Barack Obama and the Politics of Redemption

Renshon's third successive psycho-political portrait of a sitting president examines Barack Obama's life and record to map the "psychological contours" of his personality and presidency. A certified psychoanalyst and political science professor, Renshon (The Psychological Assessment of Presidential Candidates) utilizes a political psychology framework to analyze information from biographies, speeches, news, polls, and Obama's own writings. His keys are Obama's relationships with his absent father, often-absent mother, wife, and others as well as his search for racial identity. Whatever Renshon's regard for Obama the man, it does not carry over to Obama the president; he claims the president possesses a "witches brew" of traits that he calls a "recipe for political disaster." Renshon then uses polling data to demonstrate how Obama's policies failed to reflect the electorate's opinions and how he ignored or dismissed feedback, resulting in midterm election losses. Though the author's aim was to understand Obama's promotion of national and personal redemption through a transformative agenda, his assumptions and analyses result in a book that reads more like partisan criticism than unbiased psychological diagnosis or behavioral review. (Oct.)