Powerline has an interesting look at an article about Obama’s rise – working off a New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza, it is clear that Obama has a high opinion of himself. This quote from the Lizza piece is telling:
Marty Nesbitt remembers Obama’s utter calm the day he gave his celebrated speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in Boston, which made him an international celebrity and a potential 2008 Presidential candidate. “We were walking down the street late in the afternoon,” Nesbitt told me. “And this crowd was building behind us, like it was Tiger Woods at the Masters.”
“Barack, man, you’re like a rock star,” Nesbitt said.
“Yeah, if you think it’s bad today, wait until tomorrow,” Obama replied.
“What do you mean?”
“My speech,” Obama said, “is pretty good.”
While Obama is one of my brothers in Christ, I think he needs to take a course in Christian humility. That attitude is extraordinarily worrisome in a man who aspires to be President. It is clear that Obama believes in himself – and there’s only one thing wrong with such a belief: its insane.
Not insane in the sense that Obama will need to be locked in a padded cell, but insane in the sense that it betrays a complete lack of understanding in Obama of his standing vis a vis the rest of humanity and, of course, his relation as the creature of a Creator (and you may discount this as important – but Obama professes Christianity, which makes it vitally important…even if he doesn’t actually believe it, because that makes him not just self centered, but monstrously dishonest). I know that in modern times we teach that one must believe in one’s self….but, look around you and you’ll see the results of self-belief in corporate boardrooms of bankrupt firms, in prison cells filled with con artists, in broken families and destroyed relationships. A goodly portion of our social pathologies come to us via people who believe very strongly in themselves…the trouble with believing in the self is the fact that it crowds out believing in anything but the self.
Pride is not one of the seven deadly sins by accident – it is one thing to be proud of one’s nation; one’s firm; one’s successful child; one’s regiment; one’s sporting team…that is pride based upon subordination of the self to a larger purpose…but to be proud of the self is always destructive. I cannot, of course, peer into Obama’s soul and see what motivates him, but all that I’ve learned of him indicates a man who has got on too far and too fast and who lacks that sense of balance – that humble understanding that dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return. While it isn’t such a problem to have yet another self-absorbed Senator, it is a problem in a President. Nixon was self-absorbed; Carter was self-absorbed; Clinton was self-absorbed. Get the picture?
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