VI. Grabbing a Senate Seat with a Little Help from his Trilateral Friends 247entire staff to try to keep his characteristic megalomania under control. In an instant, Obama had
leapt from relative obscurity to bask in the klieg lights of DC fame, and it was all going straight to
his head:
Obama’s good friend Martin Nesbitt, a successful black businessman in Chicago, spent the day
of the speech with him, traveling from appearance to appearance. “We were walking down the
street in Boston, and this crowd was growing behind us, kind of like Tiger Woods at the
Masters. And I turned to Barack and I said, ‘This is incredible. You’re like a rock star.’ And he
looked at me and said, ‘If you think it’s bad today, wait till tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘What do
you mean?’ and he said, ‘My speech is pretty good.’ ” It was an extraordinary display of self-
confidence, and self-knowledge. (Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008)
We would rather call it an extraordinary display of megalomania on the part of a person who
somehow believes that magical oratory can automatically be used to produce concrete effects in the
real world — not a very healthy frame of mind for anyone, much less a president who will always
have to fight to get the bureaucracy to do anything at all. In the November 2004 general election,
Obama received 70% of the vote to Keyes’s 27%, the largest electoral victory in Illinois history.
Obama became only the third African-American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction,
after Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. We can expect Obama
to undergo acute bouts of megalomania if he should ever get the Democratic nomination, to say
nothing of the Nero-style performance he will put on if he should ever reach the White House. God
help us.
IN THE US SENATE: TACKING RIGHT WITH LUGAR
Despite the underlying megalomania, Obama has also developed a certain limited capacity to
display a self-deprecating humor. One example:
Senator Barack Obama stood before Washington’s elite at the spring dinner of the storied
Gridiron Club. In self-parody, he ticked off his accomplishments, little more than a year after
arriving in town. “I’ve been very blessed,” Mr. Obama told the crowd assembled in March- “Keynote speaker at the Democratic convention. The cover of Newsweek. My book made
the best-seller list. I just won a Grammy for reading it on tape. “Really, what else is there to
do?” he said, his smile now broad. “Well, I guess I could pass a law or something.” ... He was
running for president even as he was still getting lost in the Capitol’s corridors. “I think it’s very
possible to have a Senate career here that is not particularly useful,” he said in an interview,
reflecting on his first year. And it would be better for his political prospects not to become a
Senate insider, which could saddle him with the kind of voting record that has tripped up so
many senators who would be president. “It’s sort of logic turned on its head, but it really is
true,” said Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the former senator and Democratic leader who has
been a close adviser to Mr. Obama.’ (New York Times, March 9, 2008)
Obama appears to be preparing to go one step further in the departure from reality which the
neocons have thus far so nobly advanced: in the bizarro world of Obama, no experience is better
than vast experience, and no track record is far better than a voluminous track record, since only
perceptions, and never reality are involved. Unfortunately for Obama, this is just not the way the
world works.