His true personal history is a mystery to us, and may remain so forever, but my best guess is that his mother was a narcissist, who likely gave him little nurturing after he was born. According to our best understandings, she left Hawaii nearly immediately after he was born, which meant that she also left behind access to her mother and father as care-givers, and dedicated herself to school without a husband. She may have had a boyfriend–who knows?–but Barry Soetero seems to have been an angry man. Later, she abandoned him entirely, to let her parents raise him while she returned to Indonesia to pursue things that actually interested her.
From age 10 or so on his ersatz–and in my view likely real–father was Frank Marshall Davis, who I feel was likely a sociopath. Knowing what was in his book Sex Rebel: Black, and the fact that he was a Communist LONG after it was known that this meant condoning mass murder, this seems a likely conclusion.
Examine that emotional history, and where do you find anything that would build useful compassion? He seems to have viewed his maternal grandmother with contempt, and his grandfather seems to have been little better than Davis. They were in any event friends.
As I have said, leftism acts as the conscience of psychopaths, and that is the path Obama has followed his entire life. He seems to be supporting Muslim tyrants intent on oppressing Jews, and has all but abandoned Israel. He refuses to speak with Netanyahu.
There is no way to know what is behind that cold facade, but I don’t see anything good. This is why his emotion was such big news: everyone knows on some level that he is little but cold calculation.