By Rob Janicki
Hardly a week goes by, despite what world crises are taking place, that our president, the Campaigner in Chief, is actually not off for one or more campaign fundraisers around the United States. And all this is at the expense of taxpayers, of course, despite the fact that President Obama is not running for any political office.
Many people ask why President Obama is still in campaign mode and the answer is simply twofold.
First, Obama has no other real talents to speak of. He is a people person first and foremost, but not really because he necessarily likes the people he schmoozes with to fleece them of their disposable political campaign fund money. It's just a gift he has. Unfortunately for America, that's just about the only gift he has, since he has never demonstrated any leadership or management skills as president. And why should he demonstrate any of those skills? He has White House flunkies do that for him, most of which are purely political types. These people base Obama's decisions, and they are almost always political decisions, on polling rather than on principles of governance, management and leadership. They read polls like fortune tellers read tea leaves, only they're a lot better at reading polls.
We've written ad nauseam about President Obama's narcissism so I won't go into that topic much more, other than to say that the president's fundraising is directly tied into and feeds his narcissism. Narcissists need constant positive feedback to energize their overblown image of their own self worth. What better way to get that regular positive feedback about how wonderful they are than to go out and engage in the one personal trait they possess that is far above all other personal traits they may possess.
Let's face it. President Obama is one supremely gifted bullshit artist of the highest order. He understands his audiences and what they need to hear from him and in what kind of language and dialect he must deliver his daily speeches. It's almost a symbiotic relationship he establishes early on with each and every audience that he addressed in a speech he delivers. Obama has learned well from the likes of Rev, Wright and many other Black preachers, in how to create an awe inspiring sermon like speech with the sing song cadence of a Southern Baptist preacher type speaker. I am forced to give President Obama his due on this point. He is very, very good at this type of speech delivery with its captivating cadence and syncopation.
Thus, as President Obama delivers his prototypical sermon to the masses, the masses of people he speaks to return the favor by exhibiting unabashed love and enchantment for his mere presence to speak to them. This is the second and most important reason that Obama regularly goes out on the campaign trail to fund raise. It is the most necessary feedback that the president needs and craves. All one needs to do to understand a narcissist is to know that their world revolves around them. Thus, every speech Obama has ever given is strewn with personal pronouns of I. me, mine and my. It's always about Obama and the gifts that his followers perceive him to possess. Obama delivers what his audiences want and need and in return his audiences provide him with all the adoration and attention that his narcissism wants, needs and actually demands.
What I find interesting is that in the face of hard questions of Obama taking time out to campaign, his staff of sycophants invariably throws out the narrative that Obama is always in touch with what is going on in the world. In today's instantaneous electronic communications, that is true. The real problem with this reply is that it does not address the time the president needs to accumulate, digest, analyze and formulate coherent thinking on an issue. Everyone that has ever faced a series of perplexing facts in the midst of a crisis, knows that it takes time to ruminate over all the input data in order to facilitate an understanding of the problem and to determine a series of possible outcomes based on a prioritization of those possible outcomes.
In the final analysis, President Obama relies upon his inner most circle of advisers, whose numbers can be counted on one hand. The problem is that the voters did not elect these advisers to make the decisions a president must make. Without the time to address and analyze each problem or crisis that comes along, America is actually being lead by a shadow leader or leaders and no one on the outside of the Oval Office of the President knows who is really making those decisions.