A legend in his own mind

It's six months into the presidency of Mr Barack Hussein Obama and, uniquely for a US president, I still haven't figured out what he is. Oh, granted he's a Democrat and by his own, very thin, resume he's the most left-wing man ever to have ascended to the oval office, but being a leftist covers a lot of ground from mild American-style liberalism to raving Maoism. The question with Mr Obama is, where does he fall within this spectrum. Amazingly, after four years in the public eye, I find one of four alternatives:

• An idealogue who finds America in its present form unworthy of survival, who intends to rip it to shreds and rebuild it in his own image much as Tony Blair tried to do with Britain's institutions.
• A dedicated socialist who has a Utopian programme that he believes will usher in the new secularist millennium and for which all else is a distraction.
• A 21st century Mussolini who is a pragmatist at heart and will form a Third Way because the only criteria for success is not failing.
• An Alinskyite postmodernist whose sole objective is to acquire power for its own sake.

However different all these are, I believe that Mr Obama does have an agenda and a political philosophy. The trouble is, what he actually believes and desires is obscured by the following:

• Despite his reputation for being "cool", Mr Obama is actually a very timid man who is easily swayed by others and events–so much so that it's often hard to tell when he is acting of his own volition, caving to intimidation, or just not interested enough to do more than vote "present". This is the reason he's often so thuggish when crossed. Ending an objection with "I won" or making veiled threats about mobs and pitchforks is hardly the strategy of a confident man.
• He's a supreme narcissist. True, so was Mr Bill Clinton, but at least the latter's ego manifested itself in his desire to turn his tenure into an eight-year frat house party. With Obama we have a man who doesn't regard his presidency as a chapter in American history, but as another installment in the personal saga of Barack Hussein Obama. Worse, as seen in his Cairo speech, he talks as if the presidency is beneath him and that he'd rather be seen as, to give him the benefit of the doubt, a king who will be remembered as the wise ruler who made the lion lie down with the lamb while showering his adoring subjects with largesse.
• Contrary to boilerplate descriptions, he is not a very intelligent man nor is he very articulate without a teleprompter. It's easy to seem smart if you're well-spoken, but as a playwright I've spent many years hanging around actors, who are incredibly articulate, yet as a class are as dumb as a sack of doorknobs. Furthermore, it's clear from his speeches that far from being the "historian" president, Mr Obama's grasp of history is nil and he is probably the least well-read president of anyone I can think of.
• This is the clincher, he is staggeringly inexperienced and his basic competence is a giant cipher. I find it literally impossible to tell which of his policies are borne out of due consideration, ideology, desperate flailing about, or terror of altering something he has no understanding of.

Oddly, it's the last point that gives me hope. If there is one thing that has saved the Free World from raving do-gooders like The One is that they usually turn out to be complete showers at the job and therefore don't do much damage. We can only hope that that's the case here, but in the meantime, God help us all because the prospects could get pretty scary before the clock runs out.

Update: This sort of sycophantic rubbish on the part of the MSM doesn't help.

Update: Michael Barone wades in on the subject.