Originally Posted by SteveZ

As far as knowing President Obama or any other politician, regardless of party, the person's sales rhetoric (campaign or afterwards) means very little. What does matter are the actions, and they have been punctuated with arrogance and self-importance. That is a pity, because the potential and opportunity for greatness is there, but instead the trend has been to act as as "benevolent dictator" and snob. After all, the Harvard professor had to be in the right, and the blue-collar cop had to have over-reacted! Discounting the racial bias demonstrated, the class-elitism itself is sad.

This is not to say that previous Presidents did not suffer from the same delusions of grandeur. However, most of them were not so blatant in their separation from the common citizenry.