I Am the President

Obama’s decision to ignore polls, town hall demonstrations, and lost elections, and push through his massive remaking of American healthcare is yet another indication that his view of what it means to be President of the United States is very different from that of his predecessors and indeed the writers of the Constitution.

At last month’s Blair House summit of constitutional equals, there was one person present who clearly considered himself superior to the others. Twice Obama asserted an exceptionalism based on the fact that he was the president. "There was an imbalance in the opening statements, because I'm the President. And I didn't count my time in terms of dividing it evenly," he said.

Indeed.

In other words, the president doesn’t have to play by the rules.

I found Obama’s calling his constitutional peers by their first names both repugnant and revelatory of his elitist self image. I would have expected a man of his ethnic background and social experience to be more sensitive to the subtle condescension implied by referring to Mitch, Lamar, John, Nancy, and Harry instead of their honorific titles. I wondered how he would have reacted if one of his assembled peers had referred to him as Barack instead on Mr. President.

His behavior in so widely a watched public discourse between members of Congress and a president betrayed an attitude, in my opinion, that at a minimum demeaned the dignity of the men and women seated in a square (so there would be no symbolic head of the table) but it may even have bordered on the same racist mindset that compelled my parent’s generation to refer to a black man as “boy” regardless of his age.

Obama seems not to understand that the 55 men who gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to write the Constitution started (as Article I) with the Legislature, more particularly, with the House of Representatives – the people’s chamber. Only after defining the function of the House and then the Senate did they get around to drafting the role of the Executive in Article II and the Judiciary in Article III.

That is significant because most writers compose the most important issues first and move on to the less important, and Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention reveal the assembly was more concerned with the role and scope of Congress than that of the president. In other words, in those 55 pairs of eyes, the president wasn’t all that important despite the fact that everyone present knew that the presiding officer of their convention, sitting mute throughout those proceedings, would be the first president of the United States.

Washington was the only president in the history of this country to be elected unanimously by the Electoral College. While he couldn’t have known that, certainly his successors do – or should.

When it was suggested that George Washington attend his inauguration in a gold satin suit, he appeared instead in a conservative (if not common) brown wool outfit with silver buttons embossed with the American eagle.

When the first Congress struggled to find a title by which to address the new president, Washington fobbed off “Your Highness” and “Your Excellency” and chose instead “Mr. President.” (Jefferson celebrated his inauguration by having lunch at his boarding house in Washington, for which he had to wait in line. Such were these men.)

In many revolutions, its hero sets himself up in a perpetual public role. Not so with Washington, who served two terms and retired to his farm in Virginia, thereby setting a precedent that lasted for 150 years until an egoistic FDR chose to run for a third term, which killed him.

If modern presidents want to model themselves after a predecessor, there can be no better than Washington. Obama, take heed.

I recently watched Tiger Woods’ tortured televised acknowledgment that fame had caused him to lose his moral compass. "I felt I was entitled. I had worked hard. Money and fame made me believe I was entitled. I was wrong and foolish. I don't get to live by different rules. The same boundaries that apply to everyone apply to me," he said.

Tiger Woods’ real addiction was neither women nor sex. He became addicted to the narcotic of power and the sense of entitlement that deludes its victims. He believed his own baloney – the same Siren’s Song that led Bill Clinton into his dalliances with women. “Power,” Henry Kissinger said, “is the greatest aphrodisiac.”

Power seems to have ensnared Obama in its narcotic embrace. It’s a heady experience for a young black man with almost no national political experience to be swept into the highest office in the land, if not the world, against all odds. It could delude him into thinking that destiny, not a republican election, put him in the position he is in, and therefore he is beholding to no one.

Power seems to have blinded Obama to the fact that two wars and the serious economic recession confronted him on the first day that he held office and seduced him instead into creating a crisis out of the non-crisis that healthcare was.

“I am not the first president to tackle health reform but I am determined to be the last”

Power seems to have endowed Obama with a sense of superiority that he and only a few other chosen ones can grasp the arcane threat that healthcare poses to the very existence of American society.

“[Healthcare] is a complicated issue; it easily lends itself to demagoguery and political gamesmanship, and misrepresentation and misunderstanding….The American people want to know if it's still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future.”

Thus, the reason that the American people, many of whom voted for Obama, oppose his program to save their recently endangered healthcare system is that they aren’t bright enough to understand the problems and they aren’t capable of looking out for their own interests or prepare for their own futures.

Power seems to have anointed Obama with an almost messianic quality to know what is “right” for the country.

“I don?t know how {pushing healthcare reform through as a reconciliation bill] plays politically, but I know it’s right.”

Power is a Mephistophelian delusion to ignore that there are consequences to forgetting that America is a 50-50 country, if not a center-right one, and that political survival depends on listening to the voice of the people – however much the message isn’t what a president wants to hear. .

“I won.”

So much for bipartisanship.