If You Put Obama's Narcissism Aside … What Do You Have?

Have you ever met somebody who takes a passionate hard position on some important issue one day, and then when he needs to, takes the opposite position? And pretends nothing just happened? They have a name for that. It’s called Barack Obama.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane.

On July 3, 2008 -- the day before Independence Day – candidate Barack Obama told a political rally that raising the debt by $4 trillion as President Bush had done was “unpatriotic.”

“The problem,” Senator Obama said, “is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents --#43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back -- $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic.”

Irresponsible? Unpatriotic? Ok, so what words should we use to describe the increase in the national debt since President Obama took over? He added not $4 trillion … but $8 trillion-- and counting – “by his lonesome.”

That same year, candidate Obama said: "I take the Constitution very seriously,” explaining that “The biggest problems that we're facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the Executive Branch and not go through Congress at all, and that's what I intend to reverse when I'm President of the United States of America."

And just one year ago, on November 25, when a heckler interrupted his speech in San Francisco and said he could stop deportations on his own, the president responded:  "If in fact I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress than I would do so.  But we're a nation of laws.  That's part of our tradition. The easy way out is to try to yell and pretend I can do something by violating our laws.  And what I'm proposing is the harder path, which is to use our democratic processes to achieve the same goal as you want to achieve.  Bit it won't be as easy as just shouting.  It requires us lobbying and getting it done."

That was then.  Any day now – if it hasn’t happened already – President Obama will do an end run around "our democratic process" and “bring more and more power into the “Executive Branch and not go through Congress at all” when he signs an executive order allowing millions of illegal aliens to stay in the country, get a job, and not worry about being deported.

In his 2006 autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope” Barack Obama wrote, “[T]here’s no denying that many blacks share the same anxieties as many whites about the wave of illegal immigration flooding our Southern border—a sense that what’s happening now is fundamentally different from what has gone on before.”

The Daily Caller has a piece on this in which it notes that Senator Obama also wrote, “Not all these fears are irrational.”

And there’s this from the book: “The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century. If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole—especially by keeping our workforce young, in contrast to an increasingly geriatric Europe and Japan—it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net.”

And how about this: “Native-born Americans suspect that it is they, and not the immigrant, who are being forced to adapt” to social changes caused by migration, he said.

“And if I’m honest with myself, I must admit that I’m not entirely immune to such nativist sentiments,” then Senator Obama wrote. “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”

Isn’t all of that what conservative critics have been saying all along?

It’s one thing to change your mind – Barack Obama doesn’t have a monopoly on that -- but it’s quite another to do it so seamlessly, without so much as a nod to the fact that, well, you changed your mind! It takes a special kind of politician to say the kinds of things Barack Obama says without a hint of embarrassment. Which brings us to one more stop along memory lane. On June 3, 2008, after his final primary battle, Obama told an adoring rally in St. Paul, Minnesota the following:

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”

His acolytes told him he was the messiah. But he already knew that. And so, if you put his narcissism aside … you have nothing left.