As unbelievable as it may sound for the sheer arrogance and audacity of it all, President Obama has injected himself into the bios pages of all our past presidents on the official White House website. So, when you go to read about our past presidents you’ll also get a campaign blurb about The One, the Obammessiah, the Lightbringer. If this isn’t chutzpah, what is?
In his arrogance Obama has added a small section tooting his own horn into the bios of every president but Gerald Ford — likely because his web team just missed Ford’s entry, not because Ford is sacrosanct or anything.
For instance, here is what Obama had his webteam add to the White House bio of Ronald Reagan:
Did you know?
- President Reagan designated Martin Luther King Jr. Day a national holiday; today the Obama Administration honors this tradition, with the First and Second Families participating in service projects on this day.
- In a June 28, 1985 speech Reagan called for a fairer tax code, one where a multi-millionaire did not have a lower tax rate than his secretary. Today, President Obama is calling for the same with the Buffett Rule.
There are entries similar to this for every president.
Seth Mandel who posted early on Tuesday about this outrage joked that The One sees himself as equal or superior to every past president because he is carrying forward every accomplishment “since Coolidge.” He goes on to say, “No wonder he always seems so proud of himself.”
ABC’s Jake Tapper also skewers our swelled-headed president saying his additions are not “historical, but rather something else entirely.”
I’d suggest that “something else” is hubris.
Conservatives have had fun at the Messiah’s expense today, though. On Twitter the hashtag #ObamaHistory was started and jokes and ridicule of Obama abound. The RNC also got in the act and started a tumblr page with photos of famous historical figures with Obama amusingly added into the background in photobomb-style (where people that don’t belong in a photo are added in as a joke).
Still, having fun or no, imagine if a Republican president had been so arrogant as to have added his own name the the bios of every president? It would have been the left’s outrage du jour and the Old Media would have skewered such a president were he a Republican. You’d never hear the end of this on late night talk shows or from comedians, either. If a Republican had been this arrogant the whole Old Media landscape from California through flyover country all the way to New York would be lit up with vitriol.
Obama does it and there’s crickets.
**UPDATE**
Via email, Jim Geraghty of National Review tells me that in a recent private interview, Gov. Romney responded to this little example of Obamaarrogance. Here is what Mitt said about it…
I hadn’t seen the story, but I do know that when the president ran, he said that this election would be the turning point, that the oceans would recede, that the world would shift because of him being in office. There seem to be people around him, as well as himself, who have a very grand view of what he will accomplish . . . and we’re still waiting to see that. I think the American people have been disappointed. The promises were grandiose and extraordinary, and the deliverables have been disappointing at best. I think it is one thing to try to rewrite your own history — it’s something different altogether to rewrite that of all your predecessors. . . . I can commit: I will not be trying to rewrite the biographies of former presidents.
It’s pretty sad that we are in a day when a candidate has to run for office promising not to emulate the previous guy’s Stalin-like efforts to re-write history, isn’t it?
