When Obama was a candidate, we soon got bored with his constant self-comparisons to Reagan, as if Obama shared the same eloquence and would likewise would be a historic landmark president, a paradigm changer. Once elected, Obama became our new Lincoln. In December 2008, he took a Lincolnesque train ride to D.C. from Springfield, as if he, too, ever so slowly, was coming east to save the nation with his “Team of Rivals.”
After being inaugurated, he was reinvented as a Depression-era FDR. We heard for months about a new “100 days” as he pushed through Obamacare, as if this landmark president were enacting a second New Deal in early 2009. Then we had Obama as Woodrow Wilson — bored with details, perhaps, and surly and petulant in Wilson fashion, but masterful at soaring internationalist rhetoric and all sorts of progressive new utopias, a “reset” after his neanderthal predecessors.
More recently, Obama became a fiery Truman, a “Give ’em Hell, Barry” who barnstormed the country, railing against a “do-nothing” Congress that would not up by another $500 billion his unhinged $4 billion–plus new debt. Now the latest mask is TR’s: the greatest recipient of Wall Street cash in presidential campaign history becoming a historic regulator, trust-buster, and populist, harping about “trickle-down” economics.
This is all pretty pathetic. What we have here is an adolescent president in desperate search of an adult identity of his own, without which he borrows liberally from others, often oddly from Republicans or conservatives. And coming back from Lala-land to reality, today we get Obama’s anti–Wall Street speech as a backdrop to Bill Clinton’s Wall Street lobbying firm taking $50,000 a month from the bankrupt MF Global of liberal Jon Corzine — a progressive whom Joe Biden once assured us was a go-to guy when economic crises were upon us.
All stranger than fiction.
> "What we have here is an adolescent president in desperate search of an adult identity of his own"
Isn't National Review embarrassed to have this sort of inane pop psychology appear under their banner? Is the author aware that it is possible to be philosophically opposed to someone with actually despising them? This language is more adolescent than anything I've seen our President do.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI have yet to read anything Mr. Davis Hanson has written that includes real, thoughtful analysis.
This type of "psychoanalysis" is pointless drivel. Note that he drags in the Clinton consulting for no apparent reason at all other than to support the "all Democrats and liberals are bad" meme.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAdolescent Narcissist -- that's our boy Barry and we are stuck with him for 13+ more months.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhen you are elected on a mantra of "change" (a completely vapid word that has the sole virtue of allowing unlimited projection) you don't start with much, do you?
So he had nothing then and he can't find anything to be now.
Sorta fits the whole situation in a funny way.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI believe Gingrich was also comparing himself to TR (there was an NRO post about it earlier in the day).
Gingrich and Obama: Two egoists who think their perceived ingenuity gives them a black check to do whatever they please with the country (the great illusion of the technocrat). They seem more and more like two peas in a pod.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"What we have here is an adolescent president in desperate search of an adult identity of his own, without which he borrows liberally from others, often oddly from Republicans or conservatives"
Spot on.
And brilliant, Prof. Hanson.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse4 trillion in new debt, not $4 billion.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe serious question is why Obama a socialist democrat mostly compares himself to former REPUBLICAN Presidents NOT democratic ones? Is it duplicity or shame at the shabbiness of the pickings on the democrat side? Is it an unconscious bias founded in democrat racist policies for the past two hundred years that squelches his identification with prior democrat Presidents?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMr. Hanson is so right.
When a president can be characterized as reflecting a variety of prior presidents, that really just reflects a person in search of an "adult identity" of his own. It's so ridiculous -- just look at these comparisons of the president to....
...Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman... External Link
...Teddy Roosevelt... External Link
...and even Winston Churchill... External Link
The thing is, all of those links are from 2002 and are of course National Reviewers heaping praise upon the "subtle and masterful" person who, while "dismissed by the intellectual elite," nonetheless represents the stuff that "new orders are made of": George W. Bush.
Ah, yes, I so fondly remember these comparisons of Bush to Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill, and Truman -- right here in the Corner! -- provoking people like Mr. Hanson to call it all "pathetic" and a representation of Bush's search for an "adult identity." Don't you?
Hilarious.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseVonnegut: The difference is that George W. Bush didn't compare himself to Lincoln, et al.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat's hilarious is your apparent inability to distinguish writers' comparisons of one president to another from Obama's efforts to compare himself to various predecessors. It is the latter which Hanson was criticizing.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOn its own, it was not a bad speech (as these speeches go). But it belies what this president has been for the past three years, namely somebody else. In this new persona, he's the happy warrior populist taking on the robber barons. Funny how it took him so long to find these legs. If he'd talked like this when he took office, how far down the road would he be now? The truth is, these aren't convictions; they are campaign narratives, and that's ALL they are. The ultimate example of putting the finger in the air, reading the liberal media, and delivering a message tailored to fit the feedback loop. No solutions, just lots of platitudes and blame. When TR spoke in 1910, he was out of office and campaigning for a comeback. Sitting presidents, with an election a full year away, should be more substantive.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI disagree. When you look at him speaking, you see an angry person with pursed lips and hatred in his eyes, even when he has a huge grin on his mouth.
Check it out sometime without the sound. And look at every photo of this guy - his eyes are angry and cold.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe only reason he is angry is that some of us peons are bowing down before his greatness.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusebandmom: sounds like a bit of projection on your part . . . based on your past posts it's not a big leap to conclude that you have anger and hatred issues with respect to the President.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMy favorite thing about Victor Davis Hanson columns is that he always, always, always works in a reference to the president as "strange." To which I say: amen! Of course, Obumbles is well beyond strange. He's sick. Twisted. Warped. Frightening. He's a ghoul. A freak show.
His speech in Kansas was a vicious, thuggish attack on every constituent element of the American dream. It reads like it was written by Louis Farrakhan or Robert Mugabe.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMother: are you real, or a satirical persona?
"Sick, twisted, warped and frightening." If you are real, this also appears to describe you.
And enough with the tired "thug" epithet; it got warn out on NRO with its crusade against public sector unions.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMaybe he could have a "Lincolnesque" train trip back to Springfield, al la April, 1865. By the way, "$4 Billion" is the new $4 Trillion.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe American people are to blame here. It has been obvious since the man's ridiculous speech back at the Democratic Convention in 2004 that he is a smooth talker with little in the way of substantive achievement or intellectual or leadership ability. In short, a nowhere man, a blob in search of a container that would shape and define him.
The evidence piled up long before 2004: two autobiographies when he hadn't done enough to merit even one biography; a legal career of un-achievement in which he billed the fewest hours of any in his class of associates, with ACORN as his only notable client, and teaching and law review posts despite not having authored a single piece of legal scholarship, not one article, in his life; legislative un-achievement marked by voting "present" on a variety of issues and lack of mastery of any area of policy; personal friends' descriptions of him as "easily bored" combined with his absurd self-regard ("I'm LeBron," "I have a gift," etc.)
This man's life has been consumed by not just a search for his identity but also a compulsive desire to talk about that search - to spin, as he puts it, "a narrative." First as a son, then as a young man seeking his racial identity, and finally as a politician seeking to impress the world with his greatness, as if the carpenter's son can now be revealed in all his transcendent glory, Obama has always wanted to become someone rather than do something. When he writes, he writes well and insightfully only about himself. When he speaks, he doesn't persuade; he performs.
We have witnessed the arrival of the first Performance Artist president. This man is either so besotted with himself that he can't see his own fecklessness, or a complete scoundrel. My money's on the former.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHis coming out party in 2008 in Berlin should have been a tip off. Im actually surprised the speech(yesterday) wasnt at Mt Rushmore.
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