Is The One Off His Rocker?

This is a thought-provoking opinion piece by Howard Portnoy at Hot Air's Greenroom:

"The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office." Such was  the theory Barack Obama advanced for the outcome of the Special Senate Election upset in Massachusetts last week that effectively drove the final nail into the coffin of his health care reform agenda. The occasion for his statement was a television appearance — by informal count his 5 millionth since taking office. His interlocutor was ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

What can one deduce from this anecdote? One explanation, advanced in an article in today's Washington Times, is that his grip on reality is beginning to slip.

The evidence for that position is beginning to build. As the article also notes, he believes he hasn't "reached out enough to the American people." Is that to suggest he thinks he needs to make more speeches?

If so, he's further gone that anybody realizes. By mid-July of last year, halfway through his first year in office, he had already given 200 speeches. The number has risen astronomically since then. He has given 28 speeches on health care alone.

Obama has long been in denial about the relative merits of his "stimulus" package. Never mind that he has relied on invented statistics about jobs "saved and created." He can't even get his handlers on the same page as to the number of jobs supposedly save or created. This past weekend, adviser Valerie Jarrett claimed the administration had "saved thousands and thousands of jobs." On another network, at almost the same instant, David Axelrod was putting this mythical number at a million.

One of his latest stated agendas — to step up his fight to push health care reform through in spite of growing opposition from the American people — is among the hardest of all to fathom. In a TV interview(!) with Diane Sawyer of ABC, Obama allowed as how he's that he'd "rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." This was Obama's way of saying that if he pushed his signature campaign agenda through against the will of the people, it might cost his re-election but that in the long run they would admire him for bestowing this great gift on them.

At the rate at which he is drifting away from reality, a more likely scenario is that he will be remembered as the first president in history to be delivered from the Oval Office in a strait jacket.

Yeah, on the face of it, this suggestion is pretty ludicrous.  I suspect that all of these lapses have a whole lot more to do with the fact that Obama has bought into the myth of his own greatness far more than actually being crazy.  Then again, for anyone to have actually fooled himself that way...well, maybe Portnoy's argument is better than I first thought.

There's my two cents.