Obama’s Mind

[Geee]

Pajamas Media:

Different presidents have different strengths. President Obama’s genius is for antagonizing everybody at once. The other day his decision that the Department of Justice should cease defending the Defense of Marriage Act outraged opponents of gay marriage. Meanwhile White House spokesman Jay Carney’s assurance that Obama still personally disapproved of gay marriage squashed any possibility that the DOMA decision might win back the once-fervent gay supporters whose feeling that he’s on their side has been eroding steadily since January 20, 2009.

Of course, Obama isn’t just your run-of-the-mill opponent of gay marriage. No, he wants to have that one both ways, too. So it is that every time he reiterates his hostility to gay marriage, he insists on adding that he’s “grappling” or “wrestling” with the issue. The Associated Press report on the DOMA decision, for example, included the information that Obama “is still wrestling with whether gay couples should have the right to marry.”

For my part, I support gay marriage and I’m glad that the Department of Justice is no longer going to devote its energies to standing up for DOMA. But what I want to focus on here is not gay marriage but that most remarkable of mysteries, the mind of Obama. Could he be a more polar opposite to his immediate predecessor? George W. Bush sought to create the illusion that he was a good ol’ boy without a brain in his head — a regular guy who looked down on book learnin’ and whose idea of intellectual exertion was clearing brush on his ranch. Obama, by contrast, wants us to think that he’s constantly engaged in moral and intellectual reflection of the most profound and subtle sort — “grappling” and “wrestling” with thoughts weighty enough to send Immanuel Kant to the rubber room.

[righteousmomma]

This evaluation of Obama's mind goes so well with the thread "Running on the Race Track" :

 

Different presidents have different strengths. President Obama’s genius is for antagonizing everybody at once.

Of course, Obama isn’t just your run-of-the-mill opponent of gay marriage. No, he wants to have that one both ways, too. So it is that every time he reiterates his hostility to gay marriage, he insists on adding that he’s “grappling” or “wrestling” with the issue. The Associated Press report on the DOMA decision, for example, included the information that Obama “is still wrestling with whether gay couples should have the right to marry.”

Could he be a more polar opposite to his immediate predecessor? George W. Bush sought to create the illusion that he was a good ol’ boy without a brain in his head — a regular guy who looked down on book learnin’ and whose idea of intellectual exertion was clearing brush on his ranch. Obama, by contrast, wants us to think that he’s constantly engaged in moral and intellectual reflection of the most profound and subtle sort — “grappling” and “wrestling” with thoughts weighty enough to send Immanuel Kant to the rubber room.

 

A president is judged by what he accomplishes for his country and the world. But Obama seems to be constituted in such a way that he cannot transcend his perception of the country and the world as, first and foremost, objects of — and an admiring audience for — his own reflection. From the time he first emerged on the national scene, the emphasis was on Obama as orator — like Reagan, his admirers enthused, he was a Great Communicator. But what a difference! Reagan held strong opinions about the great questions of the day, and he sought to convey those opinions as lucidly and powerfully as possible. The communicating wasn’t about him — he was just the vehicle. Obama’s most admired speeches, by contrast, have been, above all, attempts to impress — his goal is not to persuade us with argument but to bowl us over with his brilliance, his easy way with exalted ideas. To look back now at Obama’s much-lauded campaign oratory is to recognize that what he was offering to us wasn’t a plan or a platform or a philosophy but nothing more or less than his own putative intellectual heft. The reason why Obama has proven such a crushing disappointment is that for Obama himself, it never really went beyond the cerebration — there never was any political program worth speaking of. The thought, and the advertisement of it, were their own end. He thinks, therefore we are.

Of course, the topper here is that all of Obama’s deep thinking is ultimately bogus. It’s as if he’s posing for Rodin, elbow on knee, chin on fist — all the while staring in a mirror, pleased by what he sees. Consider for a moment this sentence about Obama’s views on gay marriage, also from the AP’s DOMA story: “He said his feelings on the issue continue to evolve but he still believes in allowing strong civil unions.” Now, what person who holds a strong and sincere opinion about anything describes that opinion as “evolving”? One’s take on this or that issue may change over time, to be sure, but only in retrospect will one view it as having “evolved”; for a person who still supposedly has a firm belief in any given proposition, it’s nothing less than perverse to say that that belief is “evolving.”

Again, this isn’t just about gay marriage: this one remark about Obama’s “evolving” views illuminates the way he thinks about the way he thinks. And what one comes away with is the clear impression that, in his view, there’s nothing odd or inappropriate about demanding that hundreds of thousands of American citizens wait patiently, hold their collective breath, and keep their lives on hold while Obama’s mind performs its exquisite work — moving, like the very mind of Caesar in his tent, in perfect and magnificent silence.

 

All these quotes would be if they were not of such tragic portent for the Country. Chauncey the gardener could well be elected again.

 

And for the record- unlike the author of the article --I am against gay marriage. Civil unions --fine and dandy. Somehow I just don't feel comfortable breaking and disobeying that expressly stated Commandment