Saturday, August 09, 2008

Will Arrogance be Obama's Downfall?

Neo-Neocon: "...Obama is most definitely arrogant, and if he ends up losing this election I think it may have been his arrogance more than anything else that did him in."

27 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Helen --

I don't think so. I think it will be the fact that the US public is not at all the beetle-browed masses that most think them and that they are already seeing the cracks in his facade.

I also get more of a feeling of a young man waaaaaaay over his head and with not a clue as to how to either salvage and proceed or bow out with any grace.

9:10 PM, August 09, 2008  
Blogger DADvocate said...

Is it arrogance to make insipid comments such as we need to check the inflation in our tires to solve the gas price crisis or plain stupidity? I'm becoming more and more amazed at what Obama says in apparent seriousness.

9:32 PM, August 09, 2008  
Blogger Trust said...

If McCain had a pastor who talked about blacks the way Wright talks about whites, most people would see it for the problem it is. But not so with Obama.

Sad that the establishment press is campaigning for him under the guise of journalism.

9:36 PM, August 09, 2008  
Blogger I R A Darth Aggie said...

I'm becoming more and more amazed at what Obama says in apparent seriousness.

The further you get the man away from his telepromter, the more he's likely to stray from the script, and shove his foot in his mouth.

10:14 PM, August 09, 2008  
Blogger Joe said...

Nah, it's going to be just plain stupidity.

1:18 AM, August 10, 2008  
Blogger Acksiom said...

Neo-neocon: "While it’s possible to be truly self-confident and yet not have enough sensitivity to the perceptions of others to curb overt and sometimes offputting expressions of arrogance. . . ."

No, ma'am. It's not that we're "arrogant"; it's that others are emotionally irresponsible.

An important step on your path to post-leftist enlightenment is learning to divest yourself of this juvenile belief that grown adults are, as a default, at all natively responsible for the feelings of other grown adults.

Because we're not. One of the fundamental standards of adulthood is taking primary responsibility for one's own emotional state. We may choose to take on responsibility for the feelings of other adults, but it is not a default obligation upon us.

Thus, arrogance is not an external manifestation of an internal state. Arrogance is what we call self-presentations of confidence that we choose to dislike.

And what Obama displays is not arrogance but conceit. Arrogance is what we call it when people choose to dislike one's confident self-presentation, but one nevertheless still actually has the competence to support it.

Conceit, OTGH, is what we call it when people choose to dislike one's confident self-presentation, and one actually lacks the competence to support it, as well -- a lack that Obama and his campaign staff have indeed repeatedly demonstrated when events happen to diverge from their narrowly-plotted scripts.

2:53 AM, August 10, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Obama is clearly an empty suit, but he will probably be elected in the fall. That might be the best thing - things have to get a lot worse before people in general will wake up.

Let's see how Obama handles things in office. I have my own forecast, but let's see what happens. In any case, I suspect he is going to disappoint the (mostly young, impressionable) people who are mesmerized by him.

7:23 AM, August 10, 2008  
Blogger Trust said...

Part of the problem is that most of the press is pro-Obama, and that he has managed to attract a large number of new voters who are 1) mesmerized by him and 2) don't follow the news and issues and are therefore mostly immune to criticism.

Obama has gotten away with things and associations that would have ended the run of most other people.

10:33 AM, August 10, 2008  
Blogger Toysoldier said...

Here is a very basic point: if you think you are qualified to be the leader of the free world, you are arrogant. Obama is arrogant and McCain is arrogant. It takes a certain amount of ego to think that you and only you can successfully run the free world and it takes a grand amount of self-confidence to believe it. So, setting all the politics aside, arrogance comes with the presidential race.

11:09 AM, August 10, 2008  
Blogger Trust said...

@toy

I think that's an unfair indictment. No doubt many people who pursue the presidency are arrogant, but it certainly isn't proof that all of them are.

11:15 AM, August 10, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Obama is neither qualified, nor capable, of handling what is going on in the world at this moment.

1:29 PM, August 10, 2008  
Blogger TMink said...

I am with Toy on this one. It takes a certain amount of ego strength to go through what you have to go through to be a contender. You have to want it bad.

I am not sure it is necessarily a bad thing having arrogant presidents. Comes with the territory I suspect.

Trey

6:00 PM, August 10, 2008  
Blogger El Jefe Maximo said...

I think St. Barack's arrogance is indeed his Achilles heel, but I'm wondering whether people will become fed up with in it time...that is, before November. Even if he wins, serious disillusion is coming. But, soon enough?

7:07 PM, August 10, 2008  
Blogger Jeff Y said...

According to Zogby, 42% of the country's population believe the Jews or the US government did 9/11 and covered it up. That means that 42% of the country are retards.

To those idiots, Obamessiah looks like a man speaking truth to power. Presumably truth is a property of propositions. And propositions are specific utterances. Strangely, none of Obama's utterances are propositions. They are mere descriptions.

But to the 42% retards, they are descriptions that lead to change.

Pfft.

9:07 PM, August 10, 2008  
Blogger Trust said...

@jeff: But to the 42% retards, they are descriptions that lead to change

Very true. And approximately 100% of these retards will vote for the messiah no matter what.

9:19 PM, August 10, 2008  
Blogger Unknown said...

jeff --

I don't buy that 42% for a second. That's basically one in two and I can say I've never spoken to someone who buys the conspiracy crap.

To quote Rutgers university -- "Online, Internet, opt-in polling, where people volunteer to be respondents, doesn't really have a basis in scientific validity."

They were addressing Zogby specifically.

11:24 PM, August 10, 2008  
Blogger John in Nashville said...

Come on now. If you mean uppity, grow the balls to say so.

2:01 AM, August 11, 2008  
Blogger Trust said...

@oligonicella

I've noticed that the only people peddling conspiracy theories are people with no expertise in the area they are explaining. I also find it amusing that most of them think President Bush is an idiot, yet believed he orchestrated an ingenious and diabolical act.

8:27 AM, August 11, 2008  
Blogger Larry J said...

According to Zogby, 42% of the country's population believe the Jews or the US government did 9/11 and covered it up. That means that 42% of the country are retards.

That's a harsh and unkind thing to say. Most mentally retarded people are too smart to believe the conspiracy mongers.

Come on now. If you mean uppity, grow the balls to say so.

Ah, the smell of race card in the morning. I guess it's obvious that anyone who questions Obama's lack of experience (at anything), the absurdness of his economic proposals, his naive view of foreign policy, or his arrogance ("we are the change we've been waiting for") can't possibly have a valid complaint. No, it MUST be racism!

8:54 AM, August 11, 2008  
Blogger Toysoldier said...

I think that's an unfair indictment. No doubt many people who pursue the presidency are arrogant, but it certainly isn't proof that all of them are.

The fact that all of the people who have sought the presidency believed that they and only they were fit to lead the free world is the evidence. You may not like Obama as a candidate, but that does not change that both he and John McCain possess incredibly large egos and assume they know what is best for the country and the world.

As for the use of the term arrogant in reference to Obama, technically it is just a roundabout way for some people to say "uppity" without the racial connotation. Obama's rhetoric is no more and no less arrogant than McCain's, but no one calls McCain that. Likewise, no one referred to Hilary or Edwards or Romney or any of the other candidates as arrogant. So while the intention of the usage might not necessarily be racist, it can be fairly construed in that fashion, in the same way that liberal criticisms of McCain can fairly be construed as equating his age with senility and incompetence.

10:48 AM, August 11, 2008  
Blogger Soccer Dad said...

I don't know if it's the exact same thing, but Charles Krauthammer identified something about Sen. Obama back in January.

At which point, Obama, yielding to some inexplicable impulse, gave the other memorable unscripted moment of the New Hampshire campaign -- the gratuitous self-indicting aside: "You're likable enough, Hillary." He said it looking down and with not a smile but a smirk.

Rising rock star puts down struggling diva -- an unkind cut, deeply ungracious, almost cruel, from a candidate who had the country in a swoon over his campaign of grace and uplift. The media gave that moment little play, but millions saw it live, and I could surely not have been the only one who found it jarring.


Arrogance? Ungracious? Is there a significant difference?

11:59 AM, August 11, 2008  
Blogger Wayne said...

I don't buy that 42% for a second. That's basically one in two and I can say I've never spoken to someone who buys the conspiracy crap.

I don't know. I've met people who are ordinarily reasonable, but have heard the conspiracy theories so many times that they now believe that "something" was going on that day.

I ALSO watched the written opinion of someone over at MensNewsDaily whose thought-processes I considered to be reasonable change over time as she read more and more conspiracy theories. A couple other readers and I tried to counter the idiotic arguments of the wacko conspiracy-loons that were commenting, but our stamina wasn't up to it. In the end, I think this person (I think it was Joyanna Adams, but I don't read there often since they changed their format a year or so ago, so I'm not sure) has gone completely over to the conspiracy side.

1:43 PM, August 11, 2008  
Blogger Unknown said...

wayne --

You mention a few people. If that's 42% of the people you know, you know very few people.

Have almost *one half* of the people you have met agreed with the conspiracy theory? If not, my position is more reasonable than Zogby's.

3:41 PM, August 11, 2008  
Blogger docweasel said...

The arrogance is that a man as unqualified and out of his depth as Obama could consider himself worthy and ready of the most important job in the world, the job on which the lives of every human being in the world depend, quite literally and without exaggeration, is what is presumptuous and offensive about Obama's hubris.

Every major Republican running had more practical or political experience than Obama and Edwards put together. Where the hell do the Dems get the balls to put up people like this as potential CIC of the US Armed Forces and the man who would hold our collective destiny at the tip of his fingers?

It's insulting. And what is more insulting is the trope that the only reason anyone _wouldn't_ vote for Obama is that he is black, and you are therefore a racist. Even after his exposure as a long-time adherent to a disgusting, racist demagogue who detests white people, ALL white people, and considers them racially predisposed towards greed, genocide, larceny, bigotry and almost any evil in the catalog of great evils of humanity. Then he has the gall to lecture US on getting over our racism.

This a trend with Obama, it's always our fault. We don't have enough oil, it's because you ignorant auto-owners don't keep them tuned up and properly maintained, we'd have enough oil if you weren't so goddammed stupid and negligent. You wouldn't find his preacher offensive if you weren't so goddammed racist yourself. You'd vote democrat if you weren't so obsessed with guns, opiated with religion, and vote for him if you weren't so bigoted you hated people who "don't look like you do".

Not to mention his ultra-left voting record. America has _never_ elected a man this flawed, this inexperienced, this leftist, this anti-American. Any other politician 's career would rightfully have been finished if it had been revealed he'd been a member, and had exposed his infant to toddler to grade-school children to the kind of odious and despicable hatred, week after week, to which Obama exposed his kids.

Yes, arrogance will be the thing that brings him down, but it's also the thing that makes him run: the arrogance that he thinks he can bluff his way past all these egregious faults solely because of the _possibility_, so far unproven by any measurable facts, that he will be bi-partisan and heal factional rifts; that he will be post-racial and heal racial wounds; that he represents "hope" and that he will bring about a new form and style of government 'for which we've been waiting'.

Never before have so many trusted so much based on so little.

No way this man is elected president. The American people have never let me down: they have always chosen, at MINIMUM, the man who could functionally perform the office. They've never elected the stiff, the pompous pedagogue, the elitist snob, the far-left socialist nor a man who manifestly detested 70% of the electorate.

My gut feeling has never been wrong either. I've called every election since the Reagan years. McCain, and by more than people are currently betting _anyone_ can win this year. McCain by more than GWB beat Kerry. I certainly don't see how McCain loses any Bush states, and I can certainly see him picking up Penn, Mich, the mid-west, MN, WI, all the SW and CO, with no problem at all. Oregon? CALIFORNIA? Could happen amd wouldn't be shocked. Obama is due for the bottom falling out, even the press is beginning to fall out of line.

2:15 AM, August 18, 2008  
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