Of the many fruitless attempts to cut to the core of Barack Obama, he has been called a socialist, liberal, inexperienced, weak, etc. What has been overlooked however is that the overriding characteristic that defines the man is that he has a squeamish, conflict avoiding personality. In other words, he’s a pushover. In every high school, there is at least one person who will go along with any mischief with any crowd in order to fit in, regardless of how disreputable the crowd, in order to please them. That is, to a certain degree, the mentality that Obama retains to this day.

One consequence of this is that Obama never became a conscientious subscriber to any ideology on his own terms. I would apologize to Glenn Beck for saying this but in a way it squares the circle of Beck’s daily chalkboards. He surrounds the President with pictures of radicals in search of a way to connect them in a coherent way without success, and it is the aforementioned saddle point in Obama’s personality which I believe explains why it can’t be done. Obama is obviously not a terrorist, but his relationship with Bill Ayers fits quite well into this idea that there is a vacuum in the President’s moral compass, as well as his ability to discern whose company is the right to take (there is an unintended double meaning there). He is the paradoxical embodiment of an intelligent person who is at the same time an empty vessel. This is purely a result of the lack of a focal point in his consciousness.

Pushovers are people pleasers, which is precisely the same reason they avoid executive, decision-making experience throughout their lives. Therein lies a second major paradox; why would someone who is a pathological follower want to be the leader of the free world? Just consider Obama’s campaign: Did he come off as somebody bracing themselves for the enumerable harsh choices that would need to be made, or as that of somebody who could make it possible to remake the Presidency without having to do that? I would argue for the latter. It is invaluable that Obama’s Presidency be considered through this lens and not just a patchwork of cliches and innuendo.