I realize that the view of Obama as a tremendous narcissist has become a right-wing meme, but it seems so odd (kind of like the related view that he's a know-nothing who can't speak without a teleprompter, though that one seems to have died down since the election). I'm curious: how did the narcissism meme get started, and what evidence is cited for it, other than that major politicians tend to have major egos?
I'm not trying to make a political point. I don't follow the sources on this and would like someone to explain to me how the people who believe this came to believe it and what arguments they advance for it.
(p.s. I think you may have misread the GP, who meant that McCain would not have gotten their vote instead of Obama.)
All with predictable results. This isn't to say they never used teleprompters in their life; just that when they were running for the nomination, it was a useful cudgel to bash Obama and implicitly Mitt. That's why they were known as pretty gaffe-prone candidates.
> (p.s. I think you may have misread the GP, who meant that McCain would not have gotten their vote instead of Obama.)
Yes, I did misread it, thank you.
Instead we have a deafening silence from all these groups that used to squawk daily about Gitmo and other government abuses while the other guy was in office.
How are you so sure of that? McCain's neither a saint nor a philosopher-king: his personal narcissism seems to rival Obama's, and he often seems to be successfully flattered and managed by those around him. But he erratically takes stands on principle, and he also has personal experience of both torture and prolonged imprisonment. And in fact he took an anti-torture position which, while it wasn't absolute, was well out ahead of other Congressmen and presidential candidates and was hardly calculated to win votes.
There's also the fact that whatever about McCain's personal inclinations, he or any other Republican president would have been under much sharper pressure from others on the issue. The people and institutions who were shouting so much about detention and torture and drone strikes under Bush and then became silent or muted under Obama (or indeed rushed to bestow on him a Nobel Peace Prize) would have continued shouting under McCain.