Projecting Obama's Blankness Onto Romney
10/04/2012
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF

"I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views ..." 

Barack Obama
The Audacity of Hope

The concept of "projection" is one of the more empirically valid ideas that Sigmund Freud came up with. You can see it in the newspaper every day if you just look with fresh eyes: for example, that respected organization that is so angry all the time about "hate groups"—oh, yeah, it is a hate group.

In recent months, we've been inundated with strident media assertions that Mitt Romney is a blank screen, an empty suit, a cipher, a nullity. Perhaps they are right, although Romney's long track record suggests that people who know him frequently turn to him when they have difficult problems requiring leadership and management chops to solve (something that does not seem to be true of Obama).

But, we shouldn't overlook the sizable element of projection in the pro-Obama press's attacks on Romney, which might help explain their rabid reaction to Clint Eastwood's improvisation with an empty chair sitting in for Obama. Clint's old and (judging by his last several movies) lazy, but he's still a cunning old bastard with enough on the ball to intuit one key insight into Obama: there's not a lot there

Print Friendly and PDF