Trouble In Obamessiah Land

Despite the MSM's very best efforts, the Obamessiah's halo is rapidly dimming as he plummets in the polls.  There are a number of reasons for this.

First, his ego.  For anyone to seek the highest office in America and the most powerful position in the world, he or she has to have a healthy dose of ego.  It goes with the territory to say that you think you're a cut above the rest.  Frankly, I would hope my President is a cut above the rest.  That being said, Obama's ego is gargantuan -- even for a would-be President -- and that means he's got a mammoth-sized blind spot.  James Lewis says:

It's Obama's need to be seen as Jesus Christ Superstar. They have to "remake the world," "stop the rise of the oceans," "we are the change we've been waiting for."  The Obamas keep getting drawn into that blind spot, even when it's not smart politically. Arrogance is their Achilles' heel.

A Nuremberg-style mass rally in Germany is not exactly the natural stage for an American presidential candidate to strut his stuff.     It's exactly the opposite of the usual politician's schtick in America. "I'm just a little ole country boy" assures the voters that you don't have the swelled head. Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Jimmy Carter, even an egomaniac like LBJ knew that much. But the Obamas don't seem to care.  The temptation of Ego Tripping overwhelms their common sense.

Consider his background:

Amazingly, both Barack and Michelle seem to suffer from real feelings of inferiority. Michelle is a Princess of Privilege -- Princeton University, Harvard Law School and her 300K job today.  And yet, she tells us that she spent years feeling bad about being black in America, as she told the world in her undergraduate thesis, at the very time when blacks are moving ahead faster than ever before in human history. 

That is more than a little bit bizarre. It's completely out of touch with her own external reality. Ninety-nine percent of the American people would be thrilled to have Michelle's opportunities in life.

Obama's two (count 'em, two!) autobiographies are all about his sense of inferiority. "Dreams of My Father" really has to do with the ego crunch of being abandoned by one's idealized father; it's a tough thing for any kid. Obama's mother was also an intermittent presence, and abandonment is the overwhelming theme of his early life.  "What's wrong with me that my parents aren't here?"  That's what abandoned kids end up asking themselves.

Only Barack's grandparents and a series of father figures made up for that yawning gap, and that was never enough. So Obama discovered his (made-up) racial identity as a solution -- he would Save His People to fill that hole in his soul.

Obama is a mixed-race man who has no American slavery in his family past; growing up in Hawaii he never encountered Jim Crow segregation. But Obama chose the identity of American black victimhood in spite of his very favored life.  

So why the ego?

Obama's messianic persona, his need to Save His People, was his way of filling that childhood hole in his soul.

Barack's run for President is his big chance to make up for those haunting feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness. So for the Obama campaign, grandiose ego display is the answer to persistent feelings of being small and insignificant.

So, he's gone overboard.  In recent campaign speeches, he has pledged to heal the sick, give jobs to the jobless, lower the oceans, and more.  It's ridiculous.  If his ego is the compensation for his self-confidence, he must have absolutely no confidence at all!  The problem is, Americans generally don't like people who are egotistical.

Another way to say it is hubris.  For example:

He has a seat on his campaign aircraft marked "president". He has taken a shot at creating his own presidential seal, complete with Latin motto. He has laid claim to personal control over the world's oceans and seas. He has repeatedly attempted to dictate how and on what level he, his ideas, and his activities may be discussed. He has encouraged a portrayal of himself as a messianic figure, including a portrait of himself as Christ, complete with halo. He is even now completing a triumphant grand tour of the old world, during which he attempted to shanghai an ancient monument for personal use without consulting the host government.

A word of Attic Greek origin, hubris was a major concept animating classical Greek thought. Hubris is overweening pride, an arrogance so profound and so visible as to affront the gods themselves. Hubris was a quality often identified with Greek tragic heroes. The hero allowed simple human pride in his accomplishments and station to burgeon to offensive proportions, at which point the wheels of fate began rolling. The ending was never good...

But Obama has no great and glorious accomplishment to speak of.  He edged out Hillary in an ugly primary, but that's about it (unless you want to count being the #1 most liberal Senator around).  Even so, his overblown arrogance gives him the hubris of those tragic heroes who actually accomplished something.  The problem, then, is what always happens to those tragic heroes - they go down in flames, spectacularly so.  And here's the rub:

What we can be sure of is that Obama will not avoid the final reckoning. The last, and strangest, characteristic of the victim of hubris is that he appears to welcome his fate, almost embracing it, cooperating in his own downfall. So it will be with Barack Obama. But he must not be allowed to take the country with him.

Aside from his misguided conception of himself, Obama also has a casual relationship with truth.  Aside from the multitude of previous truth 'incidents', his latest speech in Berlin was another great example.  Thomas Lifson's analysis:

Twice in the course of generating the almost poetic images which mark his rhetoric, Senator Obama spoke to the assembled throng and the world's media about matters at variance with reality. This was a prepared speech, read from a teleprompter. The candidate and his staff knew the speech was going to be important, attracting the biggest crowd of his career. Moreover, the candidate boasts that he has 300 foreign policy advisors, who should be capable of fact checking the candidate's most visible oration yet.

Obama, speaking to Berliners, used the familiar cloudy and cold Berlin winter weather to evoke a response of sympathy and unity with America (at least America of the Berlin Airlift era) when he said,

"The odds were stacked against success. In the winter, a heavy fog filled the sky above, and many planes were forced to turn back without dropping off the needed supplies. The streets where we stand were filled with hungry families who had no comfort from the cold."

There's nothing like shared sacrifice in the past to generate warm feelings. Even young Berliners who weren't born then experience Berlin's dreary winters. Very artful speechwriting.

But Obama didn't know what he was talking about when it comes to the actual military operation of the Berlin Airlift. He was dead wrong about "many planes ... forced to trun back," as historian D.M. Giangreco pointed out yesterday in American Thinker.

Obama should have read my book before making his claim about the Berlin Airlift.   Barely a handful of the nearly 28,000 flights "turned back" in the face in the cruel winter of 1948-1949. 

Obama obviously has limited knowledge of the Airlift, and automatically assumes that the USAF would send up aircraft in prohibitively dangerous weather (it didn't) and that, once up, large numbers of pilots aborted their missions. 

A candidate for commander-in-chief hereby parades his deep misunderstanding about the way the United States Air Force regards human life. Is this how he would treat Airmen and Airwomen when he is in command? This should raise alarm bells among those who value the lives of our military men and women.

I find it unnerving that Obama is so out of touch with the realities of military operations and history. But even more unsettling is the habit of mind revealed here: the assumption that he knows everything already, so there is no need to sweat the details. He apparently is ignorant of the existence of what Donald Rumsfeld called the "unknown unknowns."

The second fictional imagery employed by Obama is even more troubling. Neither the man nor his 300 advisors apparently have bothered to learn about the facts on the ground in Northern Ireland.

"Not only have walls come down in Berlin, but they have come down in Belfast, where Protestant and Catholic found a way to live together;"

David Singh today pointed out for our readers that as recently as May 3, USA Today, a widely-read news source not known as a purveyor of esoteric knowledge, published an article revealing:

"Ten years after peace was declared in Northern Ireland, one might have expected that Belfast's barriers would be torn down by now. But reality, as usual, is far messier. Not one has been dismantled. Instead they've grown in both size and number."

A president of the United States needs to know the basic facts. This is far worse than Gerald Ford's reference to Poland as a free country during the Iron Curtain days. Obama and his advisors share a mentality that assumes an omnipotence unjustified by his abilities.

Senator Obama is on his way to becoming a laughingstock. If he were a Republican, he would be ridiculed mercilessly for these verbal bungles in the world spotlight.

Lifson is exactly right!  Obama and his staff seem to think that facts don't matter, and that they're immune to the effects of misrepresenting the facts (which is a little thing called lying).  The American people are beginning to understand this about him, and it's killing him.  So is the fact that he blew off a visit to wounded soldiers after this speech in favor of a workout at the hotel, as is the fact that he took the international stage to apologize for his own country while calling himself a citizen of the world.  He has also added supreme presumption to his list of character attributes, acting like the President before he's even officially become his party's nominee (a fact which McCain rightly called out).

Americans don't like hearing any of this sort of thing from their leaders.

The entire point of this trip through the Middle East and Europe was to prop Obama up as a leader of the people and a Presidential man with foreign policy cred and military gravitas.  If anything, it has had the opposite effect.  The latest USA Today/Gallup poll shows that McCain is now leading Obama by four points, a 10-point swing in the past month.  Several other major polls still show the two candidates in a dead heat, and the days of vast double-digit Obama leads are gone.  This has to be devastating to the Obama campaign (and the MSM), despite how they're spinning it (they now say they never intended to get a bounce out of the trip).

The fact is that Obama simply has not held up well under the scrutiny of high-profile presidential coverage, even with the overwhelming favorability of that coverage.  His associations with unrepentant terrorists and racist hatemongers, his backroom real estate deals with convicted felons, his constant flip-flopping (or going 'both ways') on every important issue, his radical Left fringe socialist views on abortion and the economy, his verbal gaffes when speaking off the cuff, and his obvious disdain for the military and the American people are catching up to him.  His chickens, as...someone...once said, are coming home to roost.

The halo is dimming, indeed.  Is Hillary waiting in the wings?  The nomination isn't official yet...

There's my two cents.