Another Comparison of Obama with FDR

This seems to be the summer of comparing Obama to FDR. Ronald Dworkin praised Obama. Nassir Ghaemi, a psychiatrist at Tufts, is not as sanguine. He raises the possibility that in troubled times the nation needs not a calm, cool and collected president but one who may be slightly insane. It is certainly an odd idea, but he does make a strong case. He invokes "the inverse law of sanity: mentally healthy leaders, successful in quiet and prosperous times, often fail in times of crisis; in contrast, our greatest crisis leaders frequently are mentally abnormal, even mentally ill."

He thinks FDR had a hyperthymic temperament, which expresses itself as self-confident, strong-willed, extroverted, egotistical, willing to break social norms and a whole host of other traits that Obama clearly does not have. Ghaemi states what he calls "the inverse law of sanity: mentally healthy leaders, successful in quiet and prosperous times, often fail in times of crisis; in contrast, our greatest crisis leaders frequently are mentally abnormal, even mentally ill."

Surprisingly, what made FDR truly great was his polio. Overcoming it gave him the strength to be a real leader willing to look at and try strange things. He believed, “You sometimes find something pretty good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.”