Obama is Attractive

Have you ever interacted with a sociopath?

I have. For 15 years, I worked in the mental health field as an administrator. I found that I enjoyed the clients. Many of them, despite their illness, are good people who just want respectful interactions with their fellow human beings. A handful of them are seriously dangerous when off their medications. A narrow slice of them are down-right creepy and dangerous even when on medications. Those are, usually, the sociopaths.

Sociopathy comes in degrees and can exist independent of true psychosis. Mix anti-social personality disorder severe with some degree of delusion and you may just have a serial killer, but not always. Psychiatry is still an emerging science. And there are all sorts of people who have some degree of anti-social personality disorder who are not psychotic. These are the people who see nothing wrong with cheating on their taxes, but might not cheat on their spouse or murder the neighbors.

Those with anti-social features make excellent politicians. If you can divorce yourself from the very real people your policies are harming, you can accomplish a lot more goals than if you truly care about people.

Another feature of anti-social personalities is that, often, a “normal” person will like the non-delusional ones – a lot. There is something extremely attractive about them – maybe just the self-confidence of absolute assurance that they are right in what they’re doing and that you will eventually come to agree and, if you don’t, it won’t ruin their life, but it might ruin yours. It makes you want to agree with them – even if you don’t.

Which brings us to Barack Obama.

I read his book “Dreams From My Father” before I ever saw him on TV. I didn’t agree with a great deal of what he wrote in the book and “The Audacity of Hope”, which I tried to read during the 2008 campaign, deepened my perspective that he would sell my children into economic slavery to achieve his goals of income redistribution and class leveling. Still, I love to hear the man’s speeches and I frequently find myself nodding over certain sound-bites. Then I read the transcript – I ALWAYS read the transcript – and I am not so enamored. I deprogram myself. Everybody loves people with anti-social traits. There’s something so very attractive about them that you will vote against your own interests to be seen walking in concert with them. And that’s the danger.

Watching him play chicken with the House Republicans would be fun if the nation’s future were not at stake. He’s had them beaten since election night, maybe election night of 2008. He’s not going to blink. He’s a master at the bluff because he truly believes that what he is doing is right and he does not care if anyone else agrees. If he loses a hand here and there, fine. He’s in it for the pot at the end of the game. And he’s winning mostly – for now. He also doesn’t care what happens after he leaves the table. That’s for whoever comes next to worry about. He’s going to do what he’s going to do and let the fallout happen on some else’s watch. Now, he may believe that there won’t be any negative fallout, but it won’t matter to him if there is.

I submit he’s going to go on winning more than he loses until the end of his second term. It’s not that he’s right. It’s not that he understands the people more than his detractors do. It’s that he’s got people convinced that they ought to follow him – even if it is over a cliff and into a swamp. They may even suspect that the journey’s going to end in a bad place, but they’re so enjoying basking in the warmth that they cannot help following him.

Republicans have the same problem today as they had at the start of Bill Clinton’s second term when a majority of the country might have had issues with Slick Willy, but they still found him entertaining and it annoyed them to hear him run down by his opponents. Conservatives wishing to stay with the Republicans (or even go the way of a conservative third party) need to recognize that we are not winning against that image. All our yelling and pointing out that the emperor has no clothes is working against us. It’s not wrong to point out the mistakes being made, but the histrionics are not serving us well.

Now is the perfect time for conservatives, especially in the GOP, to reevaluate and choose a different rhetorical direction. It’s not a change in principles that are needed, but a change in tone. I’m not talking about compromise. I am suggesting communication. We have reality on our side of the argument, but if we’re seen as suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome, it won’t matter – nobody will listen to us. We should clean house, focus on restating our principles in ways that people can understand, and lay off screeching about Obama.

At the end of eight years, the country will be willing to listen to new voices offering sound principles, but only if we act like grownups in the meantime. Reasonable people will listen to reason if it appears to be coming from reasonable people.