Look carefully at this official Obama-Biden campaign banner. What do you see?

My wife noted one thing immediately: that the name “Biden,” located below the name “Obama,” is greyed-out, so that is somewhat indistinct when compared to the “Obama.” The order of the names is right, but, traditionally, the names of the candidates are the same typeface size and color. Many of the new campaign buttons are the same.

Keep in mind that the picture reproduced here is from the announcement that Biden had been chosen to be the VP nominee.

Now, look at the banner again. Biden’s picture is located distinctly behind Obama. Traditionally, the candidates are depicted side-by-side. Buddies, as it were. But there’s more.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I’ll tell you: Biden looks like Obama. The two are close enough in appearance to be brothers. Compare the chins, the cheekbones, the shape of the smiles, the eyes, the brows, the foreheads, even the ears. The only real difference is the shape of the nose – - Obama’s is more flattened than Biden’s. Obama picked a running-mate who looks very much like him. In the Roman myth of Narcissus, the vain young man falls in love with his own image reflected in a pool of water.

When Alex Castellanos wrote The Molten Core Of Barack, he unknowingly but unerringly wrote a beautiful and stunningly accurate description of the workings of a narcissistic personality:

At each place and stage, as Barack Obama chronicles the chapters of his life, he tells us how he has re-invented himself, becoming the role he inhabits, though not falsely or in-authentically . . . . He actually seems to transform himself, becoming what must be next. He has been called distant, aloof and somewhat unapproachable, perhaps because we cannot approach what he does not have, a solid core. His soul seems to be molten and made up of dreams, which is at once breathtakingly inspiring and forbiddingly indeterminate. When this young man with the flowing, passionate core, when this candidate without the solid-center changes positions and transforms himself as we watch, it leaves Americans much more in doubt about who he is and how he would lead us. It also reveals an Obama of unapproachable arrogance and inestimable self-regard: He appears confident voters will appreciate his superiority regardless of where he journeys or what he becomes to meet his political ambitions.

There is nothing in the literature of psychology which I have read that brings narcissism to life as well as this.

Obama says he’s not scary. Au contraire, mon Barack: you are the scariest politician ever to get this close to the American Presidency. Not because of your race, or your religion, or even your political policies; none of that is scary. It is, as Castellanos says so well, the unpredictable, unknowable, arrogant, narcissistic “molten core.”

RECOMMENDED LINKS:

Charles Krauthammer, The Audacity of Vanity

Thomas Sowell, Cocky Ignorance.

Rich Lowry, The Audacity of Haughty.

Tony Blankley, He Is Who He Is.

Julian Krasta, Fair Warning About Obama.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Charles Krauthammer: Obama In The Cross-Hairs

Barack Obama and the Politics of Imagery