I don't know Obama, but I know what it's like to be in his class, his caste; I used to be in it, or at least aspire to it.
He cannot compromise because he is of a caste that cannot touch the lower classes: the workers, the business owners, the gun owners, the churchgoers -- Republicans (of the Main Street variety, not the Wall Street subgroup.) For an intellectual to contact these untouchables is to pollute his mind. Thus he remains safe from bothersome facts.Contrast him to the Founders. Say what you want, they all were involved in a range of activities that brought them in touch with the natural world and the human world. Washington commanded backwoodsmen in the French and Indian War. Even John Adams had a farm. They engaged in farming and business. They lived surrounded by ordinary people.
But Obama went from private school to small private college to the Ivy League, then various sinecures.
For instance, I know Hyde Park, the president's former home. It is an enclave, a bubble, plunked into the South Side. I've worked on campuses and in downtowns. The modern government and corporation seal themselves off from the less tidy aspects of life, as they seal themselves off from bad weather and noise.
Even when among the hoi polloi, the intelligensia are aloof, floating above it all, like a 17th century duke oblivious to the horse droppings on the street in London....Obama is like that: the coccoon of his mind and thoughts and ideology blurs out the unseemly sights and smells of cities or, say, failed stimulus programs.
Of course, Obama like so many of his generation must detach from the chaos of his family. A generation of latchkey kids is inheriting the world. They cannot, dare not, express their sense of being lost, and fear. So they float through life, ignoring the nastiness....
And as they subscribe to a worldview that human beings are nothing special -- we are just a pool of chemicals wandering aimlessly through a pointless existence -- just being alive isn't enough for them. They must be more. They must be hip, they must be cool. They must be above it all.
Their minds, so powerful exercised on fantasies and so lacking in contact with reality, become powerful at creating fantasies....When those mental gyrations fail, the Obamanauts have nothing to fall back on. This creates panic and despair. Then their fear and dread of the Others propels them into rabid attacks on those Others.