The Psychology of Barack Obama

The National Interest ^ | October 16, 2013 | Robert W. Merry

[Conservative Beacon]

In 1972, Duke University professor James David Barber brought out a book that immediately was heralded as a seminal study of presidential character. Titled The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House, the book looked at qualities of temperament and personality in assessing how the country’s chief executives approached the presidency—and how that in turn contributed to their success or failure in the office.

Although there were flaws in Barber’s approach, particularly in his efforts to typecast the personalities of various presidents, it does indeed lay before us an interesting and worthy matrix for assessing how various presidents approach the job and the ultimate quality of their leadership. So let’s apply the Barber matrix to the presidential incumbent, Barack Obama.

Barber, who died in 2004, assessed presidents based on two indices: first, whether they were "positive" or "negative"; and, second, whether they were "active" or "passive." The first index—the positive/negative one—assesses how presidents regarded themselves in relation to the challenges of the office; so, for example, did they embrace the job with a joyful optimism or regard it as a necessary martyrdom they must sustain in order to prove their own self-worth? The second index—active vs. passive—measures their degree of wanting to accomplish big things or retreat into a reactive governing mode.

These two indices produce four categories of presidents, to wit:

Active-Positive: These are presidents with big national ambitions who are self-confident, flexible, optimistic, joyful in the exercise of power, possessing a certain philosophical detachment toward what they regard as a great game.

Active-Negative: These are compulsive people with low self-esteem, seekers of power as a means of self-actualization, given to rigidity and pessimism, driven, sometimes overly aggressive. But they harbor big dreams for bringing about accomplishments of large historical dimension.

[AnAmericanMother]

This is like the four-way analysis often attributed to Rommel (though never satisfactorily documented):

There are four types of man, either active or lazy, and either smart or stupid.

The lazy stupid man is harmless; you may ignore him.

The active stupid man is very dangerous; get rid of him (alternatively: send him to the Eastern Front!)

The active smart man I make a colonel of brigade.

But the active lazy man I put on my general staff!

[nascarnation]

What happens to the lazy smart man in your analysis?

[COBOL2Java]

The Psychology Psychosis of Barack Obama

Better title

[TADSLOS]

What happens to the lazy smart man in your analysis?

He chases WH interns.

[Conservative Beacon]

Can’t disagree that!

[Conservative Beacon]

Winner!

/thread

[Slyfox]

Remember that list a few years back where the majority of people believed Bill Clinton was close to Hitler and Stalin in being the worst leaders EVER?

That was a much more reliable study.

[TADSLOS]

Probably the best psychoanalysis I have seen to date was on FNC a few days ago.

Obama Psychosis

[BradyLS]

Yeah, the way I heard the joke, the lazy smart man gets the gig.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

My new book title: “Obama: Megalomaniac, Marxist, Narcistic, Messiah Complex, Circus Carney and That’s Just for a Start”

[Conservative Beacon]

One addition: petulant man-child.

[AnAmericanMother]

My mistake - it's the smart lazy man who gets on the general staff!

My husband refers to himself as "Rommel's smart lazy man."

The funny thing is that he's absolutely right. One of the reasons I married him.

[robowombat]

This is a very old topology around the German army long before Rommel although he may well have quoted it. Some attribute it to the elder Moltke, although he would be too diplomatic to ever say it outside of a tight circle of friends. The phrase ‘the actively stupid’ really strikes a nerve in the US Army with its emphasis on templates and endless and purposeless busy work and its stiflingly stupid bureaucracy. Each time i told this story at least one field grade officer displayed either aggravation or real anger. ‘Takes one to know one’. I thought but didn't say.

[AnAmericanMother]

That's why I said the quote's never been run down. It might have been said by Moltke Sr. among very intimate friends, but not for attribution as they say.

It's certainly a truism. My family have always been the citizen-soldiers who show up for the wars and gaze in mingled wonder and disgust on the by-the-book peacetime career men. Spike Milligan probably described them best in his sketch of a colonel he called "Leather Suitcase" who "went out in the first Montgomery Purge".

[nascarnation]

I’ve been reading a lot of WW2 books.
I never realized that Patton and Montgomery both greatly admired Rommel and hated each other with a passion.

[blueunicorn6]

It was “Industrious/Lazy” and “Competent/Incompetent”.

Lazy and Incompetent......They are cannon fodder.
Industrious and Competent.......Staff Officers
Lazy and Competent......Commanders (they’ll find the easy way)
Industrious and Incompetent....Have them shot.

[AnAmericanMother]

There wasn’t room in an aircraft hangar for both Patton’s and Montgomery’s egos together . . . :-)

[robowombat]

The ‘by-the book’ fellows never bothered me. You knew where they came from and what they expected. Unimaginative pluggers with some OCD tendencies to be sure but not that hard to work with. The careerist milicrats who i call ‘pseudo-soldiers’ were the ones I truly loathed. Angle playing wiseguys who practiced (as one colonel stated) ‘tell those below you what you want them to believe and those above you what they want to hear’ then you will go far. Being a commissioned officer is, or should be, almost a sacred calling unlike anything other than the priesthood because in both one deals with existential issues for the real meaning of an army or navy is not all the rock painting regulations and game playing manipulations but the gist of life and death itself and very possibly the life and death of one’s nation and people. Most American military men have only a very limited grasp of that. Oddly two female officer I knew understood this idea perfectly. One, the mother of twin boys, simply told me ‘Any woman who has carried and birthed a child knows instinctively what existential issues are. After the childbirth bed the battlefield can offer few terrors.’

[AnAmericanMother]

It would have been in German in any event . . .