Our Narcissist-in-Chief.

President Obama was at an event with lots of stars—television stars, basketball stars chief amongst them, and he admitted this:

“It’s very rare that I come to an event where I’m like the fifth- or sixth-most interesting person.”

Really? That’s what’s going through his head? Who thinks that way? Who shows up at an event and takes stock of how “interesting” one is in comparison to others in attendance? That’s the sort of thing one says when one want to ingratiate oneself to another by pumping him up, but the only way one knows how to is to compare that someone favorably to oneself—the bestest and most interesting person one knows. We have a term for that sort of self-centeredness.

Frankly, I don’t find Barack Obama interesting at all, except in the “what can clinical psychologists learn about narcissism from this specimen” sense. The man has not really accomplished anything—the hear-no-evil-see-no-evil media and the David twins got him elected President after every previous political opponent was smeared out of the race. He didn’t publish a single thing while he was editor of the Harvard Law Review. No one remembers him from Columbia. We have no idea how he got into Columbia or Harvard or what he did in college because he won’t release his transcripts. He’s written two autobiographies, but they can be taken with a Dead Sea worth of salt after the “composite” revelations and outright falsehoods they have been revealed to contain. He made his way chumming with hardline socialists, an anti-American race baiting cleric, and unrepentant terrorists, a real estate scoundrel who is now in prison, and no one really knows the first thing about his actual childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii.

In truth, I find him a contemptuous and pitiable small man. The problem is, he’s in a position where he can inflict (and already has inflicted) real harm on many, many people.