Republicans sometimes denounced Barack Obama as a low-key authoritarian, and that’s defensible as a purely descriptive matter—he could be decidedly illiberal and anti-democratic where it suited him, all that diktat by “a pen and a phone” business, as with illegal immigrants—but he didn’t have the soul of a Leninist, even back when he was younger and more radical. (And now, radicalism is something Obama cannot afford: He’s too rich.) He is not a radical man, and not a cruel man—he is a smug man.
And, if you’re being honest with yourself, you can see how he might have got that way. He didn’t start his life in Dickensian squalor or anything like that, but, while he went to fancy private schools, he didn’t have a terrific family life—hippie-weirdo mother, absentee father—and was largely raised by his grandparents. And his life turned out … great. You could see how a guy like Barack Obama…
