By David Lightman and Matt Stearns | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — John McCain made a quick stop at the Capitol one day last spring to sit in on Senate negotiations on the big immigration bill, and John Cornyn was not pleased.
Cornyn, a mild-mannered Texas Republican, saw a loophole in the bill that he thought would allow felons to pursue a path to citizenship.
McCain called Cornyn's claim "chicken-s---," according to people familiar with the meeting, and charged that the Texan was looking for an excuse to scuttle the bill. Cornyn grimly told McCain he had a lot of nerve to suddenly show up and inject himself into the sensitive negotiations.
"F--- you," McCain told Cornyn, in front of about 40 witnesses.
It was another instance of the Republican presidential candidate losing his temper, another instance where, as POW-MIA activist Carol Hrdlicka put it, "It's his way or no way."
There's a lengthy list of similar outbursts through the years: McCain pushing a woman in a wheelchair, trying to get an Arizona Republican aide fired from three different jobs, berating a young GOP activist on the night of his own 1986 Senate election and many more.
McCain observers say the incidents have been blown out of proportion.
"I've never seen anything in the way of an outburst of temper that struck me as anything out of the ordinary," said McCain biographer Robert Timberg.
"Those reports are overstated," said Rives Richey, who attended Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va., with McCain in the early 1950s.
Historians point out that it's not unusual for a president to have a fierce temper, but most knew how to keep it under control.
"Harry Truman wrote scathing letters, but he almost never sent them," said author Robert Dallek.
"George Washington spent a lifetime trying to control his temper," added historian Richard Norton Smith.
But Washington didn't have YouTube replaying videos of his tantrums, nor did he have to make decisions about nuclear weapons.
HE WAS FEISTY
At age 2, McCain's tantrums were so intense that he'd hold his breath for a few minutes and pass out. His parents would dunk him in cold water to "cure" him, he wrote in his memoir, "Faith of My Fathers."
"I have spent much of my life choosing my own attitude, often carelessly, often for no better reason than to indulge a conceit," he wrote. He conceded that some of his actions have been embarrassing, and "others I deeply regret."
He was a tough little guy. At Episcopal High, he was a 114-pound wrestler classmates called "Punk" and "McNasty."
Richey, though, noted that such monikers weren't unusual in those days. "There was a tremendous amount of sarcasm in the way we talked to each other at Episcopal," he recalled. "That's the way we all talked to each other."
McCain, Richey said, "was not looking for a fight. He was feisty."
McCain entered the Naval Academy in 1954, and he was popular, the leader of a group that Timberg described as the Bad Bunch, known largely for its ability to have a good time.
Malcolm Matheson, who knew McCain at Episcopal High and stayed friendly with him in college, said his buddy had no trouble controlling his temper in those days.
"He was a little guy, but he was tough, and no bully ever got in his face," Matheson said.
But as McCain ascended in politics, he began to acquire a reputation for hotheadedness. On election night 1986, then-Arizona Republican Party executive director Jon Hinz recalled, McCain was unhappy, even angry, even though he'd just won a U.S. Senate seat and his party had just made a virtually unprecedented sweep of state offices.
McCain had hoped that night would help launch him as a national figure. Instead, when the 5-foot-9 senator-elect spoke at the Phoenix victory party, the podium was too tall.
"You couldn't see his mouth," Hinz said.
A furious McCain sought out Robert Wexler, the Young Republican head in charge of arrangements.
"McCain kept pointing his finger in Wexler's chest, berating him," Hinz recalled. The 6-foot-6 Hinz stepped between them and told McCain to cut it out. "I told him I'll make sure there's an egg crate around next time," he said. McCain walked away angrily.
About a year later, McCain reportedly erupted again, this time at a meeting with Arizona's then-Gov. Evan Mecham, who was about to be impeached after being indicted on felony charges.
Karen Johnson, then Mecham's secretary and now an Arizona state senator, recalled how McCain told Mecham that he was "causing the party a lot of problems" and was an embarrassment to the party.
"Sen. McCain got very angry," Johnson recalled, "and I said, 'Why are you talking to the governor like this? You're causing problems yourself. You're an embarrassment.' "
Johnson would go on to work at three different jobs over the next five years, and she said that each time, McCain would contact her boss and try to get her removed.
The McCain campaign didn't respond to repeated requests for comment.
LOSING HIS COOL
When John McCain came to the Senate in 1987, he quickly got two reputations: a Republican who'd do business with Democrats on tough issues and an impatient senator who was often gruff and temperamental.
In January, Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., told The Boston Globe that, "the thought of (McCain) being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me." (Cochran has since endorsed McCain.)
Added Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., who has a long list of vociferous, sometimes personal disagreements with McCain, "His charm takes a little getting used to." (Bond, too, supports him.)
Democrats are less guarded.
"There have been times when he's just exploded, " said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.
"Look, around here, people lose their tempers once in a while. But it doesn't happen very often, and it usually happens in some contextual framework. A lot of times there's just not much of a contextual framework for his blowing up."
John Raidt worked for McCain more than 15 years. "Yeah, he could get prickly," he said. "Sometimes that's exactly what's needed to move an issue or get attention. I think he uses it as a tool."
Stories abound on Capitol Hill: How McCain told Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., how "only an a-hole" would craft a budget like he did. Or the time in 1989 when he confronted Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, then a Democrat and now a Republican, because Shelby had promised to vote for McCain friend John Tower as secretary of defense, and then Shelby voted against Tower.
McCain later wrote how, after the vote, he approached Shelby "to bring my nose within an inch of his as I screamed out my intense displeasure over his deceit ... the incident is one of the occasions when my temper lived up to its exaggerated legend."
Cochran recalled earlier this summer that he saw McCain manhandle a Sandinista official during a 1987 diplomatic mission in Nicaragua.
Cochran told the Biloxi Sun-Herald that McCain was talking, and, "I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever."
McCain said the incident never took place. "I must say, I did not admire the Sandinistas much," he told a news conference. "But there was never anything of that nature. It just didn't happen."
Former Sen. Robert Dole, who led the mission, couldn't be reached to comment.
Back in Washington, families of POW_MIAs said they have seen McCain's wrath repeatedly. Some families charged that McCain hadn't been aggressive enough about pursuing their lost relatives and has been reluctant to release relevant documents. McCain himself was a prisoner of war for five-and-a-half years during the Vietnam War.
In 1992, McCain sparred with Dolores Alfond, the chairwoman of the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America's Missing Servicemen and Women, at a Senate hearing. McCain's prosecutor-like questioning of Alfond — available on YouTube — left her in tears.
Four years later, at her group's Washington conference, about 25 members went to a Senate office building, hoping to meet with McCain. As they stood in the hall, McCain and an aide walked by.
Six people present have written statements describing what they saw. According to the accounts, McCain waved his hand to shoo away Jeannette Jenkins, whose cousin was last seen in South Vietnam in 1970, causing her to hit a wall.
As McCain continued walking, Jane Duke Gaylor, the mother of another missing serviceman, approached the senator. Gaylor, in a wheelchair equipped with portable oxygen, stretched her arms toward McCain.
"McCain stopped, glared at her, raised his left arm ready to strike her, composed himself and pushed the wheelchair away from him," according to Eleanor Apodaca, the sister of an Air Force captain missing since 1967.
McCain's staff wouldn't respond to requests for comment about specific incidents.
But Mark Salter, a longtime McCain aide who functions as the senator's alter ego and the co-author of his books, said that, "McCain gets intense, and intent on his argument."
His blowups with senators often result from colleagues being accustomed to deference, he said.
"A lot of these guys aren't used to that," Salter said, so they get annoyed when a peer gets emotional.
McCain's presidential campaign has tried to use his reputation to its advantage; in an early television ad, McCain said: "I didn't go to Washington to win the Mr. Congeniality award ... I love America. I love her enough to make some people angry."
CAN HE CONTROL IT?
There's no easy way to judge whether McCain's temper would make him a risky president.
"Yeah, he has a temper," said Democratic vice-presidential nominee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden of Delaware. "It's obvious. You've seen it.
"But is John whatever his opposition painted him to be, this unstable guy who came out of a prisoner or war camp not capable of (acting rationally)? I don't buy that at all."
Independent experts have some concerns about McCain's irascibility.
"Diplomacy is not often dealing with reasonable people," said Steve Clemons, an analyst at the New America Foundation, a centrist public policy group.
"In the nuclear age, you don't want someone flying off the handle, so it's a critical question: Can McCain control his temper?" asked Thomas De Luca, professor of political science at Fordham University in New York.
History is an inexact guide, because little evidence is available tying temper to action.
Richard Norton Smith has found that according to Tobias Lear, George Washington's secretary, "few sounds on earth could compare with that of George Washington swearing a blue streak."
On the other hand, said Smith, Washington could control himself. "One reason George Washington is this cold-blooded marble figure is that he became expert in controlling his temper," he said.
Other presidents have similar histories. Thomas Jefferson, Smith said, could be a "red-faced chief executive throwing his hat on the floor before stomping on it."
Truman had his angry letters, and one that got out showed quite a temper.
"It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful," Truman wrote Washington Post music critic Paul Hume in 1950, after Hume had panned first daughter Margaret Truman's singing performance.
Added the angry father, "Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes and perhaps a supporter below!"
Bill Clinton's infamous red-faced tirades tended to be endured by staffers in the privacy of the White House rather than public displays.
The important question, said Dallek, is whether and how McCain controls his outbursts. Though his aides insist that his temper is simply a way of expressing passion — and that he sometimes uses it for effect — some observers remain concerned.
"It seems the only way to deal with John McCain is to think the way he does," said Hinz, the former Arizona GOP official who now runs an insurance reform advocacy group in Phoenix. "If he gets more power, what's going to make him suddenly become a fuzzy, nice guy?"
Anonymous Coward User ID: 499365 9/8/2008 10:21 AM
Re: Do you really want this man with his finger on that button? McCain's history of hot temper raises concerns..
there is no red nuke button in the oval office, or a red phone either.
although the prez can call in a strike, it still needs to go down the chain of command quickly, and if they think he is in error they can decide not to launch. The secretary of defense would have more say in this sorta of thing anyway.
we need a asshole int he white house to mop of these muslim asswipes
Enlilson Son of son of son of Enlil User ID: 494807 9/8/2008 10:22 AM
Re: Do you really want this man with his finger on that button? McCain's history of hot temper raises concerns..
Yesterday, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds appeared on CNN for an interview with Campbell Brown. Brown was tough on Bounds, refusing to let him spout typical campaign talking points. She repeatedly pressed him on Palin’s foreign policy experience and qualifications, asking him to name one decision that she made as commander-in-chief of the Alaskan National Guard. Bounds was unable to do so.
Today, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer revealed that because of that tough interview, the McCain campaign has canceled the senator’s appearance on Larry King Live tonight:
The McCain campaign said it believed that exchange was over the line and as a result the interview scheduled for Larry King Live with Sen. McCain was pulled. CNN does not believe that Campbell’s interview was over the line. We are committed to fair coverage of both sides of this historic election.
The McCain campaign has repeatedly tried to intimidate the press. It is now angry about media coverage of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, calling NBC’s reporting on it “irresponsible journalism.” Campaign staffers “even considered pulling out of one of the three presidential debates because it would be moderated by Tom Brokaw, a former NBC News anchorman.” When Newsweek wrote a cover story in May examining the hardball tactics conservatives might use in the general election, the McCain campaign “threatened to throw the magazine’s reporters off the campaign bus and airplane.”
McCain does understand what is going on in Iraq. And if he did he would have supported the concept of overwhelming strength.....He said he did not understand?
There IS (or at least WAS) a bag man who carries a piece of equipment which allows for direct communication for the purpose of starting a war and he/she is always in attendance with the president.
If I had more time I would quickly research the accurate info, but I have an appointment at noon.
Check google on it.
there is no red nuke button in the oval office, or a red phone either.
although the prez can call in a strike, it still needs to go down the chain of command quickly, and if they think he is in error they can decide not to launch. The secretary of defense would have more say in this sorta of thing anyway.
we need a asshole int he white house to mop of these muslim asswipes
Quoting: Anonymous Coward 499365
Enlilson Son of son of son of Enlil User ID: 494807 9/8/2008 10:36 AM
Re: Do you really want this man with his finger on that button? McCain's history of hot temper raises concerns..
there is no red nuke button in the oval office, or a red phone either.
although the prez can call in a strike, it still needs to go down the chain of command quickly, and if they think he is in error they can decide not to launch. The secretary of defense would have more say in this sorta of thing anyway.
we need a asshole int he white house to mop of these muslim asswipes
Quoting: Anonymous Coward 499365
It's a metaphor and what the President does have is access to something called the Football and a mil aide goes everywhere that the President does with it. __O__/
#
_/_\_____
"
Outside OUTSIDE ......Surf it now.....
Enlilson Son of son of son of Enlil User ID: 494807 9/8/2008 10:38 AM
Re: Do you really want this man with his finger on that button? McCain's history of hot temper raises concerns..
I just registered to vote this year really sad that my choice is so obvious at this point,im not putting my ass in line for jury duty over McStain and his ugh vp pick.
Enlilson Son of son of son of Enlil User ID: 494807 9/8/2008 10:50 AM
Re: Do you really want this man with his finger on that button? McCain's history of hot temper raises concerns..
am i worried about a guy who says "fuck you" to some asshole that deserves it? no. that's not out of control
anger. out of control anger is a guy who smashes his wife's car windshield in with his fist during an argument over supper.then while at the hospital getting his hand stitched up he has an altercation and turns over a medical cart shouting " get away!! don't touch me!! i'm not a fagot, male nurses are fagots!!". then on the way home he jumps out of the car at a red light to confront someone looking at him funny. at least mccain is showing some form of non robotic human emotion.. it's been a while since any of our politicians have done that. that's not an endorsement, just something i'm noting.
Anonymous Coward User ID: 114060 9/8/2008 11:03 AM
Re: Do you really want this man with his finger on that button? McCain's history of hot temper raises concerns..
No I would much rather have Obama since he said he would nuke Pakistan with his finger on the button lol as if it makes a difference since they are both CFR NWO puppets
Anonymous Coward User ID: 413203 9/8/2008 11:07 AM
Re: Do you really want this man with his finger on that button? McCain's history of hot temper raises concerns..
there is no red nuke button in the oval office, or a red phone either.
although the prez can call in a strike, it still needs to go down the chain of command quickly, and if they think he is in error they can decide not to launch. The secretary of defense would have more say in this sorta of thing anyway.
we need a asshole int he white house to mop of these muslim asswipes
It's a metaphor and what the President does have is access to something called the Football and a mil aide goes everywhere that the President does with it.
Quoting: Enlilson
The notion that the President, all my himself, can order a nuclear strike, is completely false. Everything needs two people to agree, and the President's counterpart is the SecDef.
So there is no danger of McCain going off half-cocked and starting a nuclear war. So, go to bed and rest comfortably that someone that knows what they are doing is going to be the next CINC, and not some mealy mouthed community organizer who would rather form an action committee and talk the enemy to death.
Anonymous Coward User ID: 114060 9/8/2008 11:07 AM
Re: Do you really want this man with his finger on that button? McCain's history of hot temper raises concerns..
No I would much rather have Obama since he said he would nuke Pakistan with his finger on the button lol as if it makes a difference since they are both CFR NWO puppets
Quoting: Anonymous Coward 498814
No argument.
Anonymous Coward User ID: 436143 9/8/2008 11:09 AM
Re: Do you really want this man with his finger on that button? McCain's history of hot temper raises concerns..
am i worried about a guy who says "fuck you" to some asshole that deserves it? no. that's not out of control
anger. out of control anger is a guy who smashes his wife's car windshield in with his fist during an argument over supper.then while at the hospital getting his hand stitched up he has an altercation and turns over a medical cart shouting " get away!! don't touch me!! i'm not a fagot, male nurses are fagots!!". then on the way home he jumps out of the car at a red light to confront someone looking at him funny. at least mccain is showing some form of non robotic human emotion.. it's been a while since any of our politicians have done that. that's not an endorsement, just something i'm noting.
Quoting: Anonymous Coward 380880
Oh heck, it doesn't matter, he's just a cunt-head.
Anonymous Coward User ID: 498504 9/8/2008 11:12 AM
Re: Do you really want this man with his finger on that button? McCain's history of hot temper raises concerns..
DENVER - Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech last week seemed vastly different from the stands of this city's Invesco Stadium than it did to the 40 million who saw it on television. Melancholy hung like thick smog over the reserved seats where I sat with Democratic Party staffers. The crowd, of course, cheered mechanically at the tag lines, flourished placards, and even rose for the obligatory wave around the stadium. But its mood was sour. The air carried the acrid smell of defeat, and the crowd took shallow breaths. Even the appearance of R&B great Stevie Wonder failed to get the blood pumping.
The speech itself dragged on for three-quarters of an hour. As David S Broder wrote in the Washington Post: "[Obama's] recital of a long list of domestic promises could have been delivered by any Democratic nominee from Walter Mondale to John Kerry. There was no theme music to the speech and really no phrase or sentence that is likely to linger in the memory of any listener. The thing I never expected did in fact occur: Al Gore, the famously wooden former vice president, gave a more lively and convincing speech than Obama did."
On television, Obama's spectacle might have looked like The Ten Commandments, but inside the stadium it felt like Night of the Living Dead. The longer the candidate spoke, and the more money he promised to spend on alternative energy, preschool education, universal health care, and other components of the Democratic pinata, the lower the party professionals slouched into their seats. The professionals I sat with were Hillary Clinton people, to be sure, and had reason to sulk, for an Obama victory might do them little good in any event.
The Democrats were watching the brightest and most articulate presidential candidate they have fielded since John F Kennedy snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And this was before John McCain, in a maneuver worthy of Admiral Chester Nimitz at the Battle of Midway, turned tables on the Democrats' strategy with the choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.
Speaking to Obama supporters on the periphery of the big event, I was startled by the rapturous devotion elicited by the junior senator from Illinois. He is no symbol for identity politics, no sacrifice on the altar of white guilt, but the most gifted persuader of individuals that I have encountered in any country's politics, as well as a powerful orator on the grand stage. This is not a crowd phenomenon nor a fad, but the response of hundreds of people to an individual.
I sat in on a session with three leaders of Veterans for Obama, a group of retired young officers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, courtesy of the New Republic's writer on the scene, David Samuels. With passion and enthusiasm, these young people spoke of their hopes for nation-building in Iraq. The George W Bush administration should have put twice the resources into the beleaguered country, they harangued me - not just soldiers, but agronomists, traffic cops, lawyers, judges, and physicians. The Department of Agriculture should have mobilized, along with the Department of Justice.
Nation-building? Doubling down on the US commitment to Iraq? Isn't that trying to out-Bush the Bush administration, while Obama campaigned on getting out of Iraq and spending the money on programs at home? Unblinking, one of the soldiers said, "That's what we think Barack will do." They believed in a more expensive version of the administration's program, and faulted Bush for half measures - and somehow they believed that Obama really agreed with them, all the public evidence to the contrary. And they believed in Barack with perfect faith.
Gandalf's warnings about the irresistible voice of the wizard Saruman in J R R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings come to mind. If these battle-hardened veterans of America's wars fell so easily under the spell of Obama's voice, who can withstand it? Obama's persuasive powers, though, are strongest when channeled through the empathy of his interlocutor. Everyone believes that Obama feels his pain, shares his dream, and will fight his fight and heal his ills. But that is everyone as an individual. Add all the individuals up into a campaign platform, and it turns into three-quarters of an hour worth of promises that echo all the ghosts of conventions past.
Obama will spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected the obvious road to victory, that is, choosing Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. However reluctantly, Clinton would have had to accept. McCain's choice of vice presidential candidate made obvious after the fact what the party professionals felt in their fingertips at the stadium extravaganza yesterday: rejecting Clinton in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness. McCain's selection was a statement of strength. America's voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.
That is why McCain will win in November, and by a landslide, barring some unforeseen event. Obama is the most talented and persuasive politician of his generation, the intellectual superior of all his competitors, but a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it. Obama's prospective defeat is entirely of its own making. No one is more surprised than Republican strategists, who were convinced just weeks ago that a weakening economy ensured a Democratic victory.
Biden, who won 3% of the popular vote in the Democratic presidential primary in his home state of Delaware, and 1% or less in every other contest he entered, is ballot-box poison. Obama evidently chose him to assuage critics who point to his lack of foreign policy credentials. That was a deadly error, for by appearing to concede the critics' claim that he knows little about foreign policy, Obama raised questions about whether he is qualified to be president in the first place. He had a winning alternative, which was to pick Clinton. That would have sent a double message: first, that Obama is tough enough to make the slippery Clintons into his subordinates, and second, that he is generous enough to extend a hand to his toughest adversary in the cause of unity.
Why didn't Obama choose Hillary? The most credible explanation came from veteran columnist Robert Novak May 10, who reports that Michelle Obama vetoed Hillary's candidacy. "The Democratic front-runner's wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party's nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility," Novak wrote. If that is true, then Obama succumbed to the character weakness I described in a February 26 profile of (Obama's women reveal his secret). His peculiar dependency on an assertive and often rancorous spouse, I argued, made him vulnerable, and predicted that Obama "will destroy himself before he destroys the country".
Alternately, Obama might have chosen a rising Democratic star like Virginia's 50-year-old governor Tim Kaine. A weaker choice than Hillary, Kaine (or someone like him) would have made a bold statement of self-confidence. Obama could have said with credibility that he would bring to Washington a new generation of outsiders who would change the old system. Instead, Obama saddled an old and unpopular Washington warhorse.
Curiously, Obama ignored the rising stars of his own party, offering the prime time speaking slots to familiar faces, including Senator Edward Kennedy and Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as his own wife, the first prospective First Lady to take the keynote spot in the history of American party conventions.
McCain doesn't have a tenth of Obama's synaptic fire-power, but he is a nasty old sailor who knows when to come about for a broadside. Given Obama's defensive, even wimpy selection of a running-mate, McCain's choice was obvious. He picked the available candidate most like himself: a maverick with impeccable reform credentials, a risk-seeking commercial fisherwoman and huntress married to a marathon snowmobile racer who carries a steelworkers union card. The Democratic order of battle was to tie McCain to the Bush administration and attack McCain by attacking Bush. With Palin on the ticket, McCain has re-emerged as the maverick he really is.
The young Alaskan governor, to be sure, hasn't any business running for vice president of the United States with her thin resume. McCain and his people know this perfectly well, and that is precisely why they put her on the ticket. If Palin is unqualified to be vice president, all the less so is Obama qualified to be president.
McCain has certified his authenticity for the voters. He's now the outsider, the reformer, the maverick, the war hero running next to the Alaskan amazon with a union steelworker spouse. Obama, who styled himself an agent of change, took his image for granted, and attempted to ensure himself victory by doing the cautious thing. He is trapped in a losing position, and there is nothing he can do to get out of it.
Obama, in short, is long on brains and short on guts. A Shibboleth of American politics holds that different tactics are required to win the party primaries as opposed to the general election, that is, by pandering to fringe groups with disproportionate influence in the primaries. But Obama did not compromise himself with extreme positions. He did not have to, for younger voters who greeted him with near-religious fervor did not require that he take any position other than his promise to change everything. Obama could have allied with the old guard, through an Obama-Clinton ticket, or he could have rejected the old guard by choosing the closest thing the Democrats had to a Sarah Palin. But fear paralyzed him, and he did neither.
In my February 26 profile, I called Obama "the political equivalent of a sociopath", without any derogatory intent. A sociopath seeks the empathy of all around him while empathizing with no one. Obama has an almost magical ability to gain the confidence of those around him. Perhaps it was the adaptation of a bright and sensitive young boy who was abandoned by three parents - his Kenyan father Barack Obama Sr, who left his pregnant young bride; his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetero; and by his mother, Ann Dunham, who sent 10-year-old Obama to live with her parents while she pursued her career as an anthropologist.
Combine a child's response to serial abandonment with the perspective of an outsider, and Obama became an alien species against which American politics had no natural defenses. He is a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans, in but not of the American system. No country's politics depends more openly on friendships than America's, yet Obama has not a single real friend, for he rose so fast that all his acquaintances become rungs on the ladder of his ascent. One human relationship crowds the others out of his life, his marriage to Michelle, a strong, assertive and very angry woman.
If Novak's report is accurate, then Michelle's anger will have lost the election for Obama, as Achilles' anger nearly killed the Greek cause in the Trojan War. But the responsibility rests not with Michelle, but with Obama. Obama's failure of nerve at the cusp of his success is consistent with my profile of the candidate, in which I predicted that he would self-destruct. It's happening faster than I expected. As I wrote last February:
It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama ... Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals.
By all rights, the Democrats should win this election. They will lose, I predict, because of the flawed character of their candidate.
So I guess the Demos new talking points are again about McCains "temper" because the Palin attacks were backfiring? Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: John 11:25
Anonymous Coward User ID: 400833 9/8/2008 11:19 AM
Re: Do you really want this man with his finger on that button? McCain's history of hot temper raises concerns..
The only place I want his finger is up his geriatric ass! Pushing a depends deeper into his ancient crack!
As for Sarah Palin, the woman is a two faced lying, confused twit who'd step on anyone to further her own agenda. She's proven that. Political hack with silicone in the right places and some lipo on her ass.
Nice thing is McCain won't get a thing done if she's around. He can't stop staring at her tits and ass, even in PUBLIC. The man is a fucking old letch!
Pathetic choices for the Repubs this year. I guess they figured that Bush has screwed up the nation so badly, that they're not going to win anyway, so why bother running a decent candidate? This year is a "throw away" for the GOP and they know it!!
Obama is going to have to rape some white girls to blow this election (on network TV with several nuns as witnesses!) Not much less would do it!
Anonymous Coward User ID: 380880 9/8/2008 11:31 AM
Re: Do you really want this man with his finger on that button? McCain's history of hot temper raises concerns..
"Oh heck, it doesn't matter, he's just a cunt-head."
i am more concerned about the mentality of the people who will be doing the voting for candidates rather than the mentality of the candidates themselves. if a politician wants a life long career in politics he or she must first become a mirror.. thanks to us, a warped one..
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FASCIST PIG WITH LIPSTICK 
