The Amateur Read Free

can’t say. I think the knowledge came to him at last—only at the very last.... I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.
     

—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
     
    O f all the Chicago people I interviewed, none got to know Barack Obama quite the way David Scheiner, MD, did. Scheiner was Obama’s personal physician for twenty-two years—from the mid-1980s, when Obama was a community organizer, until he was elected president of the United States.
    Today, at the age of seventy-three, Dr. Scheiner is a rail-thin, spunky, unreconstructed old lefty. He belongs to Physicians for a National Health Program, a far-leftwing organization that lobbies for single-payer national health insurance—or, in Dr. Scheiner’s own words, “socialized medicine.” He had great hopes for Obama in the White House, because when Obama was his patient he made no secret of the fact that he favored the kind of socialized medicine that is practiced in Canada and Western Europe.
    Given Dr. Scheiner’s leftist leanings, I expected him to be a champion of his former patient. To my surprise, however, he turned out to be one of Obama’s most severe and unforgiving critics.
    “I look at his healthcare program and I can’t see how it can work,” Scheiner said. “He has no cost control. There would be no effective cost control in his program. The [Congressional Budget Office] said it’s going to be incredibly expensive ... and the thing that I really am worried about is, if it is the failure that I think it would be, then health reform will be set back a long, long time.
    “When Barack Obama planned this health program, he didn’t include on his healthcare team anyone who actually practiced medicine in the trenches the way I do,” Dr. Scheiner continued. “I’m an old-fashioned doctor. I still make house calls. I still use the first black bag that I got out of medical school. My patients have my home phone number. It’s true that Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of Rahm Emanuel, was on the healthcare team, but Ezekiel is a medical oncologist, not a general physician.”
    Dr. Scheiner’s grievances against Obama went well beyond Obama’s policies to the very nature of the man.
    “My main objection to Barack Obama is that he is a great speaker and a lousy communicator,” Dr. Scheiner said. “He isn’t getting his message across to people. He isn’t showing that he really cares. To this day he hasn’t communicated with members of Congress.
    “He’s got academic University of Chicago-type people around him who don’t care. Where is our Surgeon General, the obese Dr. Regina Benjamin? Why hasn’t she said anything during this healthcare debate? Ronald Reagan had C. Everett Koop as his surgeon general. Believe me, Regina Benjamin is no Everett Koop. In fact, Obama’s whole cabinet has been a disappointment. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is a joke.”
    I asked Dr. Scheiner why he thought Obama had been such a dismal failure as president. He thought for a moment, then said:
    “I can really relate to people, but I never really related to him. I never had the closeness with him that I had with other patients. It was a purely professional relationship. He was always gracious and polite. But I never really connected to him. He was distant. When I think of why he’s had problems in the White House, I think there is too much of the University of Chicago in him. By which I mean he’s academic, lacks passion and feeling, and doesn’t have the sense of humanity that I expected.
    “Obama has an academic detachment,” he continued. “I treat many patients from the University of Chicago faculty, and I’ve been able to crack through their academic detachment. Not Obama. We never got to