By Steve Sailer
10/04/2012
Here’s Chris Matthews blowing gaskets over his man Barack’s low energy performance tonight.
Matthews shouldn’t have been surprised. Obama’s apathy has a long history that’s detailed here and there in biographies by his partisans:
David Remnick quotes Obama’s long-time Chicago political ally Valerie Jarrett recalling Obama’s 1990s in Chicago (p. 274):
" … I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. … So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that they had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy." Jarrett was quite sure that one of the few things that truly engaged him fully before going to the White House was writing Dreams from My Father. "He’s been bored to death his whole life," she said.
Later, after Obama got elected to the U.S. Senate [p. 444]:
The truth was, David Axelrod told me, "Barack hated being a senator." Washington was a grander stage than Springfield, but the frustrations of being a rookie in a minority party were familiar. Obama could barely conceal his frustration with the torpid pace of the Senate. His aides could sense his frustration and so could his colleagues. "He was so bored being a senator," one Senate aide said. …
His friend and law colleague Judd Miner said, "The reality was that during his first two years in the U.S. Senate, I think, he was struggling; it wasn’t nearly as stimulating as he expected." …
The one project that did engage Obama fully was work on The Audacity of Hope. He procrastinated for a long time and then, facing his deadline, wrote nearly a chapter a week.
One reason for Obama’s perpetual boredom is that his skill set is basically that of a writer. He has everything that it takes to be a good writer except the ability to come up with interesting ideas.
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