Obama’s Obvious Disdain

by Paul A. Rahe

On Sunday morning, Instapundit drew attention to a startling photograph posted on the internet by the White House. In it stands President Obama in black tie, leaning against a wall, his arms folded, speaking not a word, and looking down on Vice-President Biden with hooded eyes.

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When this shot is shown in high resolution, as one perceptive observer soon noted, “Obama looks like he has contempt for Biden” –which, he added, may be the case “given Joe ‘The Gaff Machine’ Biden’s performance this year.” I am, he concluded, once again reminded “of how this administration seems to have become oblivious to the images they project to the public.”

I wonder whether this last point is right.

Obama and his minions are certainly capable of stumbling. Their handling of the recent attempt by Al Q’aeda to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight originating in Amsterdam is a case in point. But the posting of this photograph is by no means the first time that the current President of the United States has seized upon an opportunity to display in a manner oblique but unmistakable his disdain for another public figure.

As I tried to document last year in a series of posts on Powerline — here, here, here, here, here, and here — Barack Obama is, in fact, a master of the insulting gesture and the calculated insult.

Twice in the course of the 2008 campaign –once during a debate with Hillary Clinton, and again during one of his debates with John McCain — he was caught on videotape, rubbing his hand across the right side of his face with his middle finger extended in an obscene gesture that many in the audience could see, but that his opponents could not. This provoked laughter on the part of his supporters in the auditorium, on both occasions, he responded with a knowing smile.

Then, after Sarah Palin remarked at the Republican National Convention that the only difference between a pit bull and a soccer mom was lipstick, he observed at a rally that a pig with lipstick is still a pig. Again, many in the audience caught the dig and they, too, were rewarded with a knowing smile.

After becoming President, Obama applied this technique to American’s allies in a fashion that drew considerable attention abroad and that received next to none on this side of the Atlantic.

Early in his administration, he eschewed the ordinary diplomatic niceties in his treatment of Gordon Brown. Later, he made it clear that he could not be bothered to dine with Nicholas Sarkozy; and, at a time when everyone else of comparable stature showed up in Berlin to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Well, the President of the United States ostentatiously remained aloof, leaving Angela Merkel in the lurch.

Even more to the point, President Obama chose the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland as an occasion to announce that the United States would not be building anti-missile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic.

And when he journeyed to Oslo to accept the Nobel Prize for Peace, as The Guardian then reported, President Obama infuriated the Norwegians by cancelling “many of the events peace prize laureates traditionally submit to, including a dinner with the Norwegian Nobel committee, a press conference, a television interview, appearances at a children’s event promoting peace and a music concert, . . . a visit to an exhibition in his honour at the Nobel peace centre,” and, most important of all, lunch with the Norwegian king.

It is arguably in this context that we should consider the picture recently posted by the White House.

President Obama is a man of breathtaking self-regard and self-absorption. As many have noted, he can hardly give a speech without eulogizing himself and intimating that his Presidency marks a watershed in American, if not world history. In the same fashion, he seems to take a certain malicious — one might even say, childish — pleasure in humiliating his rivals and underlings.

We are left to wonder what will happen when it becomes evident, even to the President — as it surely will — that he is an exceedingly ordinary man who blundered into an extraordinary situation and not a Messiah at all.


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Posted Jan 6th 2010 at 12:50 pm in Obama, Politics | 191 Comments