"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Obama's Aloofness?

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Here's an interesting description of President Obama from one of the last century's greatest historians, Robert Conquest:

The great intellectual, the great administrator, the great orator lacked one quality essential... to the great political leader.   [He] could fire masses of men to acclaim and follow him.   But he had no talent for leadership among equals.  He could not establish his authority among colleagues by the modest arts of persuasian or by sympathetic attention to the views of men of lesser intellectual calibre than himself.   He did not suffer fools, and he was accused of being unable to brook rivals.... As soon as he had finished [his speech] he left the hall.   There was no personal contact in the corridors.   This aloofness, I believe, may partly explain [his] inability as well as his unwillingness to build a large personal following among the rank and file of the Party.

Doesn't that perfectly capture Obama's arrogance, his narcissism, his unwillingness to credit the intelligence of others, his lack of fellow feeling, even with his ideological compatriots, his distance from his own party's leaders on Capitol Hill?   Wow... Conquest, the great historian of Russia in the 20th Century, really nailed it about our current President.  

Except...

Wait a minute...

Did I read that wrong?...

Oh, oops...

Actually that wasn't Obama Conquest was talking about.   It was this guy.




Leon Trotsky.

My bad.

But, then again, leftists never change, do they?

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