All Presidents are Narcissists

by Tex Norman⁽⁶³⁾

I was recently sent an article by I srael Psychologists Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of the Malignant Self Love, and it was all about how Obama was a Narcissist. Dr. Vaknin then compares Obama to Jim Jones, the charismatic leader of People's Temple, the man who led over 900 of his followers to cheerfully commit mass suicide and even murder their own children, then he compares Obama to David Koresh, Charles Manson, Joseph Koni, Shoko Asahara, Stalin, Saddam, Mao,Kim Jong Ill and Adolph Hitler.

Dr. Vaknin writes:

What can be more dangerous than having a man bereft of conscience, a serial liar, and one who cannot distinguish his fantasies from reality as the leader of the free world? I hate to sound alarmist, but one is a fool if one is not alarmed. Many politicians are narcissists. They pose no threat to others...They are simply self serving and selfish.

Finally, Vaknin ends with a dire prediction:

There is no insanity greater than electing a pathological narcissist as president.

Email attachments like this one come to me regularly and are always delivered with a flourish, and an expectation that this time, they’ve got me, that this time, I will be left a repentant puddle of melted and evaporating liberalism.

I agree that Obama is probably a narcissist, although I would not say his narcissism is worse than the narcissism of his predecessors. The purported fact that Obama is a narcissist is a non-issue for me.

The definition of NARCISSISM is: A pattern of traits and behaviors which signify infatuation and obsession with one's self to the exclusion of all others and the egotistic and ruthless pursuit of one's gratification, dominance and ambition.

By definition then I think that all politicians have to be narcissists. Who else would run for office but narcissists? If a narcissist is a person who loves themselves and thinks what they know better than anyone else what should be done, they their methods of problem solving are better than anyone else’s in the entire country, then isn't it reasonable to say that everyone who runs for a political office would have to be permeated by narcissism?

Just ask yourself this: Would we want to vote for a person who was running for office and didn't believe they knew what to do to address the problems of their constituency? Really who is going to vote for a guy who says in his campaign:

We have problems in this country, and I don’t have all the answers, and I’m probably going to have to ask a lot of other people what the right thing to do is, but vote for me anyway.

Wouldn't anyone who thought they would make a good President have to be a narcissist? Wouldn't anyone who thought they were ready and able to take on one of the hardest jobs on earth have to be egotistical person?

I can't imagine anyone running for President who wouldn't have to have a lot of confidence.

After getting this Obama is a Narcissist article I Googled the topic and found articles written during the Bush II administration that said George W. Bush was a ‘malignant narcissist.’ [see Paul Levy’s article GEORGE BUSH IS A MALIGNANT NARCISSIST Tue Feb 8, 2005, or his webside: www.awakeninthedream.com ]

I found it fascinating that the Paul Levy article compared George W. Bush to a list of horrible leaders and at least two of the names are also on the Obama list of names:

The intellectual and social critic Sulak Sivaraksa likens Bush to two other malignant narcissists, Hitler and Stalin, pointing out that Bush's "axis of Evil," Hitler's "Final Solution," and Stalin's "pogrom of peasants" were actually analogous attempts "to perfect the world by destroying the [projected] impurities." Interestingly enough, another modern day malignant narcissist is none other than Saddam Hussein.

I also found articles about the Narcissism of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson. I feel certain that given time I could find some expert or self-proclaimed expert to label each and every President as a narcissist.

Perhaps it is necessary and even OK for our leaders to be narcissistic as long as we don’t believe the lie they are telling about themselves to themselves and to the world. Very often, when a problem presents itself there may be 100 different responses, each aimed at resolving the problem, but rarely can we get anything done until one of those potential solutions is selected and applied to the problem.

How do we decided which of the hundreds of possible choices will be THE choice selected to attempt to solve the problem at hand?

The leader may get input, the leader may get lobbied, but eventually the leader is the one who has to choose a path to follow. The people have chosen Obama and a mostly Democratic Party dominated legislative body. Periodically the voters get a chance to assess the choices being made and to delete those they have picked poorly. Our government is a system of checks and balances, and the ultimate check, the primary source of balance when all these elected narcissists get too full of themselves, is the votes of the people. We the people are the check and the balance to the egocentric acts of our elected leaders.

Article submitted Sunday, July 12, 2009 & read 2274 times.

Leave your comments through Kerplop:

» left by Jeff Brown from Los Angeles (3 years 306 days ago.)

Tex,

Yes, what people don't realize is that in the definition of politician itself you find the phrase "self-serving." And of course he or she needs to be confident (Carter failed to instill public confidence because of his, as you say, "I don't have all the answers confession) and at least give the appearance that they have all the answers (even though the cabinet is there to fill in all the obvious knowledge gaps; Regan knew this, the great administrator). But our term limits, impeachment and so forth enable us to take out a wack job like Nixon (a true narcissist) who is not only self-serving but infested by a destructive dark side.

Fortunately, most presidents, even though they are self-serving and high on themselves (have to be to be confident enough, strong enough to be in the public eye at that level) do care about the people. So I disagree with that presidents are total narcissists or to the effect that they function "to the exclusion of all others and the egotistic and ruthless pursuit of one's gratification, dominance and ambition." A true narcissist shouldn't be president or taken out when found out.

Thanks for the article.

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