Anatomy of a Divider, Part IB: Why Obama Cannot Unify
By Artemis March on November 19, 2008 at 10:55 PM in Bamboozling, Barack Obama, Chicago politics, DNC, Emil Jones, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.
This is the second part of Artemis March’s excellent piece on “Anatomy of a Divider: Why Obama Cannot Unify,” originally published at www.lynettelong.com. If you missed the first one, you can read it HERE.
The Grandiose Self conflates not only his real and fantasy selves, but also self and other. He appropriates people’s goodies as if they belonged to him: He uses them as:
- mirrors reflecting his glory (e.g., Obama’s acolytes, his captive media), and/or as
- suppliers (who may be willing accomplices, or unwilling dependents and underlings) feeding his emptiness, ambition, and entitlement (e.g., Chicago machine, Rezko, DNC leaders, MoveOn/Soros, pledged delegates, superdelegates).
From his community organizing days onward, Obama has routinely claimed credit (often sole credit) for the work of others. To give Obama the appearance of a record, Emil Jones, President of the Illinois Senate, put his name on dozens of bills for which colleagues had fought for years (prior to the Democrats’ becoming a majority). Obama’s comment when questioned, “They couldn’t have done it without me.” His DNC suppliers refer to his phoney record as if it were real. Although Obama rewarded Jones’ district with huge earmarks, he apparently left a trail of anger and resentment among the other senators.
Having never stood for any principle or signature issue, led no fights, passed no bills to speak of, written no articles, avoided votes that would leave controversial footprints, and, in contrast to Hillary Clinton and John McCain, demonstrated no capacity to work with colleagues—let alone on both sides of the aisle—Obama speaks deceptively about his record.
Obama lies with abandon about positions he took. He inflates his role, if any, in achieving an outcome. He refers to what “my committee” has done when he isn’t even on the committee. He has claimed that his ideas formed the basis for the economic stimulus package passed by the Congress.
He proposed as his own another Hillary plank (three-month moratorium on mortgages) that he had criticized when she made it long before the crisis. Missing in action during the financial meltdown, he caved to transferring the remaining wealth of American citizens to his Wall Street and ACORN buddies.
Not a peep about alternative strategies that would put the work-out burden on Wall Street, or let its chaos creatively self-structure (isn’t that supposed to be capitalism’s glory?). Is any of this self-aggrandizing deception the behavior of a leader? of a uniter?
The narcissist appropriates not only the work of others but also parts of his mirrors as if they were his for the taking. Admiration, applause, and mirroring should not, in his mind, have to be earned; they are not conditional, but “belong” to him. Although the Grandiose Self of an NPD is always marked by entitlement and arrogance, he often draws people toward him by his charm, charisma, and his intimation that they can be part of his magical world. Bedazzled, they are drawn into a “grandiose fusion”; which, psychiatrists say, feeds their own narcissistic deficits—at least as long as they keep the applause going and don’t break the spell.
When those mirrors or suppliers whose goodies were needed to get him where he was going next are no longer needed, the NPD drops them with a thud. Being expelled from the fusion feel like betrayal—exactly as some of Obama’s suppliers began feeling this summer. Having pocketed NARAL’s endorsement, he contradicted Roe and belied his own empathic deficits and ignorance of women by rejecting late-term abortions for women who were “just feeling blue”; Having used MoveOn and the anti-war movement to be his megaphone, raise money, and provide manpower to intimidate caucus attendees and steal caucuses (see Part 2, and a professional statistical analysis at www.caucusanalysis.org), he broke his promise and supported the FISA bill. Why? He apparently needed to woo moretelecom money, and thinks he can take the Left and feminists for granted. After all, where else can they go? Does he care about their outrage? No. They served a purpose: to move him closer to securing ultimate power, and now he’s moved on.
He’s already distanced from the Democratic leadership as well. After they selected the unqualified, unvetted guy—because, in part, they thought he would be an ATM for the Party—they, too, have been left in the cold. Cash-flush Obama turned down Harry Reid’s appeal for money to help grow the Senate majority. Neither could their selectee find any pre-election time to do joint fund-raisers with Senate or House Democrats. This is unsettling not just because it echoes his refusal to help Hillary Clinton pay down her campaign debt (while still expecting her to win it for him without giving her credit for doing so), but also because what POTUS doesn’t want the strongest possible majority to move his agenda?
In calling this slipperiness the “new Obama” the NYTimes’ editorial writers revealed just how deluded and uniformed they are. This is the old, always, and forever Obama. What NARAL, MoveOn, the Times, and DNC leaders have been stunned to experience is that you can be switched from “good object” to “bad object” in a flash. Change of status is triggered by not giving unconditional admiration, by raising uncomfortable questions, or simply having served your purpose.
These typical NPD behaviors are disturbing in a president. Certainly we should all have learned that by now from observing Bush. Unfortunately, many critics have been blinded by the content of cheneybush thinking rather than seeing more deeply into how their mental structures operate. When we do, many of us observe disturbing similarities between their behaviors and Obama’s. Barack’s propensity for hiding the truth, locking out inquiry, suppressing dissent, threatening legal action against TV stations that run truthful ads that don’t flatter him, and, as announced through a statement by Governor Blunt of Missouri, enlisting elected officials and law enforcement into "truth squads" to go after detractors—what does this remind you of?
Abusive Self. When people fail to mirror the NPD’s grandiosity, his “narcissistic rage” is ignited. Narcissistic rage is not like the temporary upsurge of anger we usually associate with “rage.” It can be chillingly cold and enduring. Apart from the tell-tale coldness, this rage is often well concealed, even from the narcissist himself. This cold rage drives the abusiveness of the other half of the faulty self. That half, which I call the Abusive Self, is the deadly partner of the Grandiose Self—the hidden “bad cop”; to its ostensibly “good cop.”
The narcissist carefully manages his inglorious, non-transcendent side which consists largely of disowned feelings and aspects of himself. According to psychiatrists, these include an underlying coldness, even ruthlessness, limited capacity for emotional empathy, vengefulness, lack of remorse for hurting others, and retaliatory behavior towards anyone who inflicts “narcissistic wounds”—i.e., who speaks the truth to or about him, or simply stops applauding.
Rather than experiencing these qualities and behaviors as part of himself, the narcissist disowns them. Unconsciously, of course. It’s as if he were cut in half at the waist, and his head and upper torso had no connection with, or awareness, of having a lower body.
Although the arrogance and entitlement of the Grandiose Self is alarming (especially when it reaches messianic proportions), and its feeding off others is inherently exploitative as well as destined to disappoint them, it is the convoluted way in which the NPD manages his “bad stuff”; that becomes so disturbingly lethal.
How does he get rid of the “not-me” stuff? He projects it onto others. What allows him to do this? His mislocated boundary which enables even more destructive, “stealth”; processes to take place in the lower, disowned part of his self-system than in the upper half. Like the Grandiose Self, the Abusive Self conflates self and other, but in different ways:
Whereas the Grandiose Self imports good parts of the other into his entitlement, the Abusive Self exports his unattractive qualities and relocates them in the other(s).
Whereas the Grandiose Self appropriates people as mirrors, suppliers, and accomplices, his Abusive Self dissociates his own ugly qualities, feelings, and actions onto:
- targets for his projections (e.g., HRC, her supporters, Palin, McCain), and into
- surrogates who speak or act for him without his being held accountable (e.g. his paid and unpaid bloggers, Michelle, Wright, Pfleger, captive media)
This faulty structuration of self in relation to others allows these export/import flows to take place outside of the conscious awareness of the NPD—I say “allows,” but Alinsky organizers are acutely conscious of what they are doing (and also, I have discovered, use the word “target” very much as I have in my NPD work). Conscious or not, the two halves of the faulty self are in fact deeply connected because when the Grandiose Self experiences a narcissistic wound, the Abusive Self does the dirty work.
Working together, the two sides of the faulty self escalate the damage and divisiveness. By locating his disowned qualities and behaviors in the other, the NPD gives himself license to judge and abuse the other while maintaining intact his view of his Grandiose Self as good, even perfect, and often, as the victim of his “abuser”—i.e., the projective target. I take this up in Part 2.
NPD Divisiveness. The bitter chasm between those who are inside or outside of the Obama fusion is vast, real, divisive, destructive, and unprecedented. It has nothing to do with racism (but much to do with Obama’s aggressive and escalating race-baiting). It cross-cuts the usual policy alliances. It does not align with traditional conservative-liberal constellations. It is permeated by the “Hillary factor”; that cuts a million ways. The “Sarah factor”; then blew the top off the volcano. Many Hillary supporters who had signed on—however reluctantly—with the Democratic candidate are exploded with emotion, attacking a female candidate, and reading the riot act to any woman who doesn’t jump on their train. This is not business-as-usual.
Let me conclude the first part of my interpretation by drawing out key implications of the structural NPD issues for polarizing the electorate:
1)Obama himself is divided. He does not come from his center because he has no center from which to come. That’s why he flip-flops. We can’t depend today on what he said yesterday. Divisiveness is standard for any NPD, but typically it affects only a limited set of people, not an entire nation.
2) As is also the case with virtually any NPD, people tend to see either the public presentation of Obama’s divided self and be drawn into it, or, having seen the abusive side, cannot trust the good-guy presentation. That pits admirers and skeptics/critics against each other.
Those who treat words and policy positions as real, and as the correct basis on which to evaluate a candidate tend to see in Obama their best hopes for a desired change from cheneybush. They range from swooners to pragmatists, but share some degree of belief in, if not fusion with, his surface presentation and his words. Most accept his official narrative at face value, and resist information that would doesn’t fit. They do not see another side of him, or they deny its existence, or dismiss its relevance because policy trumps all. Yet they often don’t know what his policies are—because they haven’t done the research or his obfuscations have made it difficult to pin down his positions. When discordant information is provided or uncomfortable questions are asked, these supporters often attack and try to discredit the source or the messenger.
By contrast, those for whom behavior trumps words may point to any of the behaviors touched on in Part 1 of this article, to other behaviors that place big question marks over “who is Barack Obama?”; or to the sexism, race-card playing, and the gross intimidation that has marked his campaign, his bloggers, the caucuses, and the convention. To reward those behaviors would be, for them (and for myself), to condone sexism, misogyny, and caucus fraud. It would mean condoning the destruction of democratic process by the Democratic Party, as well as condoning the DNC’s utter silence on the sexism and misogyny directed at its best candidate in 75 years. In taking this principled stand for women, transparency, and democratic principles, we encounter disbelief, outrage, lack of comprehension, and disrespect.
An NPD pits people against each other not only because they see and focus on different sides of his divided self, but also more insidiously by raising questions, doubts, and negative assessments in their minds about each other. When I observe therapists who jumped on the Obama bandwagon or tell me that they feel a kindred spirit in him, I wonder what kind of therapist can’t see through him; involuntarily, my respect for them as professionals is suspended and I draw back, feeling estranged. When Hillary cannot meet the perfection standards of so-called feminists who can’t seem to find any flaws in Barack, I know these”feminists” are perpetrating the same old, male-identified, double standard, and that they are not people with whom I would ever want to share a foxhole. When a Hillary-hating husband intervenes in my emails to his wife, I wonder what happened to the feminist I used to know who now allows this.
3) A third source of divisiveness inherent in Obama’s NPD structure is use of surrogates for his disowned behaviors which they project onto his targets. While some degree of this behavior is par for the course in politics, the extremes to which Obamanation has taken destruction of the political enemy has generated bitter schisms in our social fabric. The fact that Obama mirrors dismiss this behavior (as non-existent or of no account) only widens and deepens the chasm and non-comprehension between those on both sides of the divide.
4) Turning opponents into targets to be destroyed (not just defeated) may be part of the Alinsky method and of Chicago politics, but it is also consistent with NPD dynamics. The immaturity of NPDs is indicated by their inability to accept responsibility for the consequences of their own behavior or deficiencies; they project blame onto others. We have just watched cheneybush do this for eight years. Now their liberal critics and their selected candidate are doing exactly the same thing, with no insight into their own behavior.
What is unusual and disturbing here is both the expanding concentric rings of Obama’s projective targets, and the nature and destructiveness of the charges being projected by Obama and his surrogates. Even during the general election, Hillary Clinton was still their primary projective target. If he had lost, she would have been blamed. Many of her supporters refused to get on board, expanding the projective target to white women of a certain age; we, too, would have been blamed for his loss and accused of racism. As the race tightened, his mirrors, suppliers, and surrogates chose the incendiary path of expanding the target to the American people with the dangerous narrative that they may not be “ready” for a black president.
Nothing has been more destructive and divisive than turning this election into a referendum on race. When I concluded this piece prior to the election, I wrote: If he loses, blaming the American people instead of his own shortcomings will inflict even more grievous wounds on an already divided and weakened nation. With his win, the self-congratulatory smugness of white liberals and black racists will fail to examine—at our collective peril—and thus fail to remediate, the systemic fraud, thuggery, misogyny, and race-baiting that, along with an economic meltdown, turned the trick. A presidency based on lies, deceit, intimidation, and suppression of dissent is doomed to fail—as the last eight years should have taught us. Now that he is president-elect, the ugly underside of his campaign is swept away in the narrative of its “brilliance” and “discipline.’
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