Presidential Psychoanalysis

Last month I half-jokingly "diagnosed" President Bush as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder. Unsurprisingly, I'm not the only one examining his inner psyche. Today's Salon has a piece on three books on the subject:

Three new psychological portraits of George W. Bush paint him as a control freak driven by rage, fear and an almost murderous Oedipal competition with his father. And that's before we get to Mom.

Do the Day Pass--the article is fair and balanced, and worth a gander. This reminds me of an article in the less-than-reliable Capitol Hill Blue that was blogged to death a couple weeks ago:

President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind.

In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.”

Now I'm reading Worse Than Watergate¹ and of course the comparisons to Nixon spring to mind. I wonder, what does Bush's enemies list look like? Here's a sample of Tricky Dick's:

Judith Martin (AKA "Miss Manners"), Joe Namath, Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, Carol Channing, Gregory Peck, Steve McQueen

Edward Kennedy, Edmund Muskie, Harold Hughes, Walter Mondale, William Proxmire, Birch Bayh

The Presidents of Yale, Harvard Law School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, the Rand Corporation, the National Education Association, Philip Morris, and the National Cleaning Contractors

Dan Rather, Dan Schorr, James Reston, Julian Goodman, Marvin Kalb, Rowland Evans, Joseph Kraft, Jack Anderson

The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, Americans for Democratic Action, and the Urban League.

Enemies of the state, every one.

Anyway, it's easy to impugn a person's motives or to dismiss them as crazy when they don't agree with our political views. However, I do have some honest concerns about Bush's mental state just judging by what I've seen from him over the last few years.

Is he nuts? Probably not much more than any other American trying to deal with emotional baggage, and certainly other presidents have had their own deep-seated issues. Yet I'd rather have a president who suffers from a pathological desire to be loved (i.e., Clinton) than one who must divide the world into good and evil, and strikes out violently as a result of repressed feelings.

ntodd

1 - I'm taking it slowly because I'm also reading three non-political books right now. First impressions: pretty good, very scary.