America’s Struggle with Success

So who is your Messiah? Or don’t you have one? Millions of Americans have swooned over Barack Obama like hysterical teenagers at a concert. Repeatedly we hear descriptions of the mesmerizing effect he has on people. Magic is in the air when he speaks—amazingly attracting a recent audience of 100,000 in St. Louis. When even your critics get in on the act you know something is up as evidenced by Russ Limbaugh’s humorous and sarcastic references to Obama as the “Lord Obama the Messiah.” But sometimes humor strikes close to home. The overall reaction to Obama could be described as ...

The media is abuzz with Obama’s recent “share the wealth” comment to Joe the Plumber. But the first part of his comment in the end may be far more revealing, “I don’t want to punish your success, I just want to share the wealth.” “Punish your success” offers a far broader picture of what Barack Obama is really all about. (And rarely have we seen a better example of how denial reveals the truth of a matter—taking wealth from a person and giving it to someone else who hasn’t earned it indeed punishes the successful person.) In America, ...

Everyday people develop identifications—sympathetic connections which become a part of them—with people, businesses, religions, countries or other concerns to which they are exposed. Often such identifications are unconscious, and the more exposure one has the more the identification tends to occur. Freud even coined the term “identification with the aggressor” which explained how people unconsciously mirror the behaviors of those who mistreat them (e.g. abused children not infrequently become abusive parents). Because of numerous comments including several slips Barack Obama has made regarding Islam, we must examine his unconscious identification with Muslims. Although he has made explicit claims that he’s ...

Let’s continue our examination of the way Barack Obama’s personal issues play out in his public life. If he’s elected president, how would his childhood trauma affect his ability to lead? Obama’s Book Dreams from My Father Provides Major Clues His book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and inheritance” reveals a growing rage so typical of the anger of a traumatized child. He reports the misdirected hate doesn’t go away, “It formed a counter-narrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people.” Betrayed by his father, Obama returns to Kenya as ...

The DI on Specific Core Issues Marriage: Marriage is maximum commitment between a man and a woman, the foundation of the home—what makes a house a home. This 1:1 commitment is the core building block in nature. All relationships are built on the basic marital 1:1 model. Think 1:1 with spouse-spouse, sibling-parent, sibling to sibling, friend to friend, and person to God (The DI reveals there must be a creator. If natural laws of life exist then a lawgiver exists.) Life-learning begins by children observing their parents 1:1 and eventually creating their own 1:1 and family. The DI of all ...

Things are often not what they seem. While our leaders insist they want success for America, their success blind spots often lead to bad decisions which sabotage our country (a la the shocking financial crisis). The good news: a new lens, a new way of seeing, recognizing and measuring success in our leaders has been discovered in the human mind. We all possess it. I call it the deeper intelligence. What is it? The DI is the part of our mind that sees and understands far more than our conscious mind. The DI brings us an entirely new level of ...

Obviously this website is about success—here the focus on our nation. As I said previously I will shift soon to how individuals’ struggle with success in my forthcoming book, Why Men Choke.  In a word, John McCain is choking—on potential success right in front of him. I told the story in an earlier article (see 9/25/08 Part II) of boxer Gerry Cooney failing to take his best shot in the biggest fight of his life for the heavyweight championship of the world. If the McCain—Obama battle is anything, it’s a heavyweight fight of the first order--for “most powerful man ...

Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton “the nation’s first black president” because of his civil rights sympathies and his own lower-class Southern roots. Now we look at Barack Obama, the man who wants to be America’s “second” black president, through the lens of Bill Clinton because of their powerful psychological similarities Why is it so important to understand Obama’s development? Because early emotional trauma controls a person’s entire life. Sounds like old psychological news, doesn’t it? But the deeper intelligence reveals the effects of profound pain much more vividly than we’ve ever understood. To ignore a candidate’s development ...

Bill Clinton was called “the nation’s first black president” because of his civil rights sympathies. We will first look at Barack Obama, the man who wants to be America’s second black president, through the lens of Bill Clinton because of their powerful psychological similarities. Childhood emotional trauma can dramatically affect a person later in life, even a president. Consider Bill Clinton, a man with striking similarities to Barack Obama who shares the ex-president’s patriarchal problem. They each grew up without their real fathers. Having profiled Bill Clinton on national television soon after his major personal and presidential failures, I am ...

Barack Obama has poignantly described his great need for a father which still defines him to this very day. As we have recently learned from the deeper intelligence—going far deeper into our psyches than ever before—major emotional traumas have much greater influence on us than we previously knew. They exist in our psyches like “holes filled with pain” as Obama characterized well. Let’s take a quick review of his past. His white mother, originally from Kansas, was three months pregnant by Barack’s black Kenyan father (Barack Sr.) whom she then marries and Obama was born born on Aug 4, 1961, ...

At the Saddleback Church forum where Obama and McCain appeared in a joint interview live on national television on Aug. 16, 2008, they were each asked their views on abortion. As usual Obama said he was “pro-choice” and in response to the question of when life begins—at conception or beyond—stated, “I’m afraid that’s above my pay grade.” Once more, he’s using the same image, that of someone above him but someone in the same company, a colleague at a higher pay grade, someone to whom he would have to submit. And what colleague might that be? Obama ‘s deeper intelligence ...

Barack Obama’s words and behavior have strongly suggested that he is still secretly lacking a sense of manhood, a sense of authority. His behavior with two older men—McCain and Biden—suggests that he’s still seeking that father he missed in his early years. That father who wasn’t there to guide and shape young Barack, that absent father whom he yearned for day after day. It was no accident that on Father’s Day, June 15, 2008, in a speech at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, Obama said, “There’s a hole in your heart if you don’t have a ...

Barack Obama’s deeper intelligence continues to tell his story, his narrative in his own words. His stories come together in a new way to tell one big story. This is how people do it—in therapy, in forensic cases, in everyday life-- for sake of telling truth and preventing suffering. This is the new knowledge about ourselves from our DI—and we cannot stop it from speaking if we communicate. As I study him I am convinced that presidential candidates have even more of a need to tell this truth because their conscience knows how much responsibility they are asking to be ...

Political analyst Dick Morris described the tone-setting importance of initial presidential debates, “The late, great media consultant Bob Squier used to analogize candidates’ first meeting in debate to grade-schoolers’ first day in the schoolyard. Just as kids rapidly decide on a pecking order based on who can beat up whom, so the candidates take one another’s measure and get elated or depressed based on their conclusions. That psychological hangover lasts for the entire campaign.”1 Beyond that the first debate tells us who believes he should be president and who doesn’t.2 Let’s examine the first debate between Barack Obama ...

When he decided to run for president Barack Obama violated a fundamental rule of nature. In fact, it’s a rule he knows well, one which he previously insisted he would never violate: The “law of nature” called “first prove yourself.” Upon first being elected to national office as a U.S. Senator in 2004 (and without any gubernatorial experience or other service as a chief executive) he was immediately asked if he would run for president in 2008. Totally denying any such plans, Obama noted how foolish that would be given his inexperience. “I don’t operate that way,” he insisted. Quicker ...

Latest Success Problem: “Out of Money” The media has been abuzz with the recent financial crisis which came crashing down on Wall Street and the financial industry, necessitating government bailout. Amidst the blame and finger pointing—and overall stupidity of the matter—what has been overlooked is that we have another classical symptom of a national success problem. Among other problems banks and financial institutions overextended themselves including making bad loans ending up with a liquidity problem—temporarily “out of money.” If you’re rich and you run out of money, you’ve punished yourself (as winners of lotteries and suddenly wealthy athletes are prone ...

Rather than being defeated by outside forces, great nations typically fall from within—they bring themselves down—as history teaches us so well. Concern about the fragility of America’s continued dominance surrounds us. More and more often we hear warnings of American failures from politicians, academics and historians both here and abroad. Consider, for instance, geographer Jared Diamond’s recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.1 Many world historians consider the 19th century as England’s era of dominance, the 20th century America’s, and they openly wonder which nation will dominate the 21st century—possibly China, or ...