Happy Baracksgiving

What do the nascent economic turnaround, Chicago White Sox ace Mark Buehrle’s perfect game and conservative Republican Robert F. McDonnell’s landslide victory in the Virginia governor’s race have in common?

Barack Obama, if we are to believe the president and his surrogates, is responsible for them all.

Much has been written about Mr. Obama’s penchant for self-aggrandizement. As a candidate in October 2008, he said: “Like any politician at this level, I’ve got a healthy ego.” But Mr. Obama goes beyond what even most politicians would do in taking credit for things that have absolutely nothing to do with him. It is made worse by his habit of blaming others - namely his predecessor and his country - for all that ails the world.

It is one thing for a president to try to control an issue. In late October, Mr. Obama said, “We can see clearly now that the steps my administration is taking are making a difference, blunting the worst of this recession and helping to bring about its conclusion.”

It’s another thing entirely for him to take credit for things he had nothing to do with. In a phone call to the White Sox’s Buehrle after the pitcher threw a perfect game in July, Mr. Obama, according to administration Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, said “maybe [the perfect game] was because I wore the White Sox jacket at the All-Star Game.”

Mr. Obama’s proxies go even further. Last fall, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine credited Mr. Obama for the cease-fire between Russia and Georgia, saying, “I’m very, very happy that the senator’s request for a cease-fire has been complied with by President Medvedev.”

After protests following Iran’s sham elections in June, senior Obama advisers privately credited Mr. Obama’s Cairo speech for inspiring protesters. One senior administration official told The Washington Post, “There clearly is in the region a sense of new possibilities. I was struck in the aftermath of the president’s speech that there was a connection. It was very sweeping in terms of its reach.” Mr. Obama himself said that “obviously after the speech that I made in Cairo we tried to send a clear message that we think there is the possibility of change” - for a “robust debate” in Iran.

Of course, as the economists would say, correlation does not imply causation. Just because Mr. Obama called for a cease-fire in Georgia and it happened does not mean Mr. Obama caused it to happen. But Mr. Obama’s admirers never allow logic to interrupt their praise for the president from whom all blessings flow.

Republican victories on Election Day 2009 were seen partly as a repudiation of Mr. Obama’s policies. Yet Obama senior adviser David Axelrod flipped the prevailing wisdom on its head by insisting that Mr. McDonnell, a Republican, won in Virginia because he ran “not as a Sarah Palin Republican, but more as a Barack Obama centrist.”

Obamaphiles even credit him with making interracial marriage fashionable and with the surge in the use of BlackBerrys because of Mr. Obama’s devotion to the gadget.

Mr. Obama rarely deflects praise. At last year’s Al Smith dinner, he joked, “If I had to name my greatest strength, I guess it would be my humility. Greatest weakness, it’s possible that I’m a little too awesome.”

That must have been what the Norwegian Nobel Committee was thinking when it nominated Mr. Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize after he had been in office just two weeks. When the committee awarded him the prize in October, it highlighted Mr. Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

The Norwegians also credited Mr. Obama with creating a “new climate in international politics.” That probably had nothing to do with Mr. Obama’s efforts to address man-made climate change but could have been related to his claim upon receiving the Democratic nomination that he was “absolutely certain that generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when … the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Mr. Obama’s self-aggrandizement would be more easily forgivable if it weren’t combined with his habit of deflecting blame to others. In his aforementioned October remarks about the economy, he was careful to add, “As I’ve said many times, it took years to dig our way into the crisis we’ve faced. It will take more than a few months to dig our way out.”

The most revealing words above are “as I’ve said many times.” Indeed, Mr. Obama has continuously blamed former President George W. Bush for global warming, the recession, the deficit, anti-America sentiment abroad and much more.

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