Posted on 10/19/2011 3:59:05 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A few months ago, I had dinner with a journalist who knows President Obama somewhat well and admires him in several respects. He told me something that didn’t particularly surprise me – but which was useful to have confirmed. This person’ said Obama is enormously thin-skinned, he remembers and keeps track of negative things said and written about him, and he is a person filled with many more grievances and resentments than one might imagine. He feels sorry for himself – and he is inclined to lash out, in his own emotionally contained way, at even slight criticisms.
I was reminded of that conversation in hearing this exchange between Ed Henry of Fox News and the president.
Henry asked Obama a question related to Iran and, in the course of it, quoted a critical comment about Obama made by Mitt Romney. To which the president responded, with a faux smile, “I didn’t know you were the spokesperson for Mitt Romney.”
For a reporter to ask a president a question that includes a quote from a person from the opposite party is about as common as the sun rising in the east. So what explains the president’s snarky response?
The answer, I think, goes back to what my dinner companions said: Obama is exceedingly thin-skinned. Beyond that, he expects to be coddled by, if not worshiped by, the press. And of course Obama carries a particular resentment for Fox News, which doesn’t treat him as the world-historical, Lincoln-like figure Obama sees himself as.
In their book The Battle for America 2008, Haynes Johnson and Dan Balz wrote this:
[Chief political aide David] Axelrod also warned that Obama’s confessions of youthful drug use, described in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, would be used against him. “This is more than an unpleasant inconvenience,” he wrote. “It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. You don’t relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty. When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched,” he said of Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate opponent.
Obama has flinched ever since – and he’s flinching now more than ever.
I have commented several times before that as Obama’s presidency collapses, he will have a terrible time processing it. He is becoming increasingly petulant and exasperated, blaming others for his own failures, and even seeing conspiracies (Ed Henry is carrying water for Mitt Romney) where none exist.
It’s a sad thing to watch Barack Obama morph into Richard Nixon.
Spot on. They agree will the goals, but realize Obama is the wrong figurehead. They’ll stick with him, at a distance, unless Hillary jumps in.
It may be that the most dangerous 75 days in this countries history will be from next Nov. 6th until January 20, 2013.
How right you are.
He must REALLY hate Rush!
ML/NJ
Then McCain stopped it all and endorsed Obama, told us we might as well vote for him since we have nothing to fear from him. But that's another story.
One word:
FUBO
By January, it will be shirtsleeve weather for us northern
Illinoisans.
According to ancient legend, Doomsday is December 21 2012...interesting ain't it!?
Only after being confronted by the Republican leadership, who informed him that they were not going down with the ship he captained.
And that is one of the more curious aspects about the current state of the Democrats (which is dire beyond belief, for a political party).
I made a prediction well over a year ago, that the old guard in the Dim party would, at some point, make it clear to Obama that he was taking the party over a cliff, and that they would not allow him to do that. I fully expected them to give him 'an offer he couldn't refuse', but it appears that the old guard is either too cowed by the Obama cabal, or too clueless, to do that.
I can't believe that they've let this situation fester this long into the 2012 campaign season without moving him out of the way for a new challenger. Perhaps they're resigned to their fate, and are ready to face their long wandering in the political wilderness.
The Democrats are now trapped by that which they used to their advantage in the past: Race.
That thought had crossed my mind...........
I'm almost embarrassed that that thought didn't occur to me right away, but being color-blind is something we conservatives do tend to suffer from.
Excellent observation.
I wish Obama would visit FR and see what real Americans have to say about him. He’s probably too drug-addled to understand our words, just as even before the self-inflicted damage, that communist was not bright enough to understand either the Constitution or the reasons why freedom is better than slavery. He is pathetic, and I hope honest historians will write him out of the history books to the extent of not pretending that he was a real president. We need to remember that enough voters were stupid enough to vote for him that fraud was able to give him the election, but that doesn’t mean that an ineligible bigot is worthy of the title that was usurped.
pretty much describes every liberal I know
His two career opportunities will be as a MSNBC personality (reporting from the Havana studio) or run for president of Kenya.
Not being a US citizen and a USA hater....
0bambi will fit right in as President of the UN.
Any honest historians will write him into the history books as the utterly corrupt, inept and dishonest Marxist usurper he is, and the how and why of his illegal occupation of our country’s highest office, and the damage that he and his evil cohorts were able to inflict upon the Republic will be taught in our de-programmed educational institutions as a cautionary tale to generations to come. This of course presumes that we’ll still have a Republic by the time this villain and his cabal of communist enablers are thrown out of office.
We still have a chance, albeit a slim one, to undo the damage wrought by these scumbags, thanks to the TEA Party folks’ denying the plotters’ continued supermajority status via the 2010 election results, but it’s going to be a close thing. The 2012 election may literally be our last chance to avoid America’s being permanently downgraded to the point where we’ve become the USSA (United Socialist States of America).
Here’s hoping that the American electorate continue to better educate themselves and wake up to the danger posed by the poseur and his minions.
...”It’s a sad thing to watch Barack Obama morph into Richard Nixon.”
First, it’s not sad watching Barack Obama disintegrate. It’s enjoyable. Second, Barack Obama as a statesman could not carry Nixon’s jockstrap. Obama is puny - Nixon, at one time, was a giant.
I like that as well..at least start challenging his dumb assertions about economics..
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