he worked in
2008. His second term ended with impotence and recrimination. We he departed, finally, showing himsel as he has always been, a vain and mean-spirited man, caught up in
his own mendacity, incapable of viewing his critics and opposition as anyone
but “enemies” whom he seeks to “punish”. The lofty side of his
rhetoric, such as the example above, with its invocation of toleration and
sympathetic sense of being able to see ourselves in others is belied by what
seems to be a deep ideological conviction premised on grievance and resentment
– “America is just a downright mean
country” as echoed by the First Lady in 2008. The grievance and resentment
that he harbors and sometimes fails to dissimulate make a vision of “us” versus “them” inevitable, and a politics of tribalism the normal order. One
then perhaps would do well to understand the President’s gestures and language
as classic “projection,” attributing
to others those shortcomings and untoward impulses that he feels within
himself.
