« Obama peeved with American press for not saying 'thank you' after press conference | Hundreds of riders escort 'Flag Boy' whose school told him to remove Old Glory from his bike »
November 16, 2010

Obama feeling sorry for self

By Thomas Lifson

Poor President Obama is upset at the American White House Press Corps, a group whose adulation was responsible for him being elected to the nation's highest office with the thinnest of resumes, picturing him with halos, forbidding serious inquiry into his radical past, and pretending that the ability to read a teleprompter constituted eloquence. From Lachlan Markay of Newsbusters:

President Barack Obama is peeved with the American press. They never say "thank you," he whined to journalists in Japan on Monday.

According to the pool report from the press conference, one reporter said "Thank you, Mr. President." Someone said the reporter was Australian.

"I knew it must have been an Australian because my folks never say thank you," Obama said.

At that, the entire American pool said in unison -- admittedly with a bit of sarcasm -- "Thank you, Mr. President."


Now that he has actual executive responsibilities for the first time in his life and is discovering that talking is a lot easier than doing, the press can no longer avert their eyes from his failures, and is withdrawing  their previous adulatory posture.

By now it is well known that President Obama has the thinnest of skins when it comes to criticism. But petulance over insufficient adulation takes narcissism to an entirely different level. This is a man wholly unprepared for serious responsibility. He may be able to accept that conservatives fail to admire him, but his incompetence and irresolution are now alienating his constituencies on the left and in the media. While he is good at projecting a calm veneer as Mr. Cool, I strongly suspect that inner turmoil is becoming increasingly difficult for him to manage.

I predict that more and more often we will see little clues to his inner upset slipping out. The man with his finger on the nuclear trigger ought to be a model of calm and stability. Instead, we have a narcissist with a fragile ego and heavy dose of compensatory bravado.

Illustrations by R. Martin and Richard Terrell