A Damp Hand in a Velvet Glove

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Asked to name his worst failing, Barack Obama surprised the adoring Barbara Walter with a one-word answer — “Laziness.” “You lazy?” she gasped. “You know, it’s interesting,” the president mused. “There’s a deep-down — underneath all the work I do — I think there’s laziness in me. It’s probably from, you know, growing up in Hawaii and it’s sunny outside, and sitting on a beach.”

Notwithstanding the confidence he let slip to one of his admirers, in owning up to a deep-down laziness, Obama has always had a considerable talent for getting his own way — without having to try very hard … through the simple mechanism (known to every spoiled child) of making outrageous demands and in acting in the most sullen and petulant way.

In his last year or two of high school — at Punahou, the fanciest private school in Hawaii — what the young Obama seems to have wanted more than anything else (going by the account that he gives in his memoir Dreams from My Father) was to engage in a booze-filled, drug-addled journey of self-discovery without having to submit any adult supervision. With his mother having departed for Indonesia, he lived with his grandparents, and he had, he said, “an unspoken pact” with “Gramps” and “Toot”: “I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I kept my troubles out of sight.”