2 years after the Greek columns, writers discover Obama's ego

...all presidents have healthy egos. You cannot become president, or even think you're qualified to run, if you don't think highly of yourself. Obama's arrogance problem isn't a matter of psychology but of strategy.

When Arkansas Democratic congressman Marion Berry complained that health-care reform felt like a replay of the Hillarycare debacle, Obama explained that the big difference between then and now was "me." In other words, the White House's plan for making everything work out was an unyielding confidence in the power of Obama's own cult of personality. That's why that cult's high priest, David Axelrod, pursued a strategy of greeting every problem as if it were an excuse for Obama to give another big speech.

Now that the strategy has proved catastrophic, the self-pity is pouring out. Joe Biden, in a rare interregnum of lucidity, assailed his own base as whiners. Rahm Emanuel, as he was fleeing for the healthier and more civic-minded political environment of Chicago's backrooms, said, "I want to thank you for being the toughest leader any country could ask for in the toughest times any president has ever faced."

Really? The times have been rough, we can all agree, but if memory serves, the Civil War was no cakewalk either. And that Pearl Harbor thing - not to mention 9/11 - might compete with the miserable economy Obama inherited and then ignored as he pursued his own "transformational" vanity projects.

There's an irony to occupying the Oval Office. When presidents think they're bigger than the job they hold, they shrink in office. When they think they're smaller than the honor that has temporarily been bestowed upon them, they grow into it. Obama has done nothing but shrink.

Last week, the president of the United States attacked Karl Rove by name - twice! - in a speech. He recently begged a crowd of black supporters not to "make me look bad" by staying home from the polls. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he scolded young voters that if they don't vote, it will be proof they "weren't serious in the first place."

It never dawns on him that were it not for the unseriousness of those voters, he might still be a one-term junior senator from Illinois.

"You know, I actually believe my own bull-," Obama told the author of Renegade: The Making of a President, Richard Wolffe.

Exactly. And that's why he's gotten into this mess.