A Good Start in Understanding Obama’s Motivations

Ken Fuchsman’s interesting take on Obama’s presidency raises a good many questions, which is what a good symposium article is meant to accomplish. I agree that one dimension—perhaps the central theme—of Obama’s character (and perhaps his presidency) is the paradox of his being able to, as Fuchsman puts it, “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and to win when it looks like he might lose.” The origins of these tendencies need to be identified by focusing on the formative psychological influences on his personality, which the last part of the essay attempts to do and accomplishes—given editorial limitations of space—only in part. Obama’s particular “talent” may have a good and bad side to it, but it does seem a central characteristic of his presidency and personality. The question is: What is behind the compulsion to reenact this inefficient, paradoxical, and sometimes counterproductive way of operating in the world?

The early part of the essay focuses on economic matters, particularly the Great Recession of 2008. Here was a monumental crisis brought on by both the Clinton and Bush administrations’ ignoring the warnings from Brooskley Born (see PBS’s Frontline The Warning, 2009), by the irrational group fantasy of America’s economic leaders—namely Greenspan, Rubin, Summers, prominent economists, and complicit members of Congress—who perpetuated the rational-markets myth, the criminally negligent abandonment of governmental regulatory oversight of Bush’s presidency (all of which saddled Obama with a disastrous inheritance), and others. This all needs mentioning and detailed psychological analysis, though perhaps not in this symposium assessment of Obama’s presidency to date.

Economics is not a force in itself but is driven by denied irrational and unconscious motives and impulses. Thus what also needs mentioning, or at least wondering about, is why the nation went along with the group fantasy of market rationality when, rationally speaking, such thinking as that promoted by the nation’s

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economic opinion-makers would eventually result in predictable financial disaster. Was it mere greed as the Dow went up and up? Or was it driven by the repetitive manic-depressive cycle that the U.S. and perhaps the world economy seem to regularly need, a modern potlatch designed to purge us of our “sins” of pleasure and prosperity as suggested by Lloyd deMause some 35 years ago, or is it a pattern driven by the periodic need for us to seek a fantasy “Heroic Savior,” or both?

No doubt the economic crisis helped Obama get elected. There is of course more to it than that. One central role of the American media’s portrayal of Obama in 2007-2008 was as the nation’s Savior, which I wrote about in Clio’s Psyche’s March 2009 issue. In times of crisis, groups both large and small typically look toward a charismatic leader from outside to arrive from nowhere to “save” the group. In 2008, Obama was the “One.”

Typically (and predictably) this can only last until the leader demonstrates the impossibility of resolving everyone’s problems and his halo begins to fade—the typical decline of presidential popularity as chartered by poll takers and pundits. One question that needs answering is: Why was Obama willing to take on this group-fantasy role in the first place?

Additionally, the group called the U.S. made sure the process would accelerate by placing in Obama’s path a group of non-compromising Tea Party Republicans devoted to sabotaging his policies. Why did we collectively create such a congressional impasse? Thus, it is not only Obama’s failure to recognize that his typical administrative style as Mediator wasn’t going to work. It was also that naïve misjudgment (his “blind spot”) joined by a collective wish from the electorate to make sure he wouldn’t succeed, or would succeed only in part.

In addition, part of Obama’s decline in popularity was of his own devising as he played the role of accomplice by shifting the policy focus from saving the country’s economy to taking on a difficult and hate-producing effort to create medical insurance for everyone. That may be an admirable goal for the U.S. in the long run, but was a tactical disaster in the short run, one that helped to tarnish Obama’s rapidly fading halo. This change in focus was Obama’s

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personal decision, as made clear by Professor Fuchsman, decided on his own and against the advice of his advisors.

Was it arrogance, narcissism, idealism, his quest to be fondly remembered by posterity? Or was it self-defeating behavior, an arrogant narcissism tinged with idealism driven by a need to become again the Outsider destined to prove the racist critics right? It seems to me there’s more here than meets the eye. What is needed is a full-scale study of Obama’s long-term behavior from childhood that may help reveal deeper patterns, a full psychobiographical analysis based on documentary evidence that disentangles the combination of complicated motives at work in him, which goes beyond the scope of a symposium paper.

Professor Fuchsman makes a good start on that enterprise, highlighting what were clearly significant abandonment issues, father-relationship issues, maternal issues, and matters of identity and race, both within Obama and impacting him from the outside world. Google “Obama as Hitler” to be shocked at the extraordinary number of vile images produced over the years to gauge what millions of our fellow Americans are really feeling. How does he handle this vituperative onslaught? Where is the anger, where is the ego-strength that allows him to soldier on? Ken Fuchsman’s paper, like all good symposium pieces, raises these questions in me and starts us on a long-term journey of discovery.

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