I first heard of the phrase “Grand Illusion” when the broker informed me that it was the name of the vessel that I was about to look at while I was boat shopping in Fort Lauderdale in the spring of 1995.  I later learned that it was the English translation of a reference to the 1937 French war movie “La Grande Illusion”, which many film critics rank as among the top 100 of the twentieth century.

Soon thereafter I bought the boat, a 41-foot aft cabin trawler yacht, but since I did not care for the name (or the French either, for that matter), I quickly arranged for a sign painter to replace it with “Salacia”, the name of King Neptune’s wife in Roman mythology.

I thought of the phrase again while reading CUNY professor Stanley Renshon’s new article at Commentary Magazine entitled “In Search Of Greatness”, in which he attempts an early assessment of how President Obama will eventually be treated by presidential historians.  I won’t link to the article because I don’t actually think it is very good.  However, I was struck by Renshon’s aggregation of some quotes by Obama himself as well as his couterie of sycophants.  Examples:

Obama’s transformational ambitions for greatness were aided and abetted by a senior staff that reinforced his enormous self-confidence and his view of himself as a historic figure.  One of the president’s senior aides told a reporter for the Washington Post, “He’s playing chess in a town full of checkers players.”  Another, Valerie Jarrett, said, “He knows exactly how smart he is…He knows how perceptive he is,” and what’s more, “I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually.”

and

His chief political adviser David Axelrod said of working with Obama: “It’s like you are carrying this priceless porcelain vase through a crowd of people and you don’t want to be the guy who drops it and breaks it.”

Having to constantly wade through all this bullshit probably would make it “hard to be humble”, as songwriter Mac Davis once said in a lyric, because Obama himself obviously bought into it:

At one point during his first presidential campaign, Obama asserted that in picking a vice-presidential nominee, he didn’t have to worry about foreign-policy experience because “foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain.”  Asked after the presidential campaign about the best advice he had received while running, he replied, “Well, I have to say it was the advice that I gave to myself.”  In July of 2007, he told a group of fundraisers, “I’m the best retail politician in America.”  In early 2007, when Obama interviewed his campaign’s future political director, Patrick Gaspard, he told him: “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters.  I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.”

Yet he was elected.  Twice!  Mainstream Media bias is a topic for another day, but it is difficult to understand how, in a country with more print and televisions media outlets per capita than any other, we can have so many LIVs (low-information voters).  Nevertheless, I think that the LIVs were a significant factor in bringing us, as a nation, so low.