“But we are nearly through the second term of a president who is the epitome of narcissistic self-centeredness.”

When I read this sentence in M.D. Harmon’s Jan. 1 column (“Neither of the leading presidential candidates can handle the job”), it fairly jumped off the page.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard similar remarks. I have 244 friends on Facebook. I often get shared posts from some of them with the same negative ring to them about our president. Sometimes they will come right out and say, “I hate President Obama.” I always delete them.

I assume these posts originate in the old Confederacy. It must be very painful for them to witness that a man who once would have been deemed unfit to drink out of the same water fountain as a white person is now sitting in the White House. Small wonder that one of their officials in the Congress declared that, “Our job is to get rid of him.”

Besides his ethnicity, I’m pretty sure it is his rather amazing self-confidence that is getting to them. Imagine being half white and half black and daring to run for the presidency of the United States, and winning – twice!

Self-confidence in a woman is sometimes interpreted as arrogance. Self-confidence in an African-American is interpreted as “narcissistic self-centeredness.”

The columnist also described Obama as “a man openly hostile to the historic American enterprise.” There is not space here to develop the thesis that the economic situation in America today is no longer like it was back when the historic American industrialists lifted millions of our citizens out of poverty, including Maine’s paper mill magnates.

With the new dynamic that is taking over, we can use a wise authority in Washington who recognizes this.

Rev. Joseph R. McKenna

Portland

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