Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

What do Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama Have in Common

They all have issues. Bill Clinton’s stepfather was a violent alcoholic. Children of alcoholics frequently have difficulty growing in developmentally healthy ways, which can impact them as adults. Clinton’s rages, womanizing and risktaking to an extent suggesting sexual addiction, impatience, lack of self-discipline as illustrated by his infamous time management problems, hubris, and self-centeredness all are consistent with a highly dysfunctional family environment during his youth.

Then we have George Bush. Can there be any doubt that W has been working through unconscious Oedipal issues at our expense? Or, perhaps more precisely, not working through them? Even if you don’t buy the argument that Bush has daddy issues, moreover, there is clear evidence of a highly dysfunctional personality in history of alcohol and drug abuse.

And now we come to Barack Obama. I’ve come away from the Jeremiah Wright episodes with the firm conviction that Obama is still trying to figure out what it means to be a bi-racial son of a white mother and an African father in a highly race-conscious society. Thomas Sowell writes:

Obama didn’t just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college—members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.

In Shelby Steele’s brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama—“A Bound Man”—it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were—and, like many converts, he went overboard.

It seems likely that Obama is still trying to figure out who he is.

If I’m right about that, do we really want a third president in a row with serious unresolved issues?