First Impressions

People can be hard to judge. Most of the time when we first meet, they put forward a good front. And since most of us assume that a majority of others are good people, we take them at face value. Rather than question their motives, we believe that they are who they say they are.

Only later are many of us disabused by ensuing events. Although we make mistakes in our initial assessments, we allow these to be modified by what others do. We have learned—often through the school of hard knocks—that how people behave is a better indicator of who they are than what they verbalize.

This is true in our personal life and our occupational life. It should also be true in the political arena. By now anyone who has been keeping score knows that politicians are addicted to hyperbole. Many of them make wild claims in the hope that this will persuade voters to put them in office.

Recent events have only underlined the degree to which this penchant applies to Barack Obama. Our president is an eloquent man, but increasing numbers of Americans are concluding that he is not the man they once assumed he was. As current polls demonstrate, many of them are no longer certain that he is the effective leader they previously supposed.

What the record now shows is that Obama tends to spurn leadership. Although he still affects the pose of a dynamic leader, he prefers to defer to others for concrete inspiration. We see this, for instance, in his reaction to the looming budget deficits. Despite calls that he present a plan for dealing with these, he prefers to hang back to see what Republicans propose. Then, no doubt, he will leap to the fore to assert that they—scoundrels that they are—have got it all wrong.

We also see this pattern in his response to the Libyan crisis. Although he early on demanded that Qaddafi leave office, there was little follow-up. It was only after the French and British dove into the breach that he decided something had to be done. Even then, however, he boasted of stepping aside to allow others, in this case NATO, to take the lead.

But this pattern is not new. It was visible at the outset of his administration. Obama knew that he had to do something about the recession, yet instead of putting forth a legislative proposal of his own, he deferred to Nancy Pelosi. She, and her congressional team, then cobbled together a stimulus package the contents of which we are only now fully discovering.

The same, of course, was famously true of Obamacare. During the fight to enact it, Ms. Pelosi opined that congress would have to pass it before we could find out what was in it. And where was the president? Well he was back in the White House surreptitiously making deals to pass legislation the details of which he himself probably did not know.

How does any of this count as leadership? Clearly, it doesn’t. One last example of this tendency to abdicate responsibility was Obama’s recent speech on energy policy. In it he boldly asserted that we would drastically cut the amount of oil imported from abroad. Then he offered not a single tangible proposal on how to achieve this.

Meanwhile members of the fourth estate (i.e., the mainstream media) continue to laud the president’s skillful guidance. They, however, must be seeing things in the man that many of us have missed. More probably they are transfixed by their fantasy version of what they once thought he was.

Unable to modify their initial impressions because they prefer to embrace what they hoped for rather than acknowledge actual developments, they have become a travesty of what objective reportage should be. Far from reflecting events as they are, they merely provide accounts of what is in their imagination.

Let us hope that the public has a better grounding in reality. Since it will not be long before voters are asked to determine who our next national leader will be, ordinary Americans need to distinguish between what is said and what has been done. If not, if people allow their own aspirations for Obama to color their judgments, we may all be in trouble.

Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University