I often talk about Donald Trump’s enormous ego – and expect I will be doing so throughout his presidency.
But he ain’t the only one.
Please read the following excerpts from John Merline’s telling article at Investors Business Daily, and see what I mean:
At one point in President Obama’s interview with ABC News that aired over the weekend, George Stephanopoulos noted that “the Democratic Party got pretty hollowed out on your watch, about 1,000 seats lost in the Congress, Senate, governors, state houses.” Then he asked: “Is that on you?”
So what was Obama’s response?
At first, he tried — and we’re not making this up — to blame President Bush.
“I came in the middle of worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,” he said. And since “in 2010 there were a lot of folks who were still out of work,” whoever was president was “gonna get hit.”
But even Obama couldn’t bring himself to blame the Great Recession for the Democrats’ losses at every level of government since 2010.
Instead, Obama said — and again, we are not making this up — that he was just too darn busy being president to help his fellow Democrats.
“My docket was really full here,” Obama said, “so I can’t be both chief organizer of the Democratic Party and function as commander in chief and president of the United States.”
Stephanopoulos was either too polite or too partisan to not laugh out loud at this statement.
This is a president, after all, who despite a supposedly full docket managed to squeeze in more than 300 rounds of golf, take 217 days of vacation, and attend more than 450 fundraisers, which was more than twice as many fundraisers as Ronald Reagan attended during his two terms in office. Obama’s light schedule prompted critics to refer to him as our semiretired president.
There is more in Mr. Merline’s article. Much, much more. But you get the idea.
Simply put, Barack Obama seems incapable of blaming himself for any failure of his administration – and this is an administration where failure abounds.
In fact, the only expression of failure I can remember him making offhand, is that “I was not able to make my case to the people” – i.e. even my greatness could not penetrate the thick skulls of these lesser beings.
So when we talk about Donald Trump’s big-as-the-sky ego, his dramatically positive self-image…let’s remember that he is not breaking any new ground. All he’s doing is occupying the same territory as the man he is succeeding…
…the one media had so much difficulty characterizing this way (but have no problem at all doing so for Trump).
