President Obama’s Fulsome Ego Occasionally Surfaces in Telling Fashion — His Gracelessly Self-Centered Eulogy for Senator Daniel Inouye — Conceit May Explain Why the Obama Presidency Has Been almost Exclusively about Him and Not about Finding Solutions to Real Problems

© 2012 Peter Free

 

23 December 2012

 

 

Citation — to transcript of President Obama’s eulogy of Senator Inouye

 

Barack Obama, Remarks by the President at the Funeral Service for Senator Daniel Ken Inouye, Office of the Press Secretary, the White House (21 December 2012)

 

 

Every once in a while, we do things that leak signs of fundamental character — President Obama’s eulogy for Senator Daniel Inouye revealed the President’s often graceless self-centeredness

 

From a leadership perspective, when one think that one is professionally (or personally) better than everyone else, the trait diminishes effective group effort.

 

What follows is an example of the President’s near narcissistic tone in eulogizing Senator Daniel Inouye (Hawaii).

 

In reading what the President said, keep in mind that Senator Inouye was many years the President’s senior.  And further that Senator Inouye had demonstrated personal courage that dwarfs anything that the President himself has shown or is likely to show.

 

I quote the President Obama’s comments at substantial length to make the point that his words were not accidentally just about him:

 

Danny was elected to the U.S. Senate when I was two years old.  He had been elected to Congress a couple of years before I was born.  He would remain my senator until I left Hawaii for college.

 

Now, even though my mother and grandparents took great pride that they had voted for him, I confess that I wasn't paying much attention to the United States Senate at the age of four or five or six.  It wasn't until I was 11 years old that I recall even learning what a U.S. senator was, or it registering, at least.  It was during my summer vacation with my family -- my first trip to what those of us in Hawaii call the Mainland.

 

So we flew over the ocean, and with my mother and my grandmother and my sister, who at the time was two, we traveled around the country.  It was a big trip.  We went to Seattle, and we went to Disneyland -- which was most important.  We traveled to Kansas where my grandmother's family was from, and went to Chicago, and went to Yellowstone.  And we took Greyhound buses most of the time, and we rented cars, and we would stay at local motels or Howard Johnson's.  And if there was a pool at one of these motels, even if it was just tiny, I would be very excited. And the ice machine was exciting -- and the vending machine, I was really excited about that.

 

But this is at a time when you didn’t have 600 stations and 24 hours' worth of cartoons.  And so at night, if the TV was on, it was what your parents decided to watch.  And my mother that summer would turn on the TV every night during this vacation and watch the Watergate hearings.  And I can't say that I understood everything that was being discussed, but I knew the issues were important.  I knew they spoke to some basic way about who we were and who we might be as Americans.

 

And so, slowly, during the course of this trip, which lasted about a month, some of this seeped into my head.  And the person who fascinated me most was this man of Japanese descent with one arm, speaking in this courtly baritone, full of dignity and grace.  And maybe he captivated my attention because my mom explained that this was our senator and that he was upholding what our government was all about.  Maybe it was a boyhood fascination with the story of how he had lost his arm in a war.  But I think it was more than that.

 

Now, here I was, a young boy with a white mom, a black father, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.  And I was beginning to sense how fitting into the world might not be as simple as it might seem.  And so to see this man, this senator, this powerful, accomplished person who wasn't out of central casting when it came to what you'd think a senator might look like at the time, and the way he commanded the respect of an entire nation I think it hinted to me what might be possible in my own life.

 

This was a man who as a teenager stepped up to serve his country even after his fellow Japanese Americans were declared enemy aliens; a man who believed in America even when its government didn't necessarily believe in him.  That meant something to me.  It gave me a powerful sense -- one that I couldn’t put into words -- a powerful sense of hope.

 

And as I watched those hearings, listening to Danny ask all those piercing questions night after night, I learned something else.  I learned how our democracy was supposed to work, our government of and by and for the people; that we had a system of government where nobody is above the law, where we have an obligation to hold each other accountable, from the average citizen to the most powerful of leaders, because these things that we stand for, these ideals that we hold dear are bigger than any one person or party or politician.

 

© 2012 Barack Obama, Remarks by the President at the Funeral Service for Senator Daniel Ken Inouye, Office of the Press Secretary, the White House (21 December 2012)

 

 

Whom was this eulogy supposed to be about?

 

I am fairly sure that virtually nobody present at the Washington National Cathedral gave a darn what influence Senator Inouye had had on the precocious Barack Obama.

 

They cared, instead, about honoring Senator Inouye for his own worth, not the President’s.

 

 

And — calling the deceased, “Danny”?

 

I am old-fashioned enough to think that someone who lived through the anti-Japanese hatred that marked Senator Inouye’s youth — and who demonstrated admirable combat courage — deserves to be called by his full name and rank during a final tribute.

 

“Senator.”  Not “Danny.”  Regardless of how relaxed Hawaiian customs might be.

 

The President, after all, was speaking to the entire nation, much of which is comprised of people who respect our elders and the sacrifices that so many of them made (unlike today) on behalf of future generations.

 

The moral? — The President’s characteristically self-centered attitude keeps him from being an effective leader

 

Even so simple a thing as fully honoring another admirable person was too much for the President’s ego to expansively and gracefully do.

 

I recognize that the President’s battles with discrimination may have made him the way he is.

 

Yet, surely a person of President Barack Obama's impressive capacities could pretend (at least once in a while) — for the sake of implementing genuinely effective national leadership — to be more humble and more willing to accept inputs from allegedly lesser beings.