The Artificially Inflated Self-Esteem of Barack Obama

As we wind our way ever further down the agonizingly long road to the 2008 presidential elections one thing has become glaringly clear: Barack Obama has a pretty healthy ego. It goes without saying that most people who become politicians have a penchant for self-aggrandizing. It does take a certain amount of self-confidence to engage in the American political process and that process requires one to effectively market oneself. But there is a considerable difference between self-confidence and narcissism. Barack Obama has crossed that line.

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It was during his “fact-finding trip” to the Middle East and Europe that all doubt was removed with regard to whether Obama was confident or egocentric. The first red flag – and admittedly, this could have been the doing of his handlers but as they say, the buck stops... – was that even though he went to great pains to indicate that he was traveling overseas as part of a “Senatorial fact-finding mission” he traveled with campaign signs, signs that appeared in Israel as well as in Germany. The first question that entered my mind was, why would someone engaged in a governmental fact-finding mission, as part of a group of elected officials – presidential candidate or not – have the audacity to even think about campaigning overseas...to foreign nationals...who cannot vote in an American presidential election? Then as I watched him bask in the adulation of approximately 200,000 Germans in Tiergarten, gathered in proximity to the Victory Column where they had initially gathered to hear two of Germany’s most popular music groups, I couldn’t help but notice that as Obama viewed the crowd his pose had a familiarity; I had seen the ego, the arrogance, the elitism before. Then it occurred to me that the manner in which he perused the crowd was not unlike the jaw-jutted arrogance possessed by the fascist Benito Mussolini at the height of his power. It was like a split screen in my mind: on the one screen was Mussolini, lording over his captive followers who screamed “Il Duce” and on the other was Barack Obama inspecting his foreign-national sycophants who chanted “Obama” and “Change.” More...