Freudian slips may haunt Obama-

By: Keith Koffler


President Barack Obama, fresh from his drubbing in the 2010 midterms, is trying to revive his fortunes by pursuing a path toward the middle.

But Obama’s effort to overhaul his image is encumbered by conflicting impressions of who he is that have been engraved in voters’ minds by his own words.

During unguarded and even some staged — but inadvertently revealing — moments, Obama has allowed unintended glimpses into his thinking. At various times, his offhand comments have led critics, and many voters, to view him as an ardent leftist or an elitist or — most recently — a partisan Democrat.

These Freudian slips, uncovering the man beneath the spin and the speeches, are embedded in Americans’ subconscious, if you will, because they seem to come directly from the president’s inner self. Obama can change his policies, but he cannot easily erase these perceptions. And because of his cool opaqueness — noted even by his own staff — and his relatively brief track record on the national stage, voters have little else to go on.

Obama’s meteoric rise and young presidency have been marked by asides that appear to offer insights into his psyche.

His surprising self-revelations began during the presidential campaign. They were harmful but did not create major problems.

First, there was his condescension toward blue-collar Midwestern voters. At a San Francisco fundraiser, he said, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The remark suggested he is an elitist, so far removed from the concerns of average Americans that he presented a harsh stereotype of what they are like. This perception of Obama’s being removed from mainstream voters was not helped by Michelle Obama’s own Freudian slip. “For the first time in my adult life,” she said early during the 2008 campaign, “I am proud of my country.”

There was also the case of Joe the Plumber. “I think when you spread the wealth around,” Obama told him, “it’s good for everybody.”

The statement raised eyebrows — not because of the principle, which many agree with, but because of the terminology. “Spread the wealth” sounded scarily like a socialist tract people are forced to read in college.

But then came the actual policies of President Obama, and they seemed to fill in the outlines suggested by these earlier glimpses. Faced with the economic abyss, Obama ordered unprecedented government interventions into the private sector and the massive stimulus bill. He moved on to heavily regulate the health system. He stocked the White House with “czars” unanswerable to Congress.


While Obama has said his policies were required to address the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression and a health care coverage emergency, many regarded them as overbearing government intrusions, out of step with American traditions of individualism and reliance on the private sector.

Other presidential Freudian slips even left a sense that Obama is hostile to accumulating wealth. His lectures to bankers, credit card company executives and health insurers sounded unduly harsh to some voters. Perhaps they felt validated in their suspicions when Obama said in April, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

His assertion just after the midterm elections that voters’ concerns about his policies stemmed from his failure to fully explain them — implying that they hadn’t understood him — inadvertently revived the perception of a man who elevates himself above the electorate.

Added to this, in the weeks before the midterms, was the vision of a snarling partisan voters hadn’t previously seen, the former avatar of “hope and change” dressing down House Minority Leader John Boehner and dismissing Republicans as Slurpee-guzzling incompetents.

What will be harder for Obama to revise are the powerful impressions created by two slips that indicated his campaign partisanship might be more than rhetoric. First was the suggestion, made during an interview on a Latino radio station, that Latinos should “punish” their “enemies” at the polls, followed later by the awkward attempt to walk it back by saying he meant “opponents.”

Obama then undermined the sincerity of his repeated calls for Republicans to work with him as equals, saying as the midterm campaign headed into its final week, “We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”

It happens to presidents. When Ronald Reagan joked on an open microphone that he had outlawed Russia and “we begin bombing in five minutes,” or George H.W. Bush read aloud his cue card notes, exclaiming, “Message: I care,” or Bill Clinton said, “That depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is,” their remarks seemed to reveal some essential truth about each man that framed the way the country understood him.

In Obama’s case, the accumulation of comments that seem contrary to the image he conveys not only will create perceptions the president will find difficult to dislodge but could prompt questions about his sincerity.

This could ensure that Obama’s stroll to the center will seem, at best, a bridge too far and, at worst, disingenuous opportunism.

Keith Koffler, who covered the White House for CongressDaily and Roll Call, is editor of the blog White House Dossier.


© 2010 Capitol News Company, LLC

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=4BF67EB3-A616-C58D-6A2C3F2CBCE5A73A