The Best President in the History of the World

WSJ 

There is a story about Mr. Obama relevant to the war, battle or whatever he declared Wednesday evening against the Islamic State, aka ISIS. It is found in his former campaign manager David Plouffe's account of the 2008 election, "The Audacity to Win."

Mr. Plouffe writes that during an earlier election race, Mr. Obama had a "hard time allowing his campaign staff to take more responsibility." To which Barack Obama answered: "I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I'll hire to do it." Audacity indeed.

In a 2008 New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza, Mr. Obama is quoted telling another aide: "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors." Also, "I think I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters."

And here we are.

In the days before Mr. Obama's ISIS address to the nation, news accounts cataloged his now-embarrassing statements about terrorism's decline on his watch—the terrorists are JV teams, the tide of war is receding and all that.

...

What we now know is that Mr. Obama is not even close to being his own best Secretary of State, his own best Secretary of Defense, his own best national security adviser or his own best CIA director.

The question is: Does he know it?

Can a humbling experience of such startling proportions have sunk in? It had better.

Has it? I doubt it, especially if the President is as narcissistic as so many observers believe him to be. (Personally, I suspect that if President Obama does not meet diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, then no one does.) As former psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer said the other day:

I mean, count the number of times he uses the word "I" in any speech, and compare that to any other president. Remember when he announced the killing of bin Laden? That speech I believe had 29 references to "I" – on my command, I ordered, as commander-in-chief, I was then told, I this. You’d think he’d pulled the trigger out there in Abbottabad. You know, this is a guy, you look at every one of his speeches, even the way he introduces high officials – I’d like to introduce my secretary of State. He once referred to ‘my intelligence community’. And in one speech, I no longer remember which, ‘my military’. For God’s sake, he talks like the emperor Napoleon.



"Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas."