In August 2007, Paul Krugman, in an op-ed titled “It’s All About Them” famously labeled Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, the then-leading Republican candidates for President, “narcissists” because they allegedly viewed real problems from the perspective of how they were viewed:
What’s now clear is that the two men most likely to end up as the G.O.P. presidential nominee are cut from the same cloth.
This probably isn’t a coincidence. Arguably, the current state of the Republican Party is such that only extreme narcissists have a chance of getting nominated….
All of which leaves us with a political question. Most voters are thoroughly fed up with the current narcissist in chief. Are they really ready to elect another?
Krugman’s clarion call, like so many other NY Times sirens, reverberated throughout the left wing blogosphere.
I wonder what Krugman thinks of this Obama statement regarding the crushing stock market swings (most down swings) since Obama took office:
“A smidgen of good news and suddenly everything is doing great. A little bit of bad news and ooohh , we’re down on the dumps,” Obama said. “And I am obviously an object of this constantly varying assessment. I am the object in chief of this varying assessment.”
So Obama screams that the sky is falling so he can pass his stimulus plan, then swings to the positive so that he can pass his budget, and the nation’s financial fortunes swing with Obama’s rhetoric. Trillions of market value lost, retirements in jeopardy because of Obama’s political games, but it’s not about us.
No, it’s all about Obama. He is the victim. He is the object in chief of every one’s assessment.
He who writes autobiographies but not biographies, who gives speeches which he declares to be historic, who recognizes his place in history long before he has created history. He who views this nation as but a stage upon which he creates his life story. He who expressed his love for this country because nowhere else could his story be possible. It’s all about him.
Krugman’s columns appear under the banner “The Conscience of a Liberal.” Will Krugman’s conscience lead him to give Obama the same assessment Krugman gave Romney, Giuliani and Bush. Will Krugman label Obama the “Narcissist-in-Chief”?
Don’t hold your breath, since we are talking about “the conscience of a liberal.”
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Comments
The degree of projection with these people is just staggering. What kind of universe do these lunatics inhabit where George Bush is a narcissist but Bill Clinton or Barack “The Messiah” Obama are not?
Unbelievable.
I learned during the Clinton years that narcissists are very adept at self-indulgent pity.
Boy, Romney isn’t looking so bad in retrospect.
I can hardly think of an American president – any president – less narcissistic than George W. Bush. He never curried favor with anyone, continually to his detriment. He never talked much about himself. Nothing he did was about him.
Romney and Giuliani just seem to have very healthy political egos. John Edwards, John Kerry and Barack Obama strike me as consummate narcissists – it’s all about them and they have no goods to back it up. Zip, zero, nada. Total empty suits. One of the hallmarks of a narcissist is he’s a zero but huge in his own mind.
Algore might be the biggest narcissist of all.
Hey Peg C.,
Amen!!!!!!
And so who in Washington is not a narcissist? Is that not the quality that the chattering classes call “gravitas”? Krugman is himself is a narcissist. As the Carly Simon song goes “you’re so vain, you probably think this column is about you…”