In one of the scenes in Citizen Kane, the protagonist's former friend Jed Leland describes the character of the flamboyant politician and tycoon. "He had a generous mind," Leland says. "But he never gave himself away. He never gave anything away. He just . . . left you a tip."
He might have been describing President Obama.
Like Kane, Obama is a colossal self-advertiser. He first made his reputation, indeed, by writing a book of quasi-autobiography. Like Kane, he can hardly get through a sentence without using the word "I." He constantly refers to government entities as "my secretary of state," "my secretary of the treasury," "my department of defense," and so on. Yet when it comes to revealing himself . . . no. He'd rather be tortured than give up any pieces of the sacred substance, or anything even associated with it.
One assumes that Obama bogarted all specifics about his supposedly close and inspiring relationship with Reverend Wright because Wright had become a political embarrassment. And one assumes that Obama wants to keep his college records secret because he wasn't a very good student. These are assumptions, however, because Obama keeps his stuff to himself even when it would do him good to give it away.
The classic example of this compulsion is his logically pointless war against the people who wanted to see his birth certificate. He conceded the struggle only when he started to fear that it was costing him support for reelection, thus torturing him beyond the limits of even his endurance. For years he had made a public fool of himself by not releasing an innocuous scrap of paper.
Why, after that performance, I expected him to surrender the Osama death photos, I don't know. Maybe I thought he had reformed, and some nice, generous, "transparent" Dr. Jekyll had replaced the clutching, anal, emotionally threatened President Hide. But whatever I thought, I was wrong. The preposterous decision not to release the pictures, ostensibly to chasten radical Islamicists with the evidence of our moral superiority, will merely convince the world that Barry Obama, like Charlie Kane, has more than a small screw loose.
But what about the "tip" — "he just left you a tip"? In Citizen Kane, the protagonist paid other people for "services rendered." He demanded their love, but "he had no love to give." So he offered them money or power or other crass "tips." And that, in his way, is what Obama does. Of all the politicians I can think of, he is the greediest for love but the least interested in other people. His speech is without stories or anecdotes. He seldom alludes to any actual historical event, anything that people actually did in the past. He appears to retain no vivid memories of the people in his own past, or any real interest in the people he meets today. He speaks always as if he were reminding his audience of things they should already have been taught, never as if he wanted to learn from their responses what they themselves would like to know. In lieu of real human concern, he professes a vast interest in abstractions — progress, equality, fairness, proving to our enemies that we are better than they are in some vague, general way.
These are not the kind of tips you can take home and spend. The real stuff — he keeps that to himself. You're not getting any of that.
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