Sometimes a Candidate Is Just a Candidate

Here are some random psychological observations about the candidates that have occurred to me lately.

Let's start with McCain. Many voters aren't familiar with McCain's experience as a POW in Hanoi; apparently he rarely talks about it. From what I've read, here are the broad strokes. McCain was a POW for five years. Two of those years were spent in solitary confinement. He was put in leg-irons for talking back to the guards. He tried to hang himself twice, but was cut down by the guards who then beat him. The injuries and torture he experienced during this period left him with limited ability to use his arms--the reason he often moves awkwardly while delivering speeches. After a year of suffering extreme abuse as a POW, he was offered the chance to return to the United States (a public relations move on the part of the Vietnamese government related to the fact that he was from a prominent military family). McCain, however, refused to leave, saying that the POWs who were captured before him should be released first. It's an understatement to say that McCain is a man of extraordinary principle and courage.

McCain's years of abuse certainly put the reports of his periodic fits of temper in perspective. What's more surprising is that someone who lived through what he did isn't in a state of rage 100 percent of the time.

Most of the time, McCain seems warm and gregarious. And frankly if McCain's irritation with Elisabeth Bumiller yesterday is an example of him "losing it", it makes me a little skeptical about past reports of his supposed eruptions. Hillary Clinton's rage at MSNBC reporter David Shuster when he used the word "pimped out" to refer to Chelsea - clearly used as street-talk and not in a sexual way -- was of Tsunami proportions. And it wasn't just an impulsive outburst as McCain's apparently are (He tends to apologize immediately). Even days after Shuster had made this remark, Hillary was still demanding that his suspension from the network wasn't enough - she demanded that Shuster be fired, raising questions not only about her temperament but about her lack of empathy and compassion. Her reaction isn't just to do with her daughter. She has a long history of being easily slighted and vengeful.

It's, of course, absurd to speculate psychologically at a distance about McCain (or for that matter about anyone at all), but hey, here goes. The fact is there's no way that anyone could survive the kind of experience McCain did as a POW without a split in mental functioning. Even trauma of a far lesser degree causes the ego to split and creates parallel universes that never come into contact with each other in order to protect the self.

This brings me to McCain's repetitious use of the phrase "My friends." It may just be a manner of speaking, but as a manner of speaking it sure seems persistent - hardly a paragraph goes by without him using this figure of speech. While it will undoubtedly be seized upon by Saturday Night Live as a comic mannerism, there may be a deeper reason for its constant reiteration. It may be a product of the split world he was forced to create, a way of insisting to himself that he's in a friendly universe.

How being forced to split one's mind as a result of torture would play out politically is unclear. McCain supporters will point to his astonishing resilience as a quality that makes him highly suited to deal with anything the Oval Office could throw at him. Should Clinton be the nominee, her camp will inevitably find some way to sow seeds of doubt about whether McCain, having been tortured to such a degree, has the capacity to make dispassionate decisions about military affairs. Her camp has already enlisted plenty of generals to convey fear about McCain's stability. If it's a McCain vs. Clinton election, one thing's for sure. McCain's ability to survive his years of torture is going to make Hillary's ability to survive her ups and downs seem feeble indeed.

That being said, people do marvel at Hillary Clinton's resilience. How could anyone appear so cheerful in public after being serially humiliated by her husband? Her ability to so successfully compartmentalize her degrading experiences made most people draw the conclusion that Hillary would put up with anything to improve her own political fortunes. After reading Carl Bernstein's biography, "A Woman in Charge", my inkling is that at the level of the unconscious her motives were less Machiavellian. Bernstein points out that Hillary's mother "silently accepted" the humiliations of her husband, Hugh Rodham. Hillary's stoicism about Bill's behavior may be related to an unconscious identification with her mother. It's even possible that Hillary's choice of Bill as a husband was a failed attempt to undo her mother's experience. New York psychoanalyst Dr. Peter Mezan says that people have a choice to repair or to repeat the past. If they don't repair the past, they are condemned to repeat it. It's very common to marry someone with the very qualities one despised in one's parents. The hope is to be able to repair the past by changing one's spouse. It rarely works out that way. Instead one tends to repeat the pattern of one's parents.

Then there's the matter of Hillary Clinton's persona - or lack of one. As Amy Wilentz wrote in "Thirty ways of looking at Hillary", it's Hillary's character that is the "hardest thing to pin down". Writers have described Hillary as opaque, enigmatic, hidden, and a chameleon. Hillary and her team have been confused about how to respond to the general impression that her "self" seems so ambiguous. They've tried to relate it to her intelligence -- she's too complex to be pinned down. They've gone the humility route - it's difficult to figure out who Hillary is because she's very other-directed and doesn't like talking about herself. Their prevalent line is that it's not Hillary's who's got a problem, but the voters. Hillary claims that she's a Rorschach test, that people project their own fantasies onto her in the same way that they do to the shapeless, ambiguous inkblots of the Rorschach. This theory might have been plausible when Hillary first appeared on the public stage. But after 16 years in the public eye, if she still appears to be a shapeless, ambiguous figure, it has to say more about her than about the bewildered public.

In this campaign, Hillary herself has undermined the Rorschach theory. Far from being shapeless, she has aggressively put out a number of distinct, contradictory personalities. One day, she proclaims that she's honored to be on the same stage as Barack Obama; the next day she's chastising him: "Shame on you Barack Obama." In New Hampshire, Hillary proclaimed she'd finally found her voice (this after umpteen years in the public eye). The next week, she got laryngitis. It's not that Hillary's two faced - it's that she's poly-faced. Seeing her is like viewing a Picasso painting during his cubist period. As Clive Cook wrote in the Financial Times, "[Hillary] has veered from one false personality to another, often during the course of a single debate or interview." She's a gracious opponent. No, she's sneaky and underhanded. No, she's warm and accessible. No, she's cold and remote. No, she's straightforward and honest. No, she's guarded and deceitful. No, she charming and funny; No, she's graceless and humorless.

Hillary always seems to be at some remove from her personality de jour and it's disturbing to watch. It's as if she has her hand up her own back and she's both ventriloquist and dummy.

Conceivably Hillary's campaign may be forcing her to act certain ways for political gain. The alternative is that Hillary doesn't actually have an authentic personality, that she has a "false self' or "as if" personality, which is to say that she is only acting "as if" she has a certain persona.

Hillary has apparently been struggling with her own identity since she's been in college. In "Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary" food critic Mimi Sheraton quotes a letter that Hillary penned to a high school friend while at Wellesley College. Hillary writes, "There is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me." Sheraton implies that Hillary was on the verge of choosing one of these personalities. Hmm, is that really how it happens - like picking a pair of shoes? I've always had the feeling that personalities evolve organically.

Hillary's Zelig-like transformations from one personality to another may explain how she can so viciously and unfairly attack her opponents with little compunction. Hillary doesn't feel remorseful after she compares Obama to Ken Starr or pretends that Obama may be a Muslim, because for her there essentially is no "afterwards" -- she's already slipped into another personality with no memory of the recent past.

The only consistent aspect of Hillary's personality that you can depend on is her determination to do anything to get elected - a quality that many see as ugly but that others argue will be an asset when running against similarly ruthless Republicans.

Now to Obama. Born to a white mother and a black father, Obama spent a good part of his life grappling with the problem of identity and the many splits in his world - his father left when Obama was two, went to Harvard, then returned to Kenya and died before Obama had a chance to know him. Between his mother's re-marriage and his father's many marriages, Obama ended up with a big bunch of siblings, most of whom lived in Kenya.

This was a formidable situation to attempt to repair psychologically. There is not only the issue of an absent parent and scattered, unexplained siblings, there is also the alienation Obama describes because of the many ways he was different: his funny name, the color of his skin, and his peculiar family circumstances.

Despite these differences, in his autobiography "Dreams From My Father", Obama describes his early life as relatively blissful -- meaning he was blissfully unaware of all these differences. He didn't realize that most people had fathers who lived with them or that many people had negative feelings about intermarriage or African-Americans.

In many of his Presidential speeches Obama conveys a vision of Americans coming together instead of focusing on their differences. One can't help but feel that Obama may be attempting to reunite his scattered family and restore the utopian feeling of no- differences that he had experienced as a child. To some degree this may explain the Obama phenomenon. What a gift it would be to all of us to return to that time of our lives when our differences didn't divide us and had no meaning.

Obama's vision is not a juvenile fantasy. It is a recurrent vision of civil life that inspired many of our greatest leaders, including Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, FDR, and Churchill.

It is Hillary Clinton's strategy to rain on that parade, to mock it as a fool's paradise and to put differences, divisions and factions back into the foreground.

For more, watch Ellen combine the professional and the political at Bloggingheads.

Comments

[bauersox]

"Obama's vision is not a juvenile fantasy. It is a recurrent vision of civil life that inspired many of our greatest leaders, including Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, FDR, and Churchill."

I think Obama's fantasy *is* juvenile. And I think to say that Jack and Bobby Kennedy were among our greatest leaders is arrant nonsense. Kennedy was a creature created by public relations, who left very little behind in the way of a legacy except for a load of hot air. And I think there was something the matter with Bobby Kennedy. He certainly wasn't a lover of mankind; he seemed more like a hater.

And none of the people you mention as being "great" rabbited on exclusively about "hope" and "inspiration."

I don't think Civil Rights is one of our main issues at the moment. We've got far more important fish to fry just now. Why try to revive the bad old days by running a "retr" campaign highlighting issues that are obsolete.

[Oldtt]

Oops! Diagnosis of persons SHE has never met.

[Oldtt]

This attempt at long-distance psychoanalysis reminds me of the parallel attempt by Conservatives to perform a medical diagnosos on Terry Schiavo sight unseen. Nothing about this article is anything but the author's attempt to make a case for Obama based on speculation about personalities of persons he has never met.

[bellecloche]

This is a fascinating article, Ms. Ladowsky, but it's important to underscore your preface that to psycho-analyze from a distance is indeed absurd. Committed Obama voters feel justified in how the interpretation slants their way and personality does play a major role in elections - ESPECIALLY in this primary - but it's essential to remember that this analysis is superficial and superficiality can work for any argument. While many voters say Obama's story touches their hearts albeit Hillary seems distant and therefore untrustworthy, many bigoted voters also use Obama's multi-cultural story as a basis for their prejudices. (I've even heard women say he must be a misogynist because he had Muslim male influence in his childhood.) So be careful - the candidates' messages are far more significant and substantive than their backgrounds.

[SamThornton]

As Wolfgang on the old "Laugh In" used to remark, "Veddy interestzing." (http://tinyurl.com/2sj52v)

The dissection of the many public faces of Sen. Clinton strikes a note of recognition. What sort of childhood experiences could have produced such a method of dealing with the world is a subject that I'd never considered before but which suggests itself here. That would be the sort of analysis I'd agree shouldn't be done publicly necessarily but which would be, nonetheless, "Veddy interestzing."

[TJS]

I'm wary of any psychologist who attempts to formulate a personality analysis at a distance--especially of politicians, who by their nature, must be guarded and deliberate in their public personnas. Sure, those instances where anger and temper burst through the veil of preconceived talking points are insightful, but no truly accurate analysis is possible without candid interaction with the candidates themselves. (As a psychologist, Ms. Ladowsky should know this. Even a shameless self-promoter like Dr. Phil conducts a superficial one-on-one session with his subjects.) There are too many firewalls between the modern candidate and their true personalities. At best, speculations such as these are amusing political parlor games, revealing more about the analyst's--in this case Ms. Ladowsky's--polical leanings.

[OtayPanky]

Ellen Ladowsky: Hillary's Zelig-like transformations from one personality to another may explain how she can so viciously and unfairly attack her opponents with little compunction. Hillary doesn't feel remorseful after she compares Obama to Ken Starr or pretends that Obama may be a Muslim, because for her there essentially is no "afterwards" -- she's already slipped into another personality with no memory of the recent past.

===

And that's why they call them BILLARY.

[Jacee]

I think McCain, at the end of the day, is the product more of being a long time, full time Republican and all that that entails. He acts and reacts in similar ways all Republicans do. His flashes of rage are the same as Bush's-they happen when someone dares question him. His ability to cower to those that abuse him-like Bush did-is more in alignment with his POW experience. It is why he surrounds himself with lobbyists. That relationship makes sense to him, making deals to survive.


Hillary has demonstrated the effects of long term spouse abuse, which is a product of her long term abuse from her father. Her personality split long time ago, stayed split. Her multiple personalities is her way of never being vulnerable or authentic. She surrounds herself with bad men that control her and use her-it is what makes sense to her. Her venom for Barak comes from her belief that there are no good men-none. That men are liars and cheats. She believes this because it is all she has ever known. It explains why she shows so much out right hate towards Obama. She is not mentally fit. She talks the way a woman deep in therapy talks, 'i found my voice' is a good example. She has never really dealt with her marriage. She accepted the abuse and humiliation, she has dense mechanisms for it-lying, shape shifting, crying, accusing, cooing. It is classic abuse syndrome behavior. Its been sad and disturbing to watch.


Obama is a sum of his experience as well. His very authentic and obviously ground desire to rise above ugliness and division drives his politics. He shows basically the same person. He does not have any high highs or low lows. He is very steady and constantly looks for the equatable place. Even in the face of Clintons attacks, he finds a way to stay even with her. He refuses to fight. What he saw and felt going up came from the females in his life. What many people that are older do not get is that he is representative of a younger mind set that is much more accepting and inclusive. Divisions and difference do not exist, younger people do not see other people from the same filter as older people. What they do reject and do not trust is the older person's closed or biased mindset. This is the one thing they will get riled up about. Mostly Obama wants the country to change from the old to the young.


For me, Obama is the one that is mentally and emotionally fit to lead us to where we need to go now. He doesn't have the emotional baggage that weighs down Clinton and McCcain. He is more fit to see things as they are and not as they are through decades of abuse, doubt, disappointment and fear. Both McCain and Clinton see the world the same way-through abuse, doubt, disappointment and fear-they will react accordingly.


Obama talks on the campaign trail about 'being stewed in Washington, having the hope boiled out of him...' He is very right here.


It is because the leaders that are in Washington are older and have had the hope boiled out of them as they survived Hoover and Nixon, Vietnam and Watergate, the MLK, JFK and RFK killings, the FBI being turned into the KGB, Iran Contra, the destruction of the middle class, our education and health care system, Clinton's Impeachment, Monica, the horror of 911 and the devastating 8 years of Bush, Iraq and our National humiliation around the world. That has boiled out the hope of Clinton and McCain.


Obama is saying that our country needs someone that has not been boiled and abused and humiliated through succession of failures. He is right. Very right. He tells people who still have ears to hear that there is a better way. There is. But you can not be a person that has had the hope boiled out of them.


Obama 2008

[hank48188]

That was a real ass-kicking in Wyoming, 8690 DEMS voted, HUGE TURNOUT. They have about 215,000 registered voters in Wyoming, I would think maybe 60,000 are DEMS? They make it so difficult to vote, you have to be in line at 9:00 AM to get a wrist band and register and then come later to cast your vote, the place I saw on TV had voting in 3 shifts. If you didn't have 6 hours to devote to this process your voice was silenced. This is the most pitiful example of DEMOCRACY I have ever seen, make it so hard to vote that only 15% of your members turn out, GREAT JOB DEMS.

[efranklin]

What do the Wyoming caucuses have to do with this article?

[theuniversalhost]

Great post! Now I *really* feel bad for Chelsea!

[racom]

Well, you certainly have numerous explanations, reasons, excuses for McCains bad behavior. What I see is a man that is in serious need of professional help. There are way too many accounts of his angry outburst even with his republican colleagues. One attribute greatly needed in a president is 'level headed'. 'Level headed' McCain isn't!!!

[danceswithyids]

I would imagine many a person would have some angry outbursts with his republican colleagues!

[peterg76]

Before his current mental illness, McCain was a true hero and patriot. He survived the Vietnamese abuse just fine. He It was the Republican Party that broke him.

[Tejano1]

interesting column. i buy a lot of it, esp. the reason for mcclinton's multiplex personality.

[Desiderata]

HRC: Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who should be President among us all?

Mirror: Hillary, you have much experience, truth be told;
But your brain has overheated and your heart gone cold....

[Hopalongpoppyseed]

Good one Desi.

[Nann]

I'm sick of the Clinton's and their double standards. Ridiculous both McCain and Obama are class acts. Hillary is too unstable.