( – promoted by lowkell)

In the previous installment, I promised new thoughts on the mystery of President Obama’s seeking and gaining the pinnacle of power only then to manifest an incapacity to use it against Republican enemies relentlessly seeking to thwart, delegitimize, disempower, and destroy him.

I recognize that some people reject the question, proposing variations either of “He’s in cahoots with the Republicans, only pretending to want to achieve the things they defeat” (this one was popular on Daily Kos) or of “He’s doing just fine given what he’s up against.” Those people will doubtless not be interested in my proposed answer to a question whose premise they reject.

To me, that premise –that President Obama has been extraordinarily unable or unwilling to confront his implacable Republican political foes– is clearly true. In fact, I think it likely will be considered by future historians the salient truth about Mr. Obama’s presidency (at least up to this point– we can only hope the coming showdowns will show him to be readier for battle).

So I maintain that this question is the one to be asking.  As for my proposed answer, I don’t want to oversell it. As I said yesterday, it’s speculative, and only partially developed.  Consider it a “clinical intuition” (and yes, I do have a background in psychology).  I do think I’ve come up with something.

The whole idea rests on a single observation: While President Obama seems astoundingly handicapped in wielding power against his enemies within the American political system, he shows no such incapacity for toughness against external enemies. He’s attacked them with drones. He ordered the lethal attack against Osama bin Laden.

Against those outside the “We” of the community, he can seek and destroy. It’s within the boundaries of the community that he shrinks from confrontation.

My clinical intuition tells me an inference can be made here.

This dichotomy suggests to me a basic template around which, in the course of his growing up, Barack Obama developed a dichotomous — unintegrated — relationship with power and conflict. Something in the original “We” of young Barack’s development, I propose, simultaneously instilled a drive toward power in the outside world and compelled him to relinquish some fundamental personal power within the boundaries of that “We.”

(Indeed, the frustrations from that relinquishment in the realm close by may well have fueled the outward drive toward power. A driving desire for power generally comes from some life issue concerning power that has left unfinished business.)

I don’t have any sense whether this original boundary defining the “We” was within the family — I observed no signs of that in his wonderful book, Dreams From my Father — or whether it was the larger social community of peers, or schools, etc.

But whatever it was, I infer that his accommodation to that microcosm entailed his making some fundamental capitulations.  Some important parts of himself would not be asserted.  Rather, he would abide by terms demanded by that microcosm — a surrounding “We” with respect to which he felt he must make peace.

One more component of this accommodation might be inferred.  While this hypothetical accommodation entailed a real capitulation for the young Barack, this defeat was not visible to the outside world.  By keeping it hidden, by acting if he’d surrendered nothing of importance, by not acknowledging that he’d surrendered to the dominance to the surrounding “We,” the young Barack Obama could maintain his dignity.

Hence the president who, within the “We” of the American political arena, accepts dignity as a substitute for power. A president more fully thwarted than any president we have seen — thwarted by a force so outrageous that it could have been shamed into either submission or oblivion — whose comportment nonetheless betrays hardly a sign of the humiliation and frustration from the ongoing defeat of his intentions.  And a president who shows little indication of any gut-level determination to counter-attack and assert his dominance.

Under normal circumstances, Obama’s inability to fight the enemy within the gates for dominance would have limited costs. A liberal president giving away his power to a conservative opposition would result in solutions to our problems further in the conservative direction than they needed to be.

But these are not normal times, because today’s Republican Party is not a normal political force.  This is a party in the grip of a sick and broken spirit, a party whose virtually every impulse and every move is toward destructiveness.

For a president to give away his power to such an opposition party results not in more conservative solutions to our problems, but in no solutions at all (and even more problems).  

It’s been clear from before Mr. Obama took office that dealing with the destructive force that’s taken over the Republican Party is Job One.  But regrettably, this is the one job — dealing with enemies within the American political system — that this extremely intelligent and capable man seems incapable of doing.

Today’s Republican Party is clearly a greater threat to the nation than the terrorists that the president has gone after with clones and Navy Seals.  

That at this moment in our history, in these particular circumstances, a good man has become president who is crippled in this particular aspect of the wielding of power is a great tragedy for the United States of America.

Here are a few Virginia (and national) news headlines, political and otherwise, for Tuesday, August 27. Also, check out the video about how we really shoud name our national disasters. I’ve got a few more suggestions: Hurricane Ken Cuccinelli, Tropical Storm EW Jackson, Superstorm Mark Obenshain…all (un)natural disasters!

*Obama weighs limited military strike on Syria (“The potential strike would serve as both punishment and deterrent for chemical weapon usage, while keeping the U.S. out of deeper involvement in Syria’s civil war.”)

*25-year span of no chemical arms may have been broken

*Wave of retirements at top levels of federal workforce creates challenges (“Agencies may not be prepared for departures of those with expertise that cannot easily be replaced.”)

*Humans’ complicity in climate change can’t be ignored (“The scientists are set to claim that the increasing amount of greenhouse gases that humans have emitted into the atmosphere has almost certainly been the chief driver of the warming of the planet over the past half-century, a finding to which they ascribe 95 percent confidence. That’s the level of likelihood researchers typically consider robust enough to justify drawing very strong conclusions.”)

*Why Ken Cuccinelli Is the Anti-Chris Christie (“Ken Cuccinelli, the GOP’s floundering gubernational candidate in Virginia, would be wise to take a page of out of Chris Christie’s blue-state playbook. But it might be too late, writes Lloyd Green.”)

*Cuccinelli goes on defense over McDonnell in Va. governor race (How about over his own scandals – Jonnie Williams/Star Scientific, Bobby Thompson, CONSOL Energy, etc?)

*The state of the Virginia governor’s race: A running conversation between The Fix and GovBeat’s Reid Wilson

*Rubio to stump for Cuccinelli in Virginia (Hey, one of the climate science-denying natural disasters is coming to campaign for Ken Kookinelli. Surprised? I’m not – cuckoo birds of a feather flock together.)

*Realtors endorse McAuliffe over Cuccinelli (Note that this group almost always endorses Republicans. But not Ken Kookinelli – he’s too crazy for them, apparently.)

*Patrick, a retired reservist and a Democrat, will run against Rigell (“Suzanne Patrick, a former Pentagon official and retired naval officer, said she is running against U.S. Rep. Scott Rigell next year.”)

*McDonnell is fundraising again – but this time for his legal bills (What a farce.)

*The red, the blue and the green (“Color-coded maps follow the money in statewide elections.”)

*Inmate sex-change request likely to be ruled on this week

*The state of Roanoke (“Roanoke is, as the mayor says, on the right track for growth. Plans are under way that will bring major change.”)

*Forecast: Summer’s sizzle isn’t over

*Harper isn’t a hit with opponents

I strongly agree with Secretary of State Kerry and the Obama administration on this “moral obscenity,” as Kerry calls the Syrian use of chemical weapons against its own people. The bottom line in my book is simple: this is not about Syria, per se, but rather about a principle: that the international community can not allow governments to use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, let alone against civilians. Those governments that do so must pay a serious price, or else it’s a total “green light” for future governments to do the same. Unacceptable. The only question now is how to respond, exactly, not whether the international community needs to respond.

One more point: I’m well aware that both the Assad regime and much of the opposition – including Al Qaeda elements, Sunni extremists, etc. – is really bad news. To put it mildly, neither side is progressive, by any standard, in any way. And I’m also well aware that we do NOT want to – and should not – get into another ground war, or even an extended air campaign in the Middle East. But we (the U.S. and its allies – France, the UK, etc.) certainly have the capability to put some serious hurt on the war criminal Assad regime using cruise missiles, etc. I say “war criminal,” by the way, not just for the use of chemical weapons, but for its vast gulag of torture chambers, as well as for its responsibility in the death of more than 100,000 Syrians, the wounding of many more, and the destruction of much of their own country. The human race should be well beyond this kind of thing in the year 2013, but sadly we’re not…

(Good question, this has frustrated me for Barack Obama’s entire presidency. I mean, heck, the Republicans had a meeting on the night of Obama’s first inauguration, in which they vowed to oppose anything he did. They promised to make him a 1-term president and make him “fail.” At that point, you know, just f*** ’em and ram through your legislation! You know they’d do the same! – promoted by lowkell)

I have never been as excited about a political leader as I was about Barack Obama at the time of his election in 2008.  A year later, in considerable distress, I published as an op/ed in the Baltimore Sun , an open letter to the president calling upon him to stop giving his power away to his enemies so that he could do the job he was elected to do.

It is because of your failure to fight back that the Republican Party – behaving more scandalously than any political opposition in memory – has grown stronger, while you have grown weaker [I wrote in late 2009]… Your opponents are relentless, single-minded and ruthless in their efforts to weaken and destroy you. This is a continuation of the same struggle for which Americans chose you to be their champion. It’s your job not to ignore the battle but to fight and win it.

That was a year before the Republicans swept away the huge Democratic majority in the House of Representatives with their own huge majority, and the problem I wrote about in 2009 persists still.

The Republican opposition has consistently treated President Obama as an outright enemy.  They’ve done everything they could to make him fail.  They’ve successfully delegitimized him with their base. And they’ve treated him with contempt, far from according him the usual degree of respect that has traditionally been given to a president even by his political opponents.

Meanwhile, with a few scattered gestures aside, President Obama has never fought back with anywhere near the intensity — not to say the ferocity — that his enemies bring to their fight against him.

It is remarkable, really-even bizarre.  No one becomes President of the United States without having an extraordinarily strong desire for power.  But here is a man who labored long and hard to gain the most powerful position on the planet who then showed less acumen in coping with a power struggle than the average boy on the playground.

In the years I’ve been discussing this astonishing failure to stand and fight effectively, I’ve found that a great many of the president’s other supporters are eager to maintain that he’s doing the best that can be done under the circumstances.

He’s black, runs one excuse, and the American public would respond adversely were he to act like “an angry black man.” But he could making his enemies pay a price for their disgraceful and destructive conduct without a display of anger.  Besides, President Obama has thrown a good jab here and there, almost always succeeding with those more aggressive gestures in moving the political struggle his way.  The problem is that every time he gets his opponent on the ropes, he backs off and lets his opponent regain his strength.

He came into office at a time the economy was tanking, runs another argument, so his hands were tied.  But FDR came to power in the depths of the Great Depression, and he used that circumstance as an opportunity to transform the country.

(People on the far left, meanwhile, often “explain” the president’s inability to fight with the assertion that he’s really in cahoots with the Republicans.  He only pretends to favor what he says he wants, this argument goes, so every time the Republicans prevail Obama is actually winning also.  I don’t buy that, either.  When in American history have we ever seen collusion of this sort, and when have we ever seen a political leader voluntarily arranging for himself to appear weak, thwarted, and defeated by his political foes?)

So what explains this incongruence, this man who – against all odds – succeeded in gaining power and then showed so little ability or inclination to fight against those whose main desire was to strip that power from him?

I don’t know how many hundreds of hours I’ve spent pondering this question, some of it publicly in written form. But I’ve never been satisfied with any answer I’ve come up with. That we’re dealing with something at the level of character structure seemed clear, but I didn’t have much of a picture of what it was.

Now a new idea has come to me. It is but a speculation — call it a “clinical insight” – but I do think I’m onto something.  And I will articulate these new thoughts in the next installment.

Here are a few Virginia (and national) news headlines, political and otherwise, for Monday, August 26.

*Confident Syria Used Chemicals, U.S. Mulls Action (The bottom line in my book is simple: this has nothing to do with Syria, per se, but rather a principle, that the international community can not allow governments to use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, let alone against civilians. Those governments that do so must pay a serious price, or else it’s a total “green light” for future governments to do the same. Unacceptable.)

*The Armageddon Caucus (“A handful of lawmakers may hold the rest of Congress hostage this fall to their extreme ideology.” And they are all Republicans, of course.)

*Cokie Roberts: ‘What’s Going on With Voter Rights is Downright Evil’ (Agreed.)

*Colin Powell On Republican Voting Restrictions: ‘It’s Going To Backfire’

*Ethanol’s empty promise (“Mandates won’t work, but a carbon tax might push the nation toward clean technologies.”)

*Virginia Governor Race Lures Far-Flung Donors (More boring horse-race coverage. The sad reality is that the media, and probably the public as well, is averse to serious policy discussion. Sigh.)

*The facts of omission (“Virginia’s ethics laws need strengthening, a fact Cuccinelli decided to champion after he stretched them beyond recognition.”)

*Cuccinell overstates McAuliffe’s role in Lincoln Bedroom scandal (“We rate Cuccinelli’s statement False.”)

*Most Virginia police agencies fall short of state photo lineup guidelines

*Gov. McDonnell, It’s Time for a Hard Choice (“We have said before, and we say again, Gov. McDonnell has lost all moral authority to govern. The longer he remains in his post, the more damage he does to the institution of the governor’s office and to the commonwealth.” And so has Ken Cuccinelli, who also took money from Bobby Thompson, Jonnie Williams, not to mention CONSOL Energy, I’d add…)

*In Fairfax schools, extra cash adds up to artificial turf, but not teacher raises (Brilliant priorities!)

*Goldman to meet with Gov. McDonnell about tax credit

*Virginians Split On Whether Racial Divisions Persist

*Nice today, but hottest weather pattern since July easing in

*Nationals lose a heartbreaker (Can’t afford to lose many more games…)