http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2013/10/18/barack-obama-angry-young-man/Barack Obama, Angry Young Man
by KEITH KOFFLER on OCTOBER 18, 2013, 11:52 AM
People reveal themselves. Anyone who speaks to others long enough eventually exposes aspects of their nature they don’t want on display.
You’ve probably, if you’ve read this blog regularly, found out something about me that you don’t really like. Perhaps something even I don’t like about myself.
Politicians reveal themselves too.
President Obama, beneath his controlled surface, has within him a profound reservoir of anger. It comes out in all kinds of ways, often in the contempt in which he holds others. I don’t know, perhaps I’d be angry too if I grew up in his circumstances. But angry he is.
Wednesday, during remarks in which he attested his eagerness to work with others, Obama inadvertently demonstrated why it never really happens. It’s because it’s really hard to work with people you detest.
And now that the government is reopened, and this threat to our economy is removed, all of us need to stop focusing on the lobbyists and the bloggers and the talking heads on radio and the professional activists who profit from conflict, and focus on what the majority of Americans sent us here to do, and that’s grow this economy . .
First of all, DON’T LISTEN TO HIM!! Please do focus on the bloggers . . .
But, without making this personal, imagine the mindset of a person who thinks that vast groups of people would intentionally, and for venal reasons, stoke conflict that shuts down the government and risks default on federal obligations.
The lawmakers who pushed this battle with Obama, and those who agreed with them, have a strong, principled disagreement with what he is doing and decided the usual way of doing business wasn’t working. It wasn’t working, in part, because Obama is impossible to work with.
Photo by Keith Koffler
Photo by Keith Koffler
The president is a highly committed left wing ideologue who is on a mission, as he has acknowledged, to transform American society. With the passage of Obamacare, steamrolled through Congress without a single Republican vote, he’s on his way.
This is not a president who wants to ”focus on the things we agree on, and get some stuff done,” as he said Wednesday. Unlike Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, he has never successfully reached across the aisle in a cooperative manner to pass significant legislation. Clinton, as a matter of fact, worked with Republicans to pass major trade legislation – normalized trade relations with China – even after they impeached him.
But for this president, things are much more personal. The world is divided between the have nots, and the haves who are unjustly hoarding the wealth. He has taken his anger and directed it toward those who oppose him, construing them as either oppressors or mercenary cynics.
All this talk about “freedom” by conservatives is nothing but a cover for unfettered rapaciousness, Obama believes. Just like the notion of “states’ rights” was indeed abused as a cover for institutionalized racism.
Whatever the roots of Obama’s anger, he has failed to grow beyond them. There is a dose of arrested development going on here, a lack of maturity that allows true understanding and appreciation of others and the transcension of the scars that mark us.
To truly cooperate with conservatives, to truly seek compromise, Obama would be forced to abandon the anger that animates his worldview – to at least, as many presidents do, “grow in office.” And as we saw just yesterday, that’s not going to happen.
