A Classless Act

Class and grace are widely admired attributes related to reasonableness,  strong,  unstressed self-control and self-confidence, a sense of proportion and awareness of context, and an appropriate consideration and respect for other people.  While they are seldom encountered among politicians,  it is generally accepted that there are occasions such as the transfer of power from one president to another when even a faked display of them is useful and expected. Most presidents  and their wives seem to have understood this and behaved accordingly.  The Obamas have been an exception.

We cannot know if Barack Obama is the most arrogant and narcissistic president of the last seventy years since we cannot know his predecessors’ private thoughts. However we can observe that he has consistently behaved more arrogantly and narcissistically in public  than any of the others. He often has seemed quite unable to hide an apparent  belief that  the cosmos revolves  around him.  He has rated himself publicly as among the  greatest president of all time (always probably a smidgen behind Lincoln and sometimes maybe nosed out by Washington or  FDR but right up there) despite his many failures and his small and now likely mainly ephemeral set of accomplishments.  His penchant  for commemorating  everything and everyone with photos of himself has become a recurring joke on the internet as  has his characteristic jaw-jutting pose which to many is more than a little reminiscent of the Duce’s.  A thing circulating recently shows official  Christmas cards from presidents going back to FDR displaying views of the White House in winter together with the official card from Obama displaying a view of Obama.

So it is no surprise he is behaving as he is during the period of transition to the next administration after an election in which his policies were rejected, and his chosen successor was defeated by a crude political amateur who was opposed by many of the leaders of his own party. He has blamed  the voters, blamed  conspiracies by shifty foreigners, blamed the few outfits in the media not staffed by his sycophants  and done nothing  to oppose  efforts by  those in his party to attack the validity and even overturn the results of the election. He and those in  his  administration have gone on a pointless binge of issuing decrees and regulations when he knows most or all of them will be cancelled by the new president and his people.  One can see reasons some people see his behavior as a petulant desire to insult the Americans he so despises a few more times before leaving office.

 The prize for a single act of gracelessness though must go to his wife.  This woman who said she never cared for the country until it elevated her and her husband toward the presidency and who continually and absurdly  posed as a poor victim while occupying the White House and living remarkably opulently  has chosen to leave giving  the nation her variation of après nous le deluge  - explaining on national TV that hope for the country will end with the departure of  her and her husband.  

For many observers the appropriate response to these two comes from the old saying: don’t go away mad, just go away.