Sometimes the littlest thing tells you a lot

Politics Aside, Is Barack Obama A Good Person?

By Jonathan Mark

News Item - AP 10/06/2010 -- The presidential seal fell off President Barack Obama's lectern and clattered to the stage as he delivered a speech to a women's conference. "That's all right, all of you know who I am," the president joked to laughter from the audience when he realized what had happened.

"But I'm sure there's somebody back there that's really nervous right now, don't you think?" the president added, referring to whatever staffer had hung the seal on the front of his lectern so precariously.

"They're sweating bullets," he said, laughing. "Where were we," he then said, and returned to his remarks.

If Obama was a mentch would he have suggested that some poor worker in the back might be "really nervous" and "sweating bullets" because of an inadvertent mistake? What kind of person laughs about another man, a worker sweating bullets? If Obama had any class, any kind of compassion he'd be saying "It's OK, nothing to worry about."

I can't imagine Bobby Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Woody Guthrie, or anyone with a real heart, saying what Obama said about a worker in that kind of spot.

We're talking about a president whose mentor and spiritual leader for 20 years was Jeremiah Wright, a snide bully. Sitting in someone's pew for 20 years is not an accident but a choice. Obama's a cold, callous man, and a dozen small moments such as this one illuminate that sorry point as much as any of his policies.

Yes, that worker backstage was nervous. These are hard times in America, vast unemployment, great fears of losing jobs, Obama seems indifferent to the nervous and uncertain. He leads by intimidation, not inspiration. His whole approach to the nervous and uncertain in Jerusalem and among the settlers was to pressure and intimidate; inspiration had nothing to do with it.

He has a touch of the bully in him, and Israel knows it, and that guy back-stage who was made to feel small, that worker now knows it, too.