Monday, November 10, 2008

Vituperation in Victory   [John Derbyshire]

Strange reactions to my column on how our new President-Elect has spent practically his whole life in far-Left precincts, and has a "cultural Marxist" mindset, neither of which things seems to me sensationally controversial on the known facts, even if the McCain campaign was too race-whipped to mention them.

What routinely happens with a pointed NRO column is that you get a flutter of emails from appreciative conservative readers, some perhaps taking you to task on some particular point or other, or scolding you for grammatical faults (NRO readers are terrific grammarians). Then there's a pause. Then your piece get out into the Lefty blogosphere somehow, and you get a second wave of emails from ourtraged Lefties.

This is, as I said, routine. It's happened often enough, I have the measure of it, and know what to expect. Last week's Lefty emails were, though, quite unusually vituperative. I noticed the same in the weekend Letters columns of the New York Post. The Post editorialized for McCain, and carries some good conservative Op-Ed writers (including some of ours), but treated Obama with kid gloves, as McCain did. Yet they got some really vituperative letters from scandalized Obamarrhoids, furiously indignant that anyone should criticize The One.

I suppose there is always a segment of any population that believes anyone who disagrees with them about politics must be wicked. (Or mad: I get regular emails from Lefties urging me to seek counseling.) That segment seems to be unusually prominent this election cycle, I suppose because of the race factor, which gets a lot of people excited this way or that.

The sputtering-Left component of my email bag took particular exception to my calling Obama "shallow, ignorant, and self-obsessed." How dare I? Well, let's unpack it.

Shallow:  Have you ever heard Obama say anything interesting? Me neither. I saw him on the telly the other day fielding a question about illegal immigrants. He said something like: "We can't deport ten million people. We need to find a way to bring them out of the shadows. Thet should have to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for citizenship." Now, here is an issue that's of major concern to millions of Americans, who feel they are losing the nation they grew up in. It's been argued for years at high levels of discourse, with many fine books written. (Most recently, one by our own Mark Krikorian.) Yet Obama can address it only with the tiredest, most threadbare clichés of the open-borders Left. It's plain he has never given a moment's real thought to the issue. Shallow.

Ignorant:  Obama strikes me as a very intelligent person, but with that intelligence narrowly focused. He has spent his adult life among the tiny sub-class of black Americans who have grown wealthy, or hope to, via the affirmative-action rackets. He has never ventured outside that milieu, and I seriously doubt he knows much about life outside it. I doubt, for example, that he knows anything much at all about business, the military, science, work (other than paper-shuffling), or high culture. I'll be glad to be proved wrong, but nothing I've heard him say, nor my (admittedly incomplete) acquaintance with what he's written, refutes that.

Self-obsessed:  A guy who publishes a 464-page autobiography at age 34 is self-obsessed, what can I tell ya? If he publishes a second autobiography at age 45, you can print "self-obsessed" in capital letters. (Yeah, I know, it's a "campaign book." The content is mainly autobiographical, though.)

On the question of smarts, I'd put Obama easily in the top percentile on IQ, maybe over 140. I don't have a good fix on his Big Five personality scores, though. My best guesses would be:

Openness:  low, perhaps very low

Conscientiousness:  high

Extraversion:  average to high

Agreeableness:  high

Neuroticism:  low? I really have no fix here.

11/10 10:15 AMShare