Obama’s Bipolar Governing Style: Nothing Stable in the Middle

Bipolar disorder causes serious shifts in a person’s mood, energy, thinking, and behavior – from the highs of mania on one extreme, to the lows of depression on the other.

Obama is a strange dichotomy of hopeful and sometimes responsible words to reckless behavior often destroying his earlier dialog; words he recycles to take our eyes off of reality of what was destroyed. I have said this before, as he ran for President during the early primaries, even I was captivated by the dope of hope. Why wouldn’t you want to believe in the positive energy that surrounded his campaign? Of course, before drinking the Kool-Aid, the cautious side of me that has guarded my every step since I was a young, began to listen. Obama hid his left-wing radical side providing only small hints in his rhetoric. Anyone who paid close attention to Obama could easily observe his darker side. Most chose not to look or lacked critical thinking skills to understand what was below Obama’s iceberg rhetoric.

Obama best displays his bipolar style with the word hope, remember when all was good out on the campaign trail. He didn’t even blink when the banks were crashing before the bailouts. According to the media and his followers, Obama could pull America out of the rut, bring fresh ideas never before held to the office, and empower a new generation of Americans to participate. We quickly discovered his ideas were the same ideas of old. The people he surrounded himself with, were the same tired Washington insiders left over from Clinton. Hope became panic and panic became gloom. The optimist became the pessimist preaching the economy is worst than we ever thought. Obama went from a total rock-star high to a total buzz kill in a few short weeks, and the affect it’s had on the economy has been devastating as the market closed 250 points lower yesterday after Obama promised to raise taxes.

Obama celebrates one side of the left-wing spectrum one day, and then toots a different horn the next. The Obama stimulus package promises nearly a trillion dollars of new government spending and lots of new government. Obama stopped talking about the stimulus the day after and began preaching to workers in Illinois that we need to become financially responsible. He followed up this act with a fiscal responsibility summit at the White House yesterday. How do you go from spending nearly a trillion dollars in one day on items like weatherization of homes to demanding financially responsibility the next? It’s bipolar to say the least.
It doesn’t stop there. Obama made the biggest, impossible promise of his political career last week. He will cut the national debt by 2/3 before his first term expires. We are back on the Obama high. Not even a week later, we find out he is going to propose an extra eight percent in government spending in his first budget, which doesn’t even include the nearly trillion dollar stimulus plan. There is no in between with this man. It’s either one extreme or the other. You can’t cut deficits and increase spending.

We see his bright and dark side exposed in the way he treats people. He claims he wants to hear all ideas and comes across as warm and open, but the second an idea comes out that makes sense that doesn’t coexist with the direction he wants to take the country; he quickly ridicules the person coming across as cold and calculated. We have seen both Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli make valid points about the economy, and both have been punch lines in Obama’s rhetoric. A few from the media praised Limbaugh’s idea of spending according to Obama’s winning percentage and tax cuts based on the percentage who didn’t vote for him as a solid bipartisan structure to design a stimulus plan around.

There’s a pattern of extreme behavior that defines Obama’s method of governing. He continues to reach a peak and quickly descends to the lowest valley. This hasn’t been healthy for the country during his first month, and I doubt we see much change in the way he governs. Obama’s bipolar style provides those who support him hope that he might actually mean what he says, while his actions provide the truth that he doesn’t. He means little of what he says. He knows what to say just enough to keep the hope alive. This is the positive mania side of his governing. His actions provide a far more serious depression, which the market has followed since his inauguration. Even this past weekend, Drudge reported that Obama wants to move the discussions away from nationalizing the banks, only for the nationalization conversation to grow stronger by Monday morning. He’s tough to keep up with, but if he says it, expect him to do the opposite. For now, he believes it catches his critics off guard, but then again, we know he’s not the smartest cookie in the jar. He expect him to tell us the opposite and while changing the political philosophy of the United States to the hard socialist left.

Originally Published at Bungalow Bill’s Conservative Wisdom

[print_link]

Link to this page