But contrary to the above is the view of a writer, Sam Schulman, who calls calls Barack Obama a Hamlet in an astringent Weekly Standard piece. Calling President 44 "a 20th century liberal of a very conventional type: incurious, superior and vain," Schulman writes that like Hamlet 44 is "obsessed with finding and playing a role--and uncertain he is quite up to the task":
Hamlet is obsessed with finding and playing a role--and uncertain that he is quite up to the task. Such is the Obama we have watched for the first 40 days. For Hamlet, the role he must play is rather simple: He does not expect to combine in himself the qualities of Lincoln and Roosevelt, as our unenviable president does. Hamlet only has to be an avenger. Hamlet's dream of his father assigns him this role in the first act, and, for the rest of the play, poor Hamlet repeatedly tries and fails to live up to it. Instead of taking action, Hamlet whiles away the time until his death despising, envying, and imitating the single-minded souls who can play their appointed role in life without agonizing self-consciousness. He tries to imitate them all--young Fortinbras, Laertes, his dead father. To do so, he devises over-complicated rhetorical tricks--writing speeches for the strolling company of actors, pretending to be mad, writing love letters, ordering secret renditions for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, throwing Polonius and Ophelia under the bus. Hamlet dies--and inadvertently achieves his revenge--only because he is so jealous of Laertes's fencing skill that he agrees to the fatal one-on-one that ends the play.
Hamlet's trajectory describes exactly what is unique about Obama's pathway to power--what he didn't do. Most young men of Obama's generation with presidential yearnings have tried putting their hands on the steering wheel of a smaller vehicle, like an attorney-generalship. A state AG's office is an excellent place to practice the swordsmanship that a president needs. Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo prepped this way. Rudy Giuliani matriculated as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Spitzer was the most presidential of all, because he didn't bother with actual lawyering but merely harried and bullied businessmen with something to lose--no indictment necessary.
At the same stage of his life, Obama--skill, intelligence, and training outmatching Cuomo's and Spitzer's, and with even more ambition--didn't burden himself with such responsibilities. He prepared himself purely through the exercise of rhetoric. A brief speech at a student anti-apartheid demonstration gave him a vision of power, he took an assistant professor's salary from a charity to become an organizer of community protest for such causes as asbestos removal. Most of all, he wrote autobiographies. In his books he rehearsed a vision of himself as leader, solving problems with ease that no one had ever solved before. And the key to leadership, he discovered in his very first autobiography, was not the exercise of authority but the telling of stories.
Three paragraphs hardly do justice to three pages of very interesting analysis. Here's hoping that future Damascus conversions (see posting above) include character and nerve as well.
In the same vein, Robert Samuelson applies "great pretender" to the President based upon the gap between budget and reality:
Obama is a great pretender. He repeatedly says he's doing things that he isn't, trusting his powerful rhetoric to obscure the difference. He has made "responsibility" a personal theme; the budget's cover line is "A New Era of Responsibility." He says the budget begins "making the tough choices necessary to restore fiscal discipline." It doesn't.
President 44 grossly shortchanges defense while promising to protect us (as did Bill Clinton, 90 percent of whose budget cuts came out of the hide of the defense budget--the "peace dividend" during the pre-9/11 holiday from history during the party decade 1990s, an excuse President 44 hardly has, what with the wars against militant Islamists and financial catastrophe):
It would also be "responsible" for Obama to acknowledge the big gamble in his budget. National security has long been government's first job. In his budget, defense spending drops from 20 percent of the total in 2008 to 14 percent in 2016, the smallest share since the 1930s. The decline presumes a much safer world. If the world doesn't cooperate, deficits would grow.
And Mark Steyn, ever witty and acerbic, sees megastar complex in 44 and notes that not only was UK PM Gordon Brown snubbed and belittled on his "I love America & I want America to love me!" visit, but that President 44 seems determined to hold the world stage all by his celebrity self, whatever the cost:
I would make a modest prediction that in 2012, after four years of the man who was supposed to heal America’s relations with a world sick of all that swaggering cowboy unilateralism, those relations will be much worse. From Canada to India, the implications of the Obama ascendancy are becoming painfully clear. The other week Der Spiegel ran a piece called “Why Obamania Isn’t the Answer,” which might more usefully have been published before the Obamessiah held his big Berlin rally. Written by some bigshot with the German Council on Foreign Relations and illustrated by the old four-color hopey-changey posters all scratched up and worn out, the essay conceded that Europe had embraced Obama as a “European American.” Very true. The president is the most European American ever to sit in the Oval Office. And, because of that, he doesn’t need any actual European Europeans getting in the way — just as, at his big victory-night rally in Chicago, the first megastar president didn’t need any megastar megastars from Hollywood clogging up the joint: Movie stars who wanted to fly in were told by his minders that he didn’t want any other celebrities deflecting attention from him. Same with world leaders. If it’s any consolation to Gordon Brown, he’s just not that into any of you.
Thus is 44 separated from 42, one William Jefferson Clinton, in seeking not the approval of others--in social science parlance, 44 is "inner-directed" versus 42 being "other-directed." He pushes radical change not caring if investors hate it--and him. And he seeks not the company of celebrities. Brad & Angelina may ge far fewer White House gigs they they expected.
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