Townhall
Obama's
Mistaken Belief That Others See the World as He Sees It
Michael
Barone
Mar
07, 2014
Solipsism.
It's a fancy word that means that the self is the only existing
reality and that the external world, including other people, are
representations of one's own self and can have no independent
existence. A person who follows this philosophy may believe that
others see the world as he does and will behave as he would.
It's
a quality often found in narcissists, people who greatly admire
themselves -- such as a presidential candidate confident that he is a
better speechwriter than his speechwriters, knows more about policy
than his policy directors and is a better political director than his
political director.
If
that sounds familiar, it's a paraphrase of what President Obama told
top political aide Patrick Gaspard in 2008, according to the New
Yorker's Ryan Lizza.
More
recently, Obama's narcissism has been painfully apparent as the
United States suffers one reversal after another in world affairs.
But it has been apparent ever since he started running for president
in 2007.
Candidate
Obama campaigned not just as a critic of the policies of the opposing
party's president, as many candidates do, but he portrayed himself
repeatedly as someone who, because he "looks different"
from other presidents, would make America beloved and cherished in
the world.
Plenty
of solipsism here. Obama's status as the possible -- and then actual
-- first black president was surely an electoral asset. Most
Americans believed and believe that, given the nation's history, the
election of a black president would be a good thing, at least in the
abstract.
But
that history has less resonance beyond America's borders. Obama must
have been surprised to find, on his trip to his father's native
Africa, that he was less popular there than George W. Bush, thanks to
Bush's program to combat AIDS.
Obama
was also mistaken in thinking that his election and the departure of
the cowboy bully Bush would make the United States popular again
among the world's leaders and peoples -- though it had that effect in
the faculty lounges and university neighborhoods Obama had chosen to
inhabit.
In
the wider world, the United States, as the largest and mightiest
power, is bound to be resented and blamed for every unwelcome
development. American presidents for more than a century have been
characterized as crude and bumptious by foreign elites.
Moreover,
as Robert Gates argued persuasively in his 1996 and 2014 memoirs,
there is more continuity in American foreign policy than domestic
campaign rhetoric suggests. From Guantanamo to Afghanistan, Obama
found himself obliged more to carry on than to repudiate Bush's
policies...
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