The contradictions the voters see in Obama now were real, not the work of spinmeisters. They were tied together by the president’s narcissistic belief in himself, which he imagined transcended politics. His prolific use of the personal pronoun bears this out. He believes in his own sincerity. For a while, we did, too.
“Every man alone is sincere,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.” Before his entrance into the major leagues, the president was virtually a man alone on a private stage. When his audience grew larger, he still believed he could end the rancor in Washington and inspire a new bipartisanship. But sincerity moved to hypocrisy when that stage got crowded, and he was called on to deliver satisfactory answers to an unmanageable audience. Smooth rhetoric covers a multitude of rough edges until the rhetoric must produce legislation.
The rest is equally brilliant. Go read it.
via Deb