From the magazine that brought you such penetrating insights as “Sonia Sotomayor is mean,” we now have the latest bit of psychobabble:
What I suspect is that the president is probably a clinical narcissist. This is not necessarily a bad condition if one maintains for oneself what the psychiatrists call an “optimal margin of illusion,” that is, the margin of hope that allows you to work. But what if his narcissism blinds him to the issues and problems in the world and the inveterate foes of the nation that are not susceptible to his charms?
Joe Klein handles this quite nicely, and correctly notes the cause of this- Obama standing firm on Israeli settlements.
How long before Peretz is waving a tire gauge asking to see Obama’s birth certificate?
Lyle4
Isn’t it basically required that you be a narcissist to be a politician?
geg6
Marty Peretz is a neocon, always has been, always will be. When, oh, when will people quit thinking of the TNR as any sort of “liberal” publication.
ellaesther
A) This left-wing Israeli says: The President is not, in fact, standing firmly enough on a settlement freeze. This left-wing Israeli is fucking sick and tired of her Israeli government and really fucking wishes that someone would truly call their fucking bluff. (Not that this left-wing Israeli is holding her breath, and she is in fact grateful for the President’s efforts to date. She just doesn’t have much faith that those efforts will lead to anything substantive, because she knows the Israeli players too well). (Ahem).
B) Also: Aren’t these the same people who hated the word “empathy”? I don’t know if Peretz specifically hated it, but really, folks, get your stories straight. Either Obama cares too much, or not enough. Even the Messiah can’t do both at one and the same time.
ellaesther
@ellaesther: Wait, probably TNR didn’t hate on “empathy.” But the neo-cons did, and like geg6, that’s kind of where I lump Peretz in my mind. Hmm. I wonder why?
MNPundit
Ah, Marty Peretz. No man has done more work to pushing me towards anti-semitism.
Svensker
I agree with everything Joe Klein says — but why in HELL is he even commenting on ANYTHING Peretz has to say, except to point and laugh? Peretz is a war-mongering, racist, neo-con piece of shit. (Other than that, a perfectly delightful fellow.) Fuck the Villagers.
Paul
nudge nudge,wink wink
r€nato
George W. Bush – totally not a narcissist.
aimai
Its true that there was a certain amount of psychobabblic behavior as Liberals tried to fathom what made “the man in charge” tick when Bush/Cheney were our hydra headed leaders. And it was kind of interesting because the things we were trying to explain–the disconnect between what they said they were doing, what they were doing, and what was going to happen because of what they were doing was so incredibly clear that *only a psychological explanation* could make sense. That is, at some level you could only explain bombing Iraq in revenge for 9/11 as either incredibly cynical or incredibly psychotic or both.
But the things they are trying to ” explain” that Obama has done are always utterly ordinary political acts. It doesn’t take a “narcissist” to go to Copenhagen to plead for his country to get the Olympics. Just because it was Chicago and Obama had some personal ties there doesn’t mean he was under the impression that if Chicago got it he would be personally vindicated. And we know that because Bush wanted the Olympics in Chicago and, had he been president, probably would have gone to plead for it too. We just don’t need to get into a tortured, psychological and, essentially, pathologizing exploration of Obama’s motives. Not to say that his motives are any purer than any other persons but in *every single case* that the Right has pulled this crap they have looked at the ordinary behaviors of a perfectly ordinary man and discerned pathology. That’s on them.
aimai
Derelict
Yes, Obama is a narcissist. Why can’t he be more humble like, say, Bush and simply declare that he was chosen by God? Or, also like Bush, drag other world leaders aside and tell them that God has spoken to him and given him special orders for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian situation? That shows so much less self involvement.
Prattlehorn
Um, read the whole article folks.
Peretz calls Mary Robinson a “frigid Anti-Semite.”
W. T. F.?!?
danimal
Who’s to say he hasn’t already? I’d be surprised if he hasn’t been spotted at a Town Hell meeting demanding his country back.
aimai
I’d also like to say one more thing which is that this continued right wing rage that Obama is a “narcissist” who “thinks well of himself” and is “arrogant” and etc… is more than pure projection. Its more than a payback for the left’s accusations about cheney and Bush. There’s something important about the selection of the very charge “arrogance,” “self confidence” “certainity” because all those things are, of course, to right wingers a feature and not a bug. Its exactly what they celebrated in Cheney and Bush, as long as they could.
The charge that certainity is good in bush but a pathology in Obama is coming straight out of a baffled sense of rage that Obama, finally, of all the dems has refused to take the Right’s valuation of Democrats seriously. They’ve run this shtick sucessfully for so long –the dems are weak, feminine, indecisive, stupid, blah blah blah and the dems always have responded by accepting the charge even as they pathetically tried to push back. The right is furious that Obama sees himself, and represents himself, as, well…whole and entire, a complete adult, who doesn’t need their adulation and doesn’t care a fig for their condemnation. This is absolutely enraging to them. Look for this accusation to get more shrill and more disconnected from reality. They were used to being able to whisper their critiques and have them matter. Now they are having to resort to complete hysterics to even get into print and they know no one is listening. Certainly not Obama.
Mike G
What I suspect is that the president is probably a clinical narcissist.
This was written between 2001 and 2008, right?
cleek
i really don’t understand this “narcissist” charge.
usually it’s possible to see the link from rhetoric to the reality. but this one has me totally stumped. i get that the wingnuts need to be saying bad things about the president, always. but this one seems so detached from reality…
trying to make a long shot for your home town doesn’t make you a narcissist. it makes you a nice guy.
David
It is only arrogance and narcissism for the Right and the neocons when it doesn’t agree with their viewpoint.
How convenient.
gocart mozart
Yes Aimai, is he steadfast, bold and resolute, or is he perhaps just a bit too uppity.
catclub
Someone asked why Joe Klein is commenting on Marty Peretz.
There is only one possible reason. Peretz has in the past insulted Klein.
Issues do not really matter.
Klein is often an excellent writer. Unfortunately, the only thing that appears to motivate him is a personal insult.
It is clear that 45 years ago a DFH insulted him. He is still nursing that grudge.
beltane
It’s an equilibrium thing. The Little Green Footballs guy recently emerged from the gray fog of crazy, and so Peretz must rush in to take his place so the crazy can remain at critical mass.
The Grand Panjandrum
I see the NRA (gun nuts) crowd and the Israeli Exceptionalism (Israel can do now wrong.) crowd in a similar fashion. Always paranoid. Always. Everyone who is not a wild-eyed frothing at the mouth supporter is an enemy.
machine
No doubt Peretz will soon be adding “AnalRapist” to his business cards.
Svensker
@Prattlehorn:
If you google Mary Robinson and Medal of Freedom, the first article that comes up is one from John Bolton in the WSJ where he explains Robinson’s horrible anti-Israel bias and, therefore (axiomatically, apparently) her anti-American bias. In other words, she said uncomplimentary things about Israel’s record on human rights.
Peretz, not content with throwing around the anti-Semite charge, decides to question Robinson’s sexuality as well. Really a sweet guy, isn’t he?
Brick Oven Bill
The narcissism masks a deep insecurity. It is fair to analyze this as he signed up to be President and his thought processes affect all of our lives. We should know how he thinks.
To understand Obama, you need to start with his mom. The maternal grandfather wanted a boy and resented the daughter, naming her Stanley. Her revenge was running off as a teenager and getting pregnant by a guy from Africa to spite her father’s DNA. So this is kind of a strange family from the start.
Then the African father abandoned the son, which is hard on a boy. And then there was the step father, who also abandoned him. Then, mom left. This is enough to mess up any child.
Thus the deep desire for attention and love on the part of the President. This is why he spends lots on time on TV and avoids Alpha males. First in college and now with General McChrystal. This is the ‘pleasure principle’ in accordance with Freud (Id). This also explains his self-prostration before his adopted father figure, Mayor Daley, and perhaps his fantasy father figure, the King of Saudi Arabia.
Napoleon
@cleek:
IMO its just a way to call him uppity and a n— that doesn’t know his place.
Napoleon
@catclub:
I think Klein does not care for those members of the neocon right that use the charge of anti-semitism as a bludgeon, like Peretz, and he will go after them when they do.
gocart mozart
neil
It is interesting that this is the third president in a row with absent-father issues. It does say something about what personality traits make one want the job, I think.
I’m not sure why they picked this issue to go after Obama for ‘narcissism,’ since it seems no more about his personal aggrandizement than anything else he does as head of state. The only thing I can figure is that they see it as an attack that they can only deploy when he fails to achieve something — then they can explain that he failed because of his narcissism. It is noteworthy, then, that not being selected to host the Olympics is the first failure of the Obama administration significant enough to attract this sort of name-calling.
asiangrrlMN
@Svensker: I take exception to one thing Klein said–that the health care options would put too much burden on the financial sector. Oh, and that liberals have been wildly wrong about, well, anything in the last ten years or so (except how truly spineless the Dems would be). Other than that, he is pretty much on the money.
As for Obama and narcissism, I think aimai hit the nail on the head. Obama is the one Democrat who was neither blustery bombastic nor weak and ineffective in his campaign. It’s his calmness and surety of self that drives the right backshitcrazy (along with teh blackness, to be sure). He is what they long to be, but never will be: a true leader (use the powers for Good, Obama).
Is he a narcissist? To a certain extent, yes. As Lyle4 said, you have to be to enter into politics. I would put Obama at the healthy end of the scale, though–more like very self-assured rather than narcissistic.
Das Internetkommissariat
@Brick Oven Bill:
What no artificial law, Adolf?
Das Internetkommissariat
@Brick Oven Bill:
What, no artificial law, Adolf?
Hugh Batchaw
@Brick Oven Bill:
What, no artificial law, Adolf?
catclub
Napoleon@25 said:
“I think Klein does not care for those members of the neocon right that use the charge of anti-semitism as a bludgeon, like Peretz, and he will go after them when they do.”
It is because they used that bludgeon on HIM. Only then does it matter.
Up till then he can ignore it.
Persia
I always figured that what with the economy in the toilet, gay marriage running rampant, and two wars going on, people would find more evidence of the Failed Obama Presidency than a lost Olympics big. But what do I know?
“Frigid” was indeed especially nice. Because we all know there’s nothing worse than a frigid woman, unless of course she’s a slut.
The Republic of Stupidity
Go back to claiming the Olympics bid was meant to pay off crooked land speculators and therefore proves Obama hates the military, B.O.B.
At least you had HALF a chance of selling THAT line of thought.
Got a question… how come we never heard this sort of silly psychobabble from the pundits when Bush was busy despoiling the WH , the country, and the whole world?
We’re talking a man who was reputed to blow up frogs w/ fire crackers as a little boy and giggled when sending convicts to their deaths in Texas.
WTF??? … over…
Rhoda
I love this: Marty Peretz calling someone a narcissist!
How long before we get the “I made Barack Obama and I regret it because he is a Kenyan Muslim” post.
Notorious P.A.T.
So true! What if he ignores real problems like death panels and concentration camps, and instead tries to stop global warming or stimulate the economy or reform health care with a public option?
The Republic of Stupidity
Because we all know there’s nothing worse than a frigid woman, unless of course she’s a slut.
———-
Oh yeah?
Well… what about a frigid slut???
Notorious P.A.T.
Also, there is something about Obama that makes certain people treat his behavior differently than other presidents. Something that colors their judgment, if you will.
Brick Oven Bill
Obama is neither Artificial nor Natural Law. He is the agent of Artificial Law. Artificial Law sent him to Copenhagen. Artificial Law programs the teleprompter.
Shell
Didn’t George Will add his onion to the stew of ‘Obama=narcissist’ with his counting how many times Barack/Michelle supposedly said “I” and ‘me” in their Olympic bid speeches? This guy needs to go back to worrying about too many people wearing blue jeans.
wasabi gasp
Nothing say narcissism more than funny mustard, ‘cept maybe post-law degree community organizer.
gocart mozart
@Brick Oven Bill:
BDeevDad
I wonder if any of these arm chair psychologists have ever looked at the DSM-IV criteria for the personality disorders they place on others. For narcissism
Because I can identify a bunch of other folks that fit those patterns much better.
David
@Brick Oven Bill:
You are a weird dude, BoB. It is strange that someone thinks that teenagers get pregnant to spite their father’s DNA. That is some sort of racial purity argument.
Guess you don’t know who else made those sorts of arguments…
Hugh Batchaw
@Brick Oven Bill:
And what about the Liberal Arts?
Hugh Batchaw. Also, too.
Jason B at Work
Jokeline actually admitted to some wishy-wishiness there, I appreciate that. Honestly, just put Joe Klein together in a room with Marty Peretz, let them talk for twenty minutes, then light a match and the combined power of the fumes of their utter bullshit will immediately ignite the room and rid of us two “liberals” we really don’t need.
Wow, my attitude is showing today. You’re welcome.
Also, don’t mean to threadjack but this has me absolutely steaming…..just discovered a forum/blog on the intertrons called “Fuck France”, and of course it’s full of the usual gleeful eurohate, but the really terrible thing is their nickname for Obama. See for yourself:
http://www.fuckfrance.com/topic/3532447/1/USA/Nigger-One-cuts-funding-for-Iran-rights-watchdog.html&replies=2
Sometimes, it’s a victory just to keep from killing.
Demo Woman
OT General Stuck mentioned Dylan Ratigan’s smack down of Betsy McCaughley during a segment on health care. If you haven’t seen it, I found the linklink
JHF
WHAT?!? Obama has a birth certificate? I wanna see it.
gocart mozart
@Brick Oven Bill:
O.K., I call spoof. No sane person can say this and mean it. You have been exposed B.O.B.
Brachiator
@cleek:
Actually, I don’t think this is the biggest piece of nonsense in the column. The Peretz piece could just as easily been ghost written by Brick Oven Bill.
It is a disjointed ramble of fear and anxiety, taking odd cheap shots along the way (the bizarre sliming of not only Mary Robinson, but also of Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett). But little Marty’s deepest neo-con fear is revealed in the massive non-sequitur that is the column’s very last sentence:
Little Marty, like others of his neo-con ilk, are addicted to a kind of nationalistic narcissism, the infantile idea that an American president must always project the United States as the bestest country ever whenever he appears on the national stage, a country which is perfect, without sin and flaw, and incapable of being criticized no matter what it does.
It’s not about Obama’s supposed narcissism. It’s about a desperate need to cling to the lost promise that might have been had McCain been elected president: “Country First!”
Demo Woman
@Demo Woman: I meant to add that you have to watch a short commercial before the video comes up, It’s the best smack down ever and McCaughey lets Dylan know she is not happy about it.
Brick Oven Bill
Or maybe not? Disregard comment #39.
Hugh Batchaw
@David:
You know who made those arguments? The guys my grandfathers used to hunt in the European mountains and forests.
Seriously, it’s becoming time to finish the job and get rid of the Nazi scum for good.
Shell
Brick Oven Bill makes as much sense as No.2 in the old tv series ‘The Prisoner.’
ericblair
Like a couple of people have already said, there’s not much to really analyze here. The assorted wingnut factions have found out that you can’t say “uppity uppity uppity” in mixed company anymore, so it’s time to smear some psychoanalytic mumbo jumbo over the basic lizard brain concept and shove it out the door.
Jennifer
What I suspect is that the president is probably a clinical narcissist.
HA! That’s classic, coming from a man to whom I once sent an email that read, in part, “de haute en bas – correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the literal English translation for that phrase “I’m so smug I’m in love with the smell of my own farts?” In terms of the one employing the phrase, that is.”
(this in response to his use of “de haute en bas” as a put-down descriptor for John Kerry)
Mike in NC
Peretz channeling Charles Krauthammer? Something to do with Zionism, you say? Before the day’s over some talk radio imbecile will have picked up the “narcissism” ball, then it’ll get caught in the right wing feedback loop for a few days. Then tune in to the TV pundits on Sunday morning as they attempt to gauge the depth of Obama’s narcissism.
BDeevDad
@Demo Woman: Can’t believe he said “Corporate Communism”
Midnight Marauder
@Shell:
Indeed, and I have to say, this game “conservatives” keep playing where they do these nonsensical, half-assed word counts of Obama’s speeches (I’m thinking Ed Morrissey when Obama spoke to teh childrens a few weeks ago) is really starting to grate me. Beside the fact that they remove all context of how the words are actually used, they also continuously neglect to count such words as “our”, “we”, “us”, etc.
It’s just such a stupid, pointless, inane thing to do anyway, but moreso when you neglect to mention that he says things such as “This is not about me.” But he’s still a narcissist somehow, right? How, you ask?
Because shut up, that’s how.
PanAmerican
“Prediddily-ictable”
Homer-esque in it’s impotence.
Stupid
FlandersObamaaimai
Neil at 37
I don’t agree that this narcissism charge is new at all. (As someone else said, its the damn “funny mustard” and also “kerry is french” charge all over again. More than that–The narcissism charge isn’t being leveled at Obama *when he fails* at something. Its being leveled at him specifically because he tries to do something totally and ordinarily political that takes more than just rolling out of bed and putting his pants on in the morning. At the rate they are going and with the examples they are coming up with pretty soon he’ll be accused of pathological narcissism and grandiosity in thinking that he can ask the white house cook for cheerios. And, come to think of it, they essentially did just that when they attacked him and Michelle for going out to dinner for their 17th wedding anniversary.
This isn’t the first time at all. Its been brewing for a while and is related to the “celebrity” charge that McCain started and the accusation that he is fomenting a kind of “cult of personality” among his followers. Its all of a piece. It certainly stems from a kind of “who does he think he is” mentality that seems to have been kicked into high gear by a black guy assuming that he gets to do just what a white guy gets to do.
aimai
Cap'n Phealy
Marty’s looking in a psychiatric mirror, but thinks it’s a TV set.
kay
@aimai:
I think it’s different when it’s lobbed at a candidate, as opposed to the President. It’s a campaign tactic with a candidate.
It just sounds like peanut gallery sniping when they’re resorting to amateur analysis and personality traits re: the President.
It’s what powerless people do: “I think he’s like THIS, no, he’s really like THIS”. You probably remember it from home room in high school.
It always made me a little sad when liberals tried it with Bush. It means, to me, that they felt they had no chance to actually change actions or outcomes. Powerless sniping and conjecture.
Next they’ll go to his appearance. They’re already there with his wife, who scares the hell out of them, apparently.
tc125231
@Brick Oven Bill: I have to ask –do you do drugs? If not, why is it that you believe that simply saying something makes it true? You routinely make the most grandiose extrapolations based on the skimpiest of facts and declare them to be God’s truth.
I don’t know what kind of clinical condition that represents. I do know it is moronic. Nobody who actually has to solve real problems for a living would have the slightest patience with it.
Kryptik
@ellaesther:
That’s the great irony, isn’t it? It’s more taboo for left-wing criticisms of Israel to be thrown out in the US than it is in Israel itself.
I’ve read way too many Haaretz op-eds that would instantly have gotten shitcanned by any major paper stateside for antisemitism.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
As Al Franken says, they love America the way a 4-year-old loves his mommy.
Hugh Batchaw
@Brick Oven Bill:
And speaking of (and to) Nazis:
Beck gets pwned.
kay
They’re going to spend the next 3 years trying to figure out what Obama is.
They’re just wandering in the weeds. He’s was a jack-booted radical thug, now he’s a weak-kneed self-absorbed wimp. They can’t even settle on his most basic ideology, because they’re not accepting what’s right in front of their noses, and instead are looking for something mysterious and dastardly.
The press are baffled too. It’s like they will never recover from the shock of election night. They braced themselves for exotic, and goddamnit, he better be!
What if he’s just a completely conventional wildly ambitious Democratic centrist? In other words, what if he is what he says he is, and what his actions reflect? I know he’s a BLACK PERSON, but what if he’s not at all strange or devious or unfathomable? Christ. They’ll die of disappointment.
ellaesther
@Kryptik: Tell me about it. I’ve been back in America for some time now, writing about Israel/Palestine on op/ed pages since 2002, and I could show you letters….
slag
This is a very common rightwing neurosis. Totally incapable of seeing racism in a Photoshopped witchdoctor poster but more than capable of extrapolating wildly neurotic theories based on something as insignificant as a fist bump. I’d observed this condition directly for years and have never been able to understand it.
Chad N Freude
@Brick Oven Bill: As Bill Frist diagnosed Terry Sciavo, BOBill diagnoses Barack Obama. No need to actually see the subject or have any direct contact, just use your medical or psychological training from a distance.BOBill, could we see your long-form certification as a psychologist?
For the record, I get just as pissed off at the articles and books that purport to analyze the psychology of Bush, Cheney, or any other public figure with no direct experience with the patient. It’s not that they’re necessarily wrong, it’s that they are presenting speculation as medical evidence.
Chad N Freude
@Chad N Freude: If I had an edit button, that would appear as “Schiavo”.
kay
“Justice Sonia Sotomayor displayed no reticence on the first day of her first term on the court; in the two cases on the docket, she asked as many questions and made as many comments as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.”
Oh, she’s going to hear about this! No apparent deference! Right wing protocol violation! Arrogant minority alert!
Plus, she was so mean to the lawyers, with all those questions.
aimai
Actually, Kay, I think its a mistake to separate the way the Right wing treated Obama as a candidate from the way they are treating him as a president–because they are still dealing, in their mind, with “Candidate” Obama. Their goal is to continue to undermine him with next round’s potential voters and so they continue to mine the same ground. In effect they are still pushing to have the voters see him as “not commander in chief material” even though, definitionally, he already is the commander in chief. They are just choosing, almost at random, from a series of insults in order to try to convince the voters that Obama is awful. And that’s the heart of the focus on the Olympics.
We observers grasp that all the charges levelled at Obama over Chicago/olympics/copehagen are, essentially, cancelling each other out. He went so he’s an overconfident narcissist, if he hadn’t gone he would have been a scaredy cat. If he got it for us it would have been despite him, or because the rest of the world was under his spell, or he wasted time on a sure thing when he should have been running the war. But it doesn’t matter because they are still just throwing stuff up against the wall and hoping it sticks.
This is more than just a primal scream of rage. Though it is that too. Its just part of the permanent right wing campaign to control narrative of the next four years going in to the next election cycle.
aimai
Brachiator
@kay:
I think you are onto something here. Neither elements of the press, nor Sarah Palin, nor the wingnut fringe, nor ironically many self-described progressives are able to accept the fact that Obama is as centrist and as mainstream as most Americans. Michelle Obama even has acknowledged a fondness for (gasp!) country music, which is unpossible since everybody knows that black people don’t like country music.
The hopeful sign is that outside of the right wing media echo-chamber of horror, most people simply shrug this stuff off.
Still, it is sad, and somewhat self-destructive that people like Palin and some in the mainstream media keep wanting to hit on the “real America” vs “Obama America” nonsense.
kay
@aimai:
The Permanent Campaign. Okay. I don’t think they’re getting him, though. It’s been month after month of erratic, constant attacks and he’s polling where Reagan was.
I would think they’d be able to make a dent in that.
Dr. Loveless
@beltane:
So what you’re saying is, there exists a Law of Conservation of Neocon? Maybe this is why Peak Wingnut theory turned out to be wrong.
dmsilev
@aimai: I would take your argument about this being an extension of the perpetual campaign, and go one step farther. It’s also a continuation of the same tactics used by the right during the campaign, specifically an overwhelming focus on “winning the day” and trying to dominate the media coverage of a particular event. Lost is any sense that there’s any sort of roadmap between here and their long-term goal of regaining Congress/the White House. All tactics, and little if any strategy. The McCain campaign writ large, in other words.
-dms
anonevent
When I had a digital subscription at TNR, I always thought the TNR guys were pretty smart for giving Marty his own section on the website. He could spout all of his nonsense, and I could ignore it. Kind of like dealing with that uncle at Christmas.
jrg
Marty Peretz has Rectal-Cranial Inversion disorder. I know this because I am a certified blog commentator, well versed in contributing to civil discourse.
I also happen to know that Peretz has teh narcissism. He caught it buttf*cking a self-important chihuahua.
General Winfield Stuck
One mans narcissist is another mans election winner.
binzinerator
@aimai:
This.
After 2003 it seemed to me that what was going on with roughly half this nation had less to do with an expression of politics and more to do with a manifestation of mental disorders.
Chad N Freude
@General Winfield Stuck:
Fixed.
Brachiator
@aimai:
I think it might be more accurate to say that the ABC strategy (Always Be Criticizing) was perfected during the campaign and continues now that Obama has been elected.
The idea is that no matter what Obama does, he must be shown to be illegitimate, not “commander-in-chief material,” not presidential enough, naive, unprepared, etc.
In addition, the right-wing will continue to work this because it fits nicely with the fringe wingnut birther delusion that Obama is not really a citizen, and so by definition not legitimate.
Svensker
@Jason B at Work:
Yes, but bloggers on the Left say “fuck” a lot, which is worse than calling the President “nigger one” so Michael Moore is still fat. Also, ACORN. Plus, ZOMG!, burqa!
Jack
FWIW, I think
self-promoting doucher“narcissist” pretty fairly describes almost everyone in politics, news, entertainment and sports. At the very least, we should treat with these folks as decidedly self-referential.A guiding principle: Self-regard is the high mystery cult of the televised elite; voyeurism, the true American religion.
aimai
Kay @ 76–yeah! I agree! They should be able to make a dent in his popularity but as dms points out they are actually really bad at this stuff and winning the week (which is explicitly their strategy at this point: pick a provocation, shriek in horror, and then drop it except to refer back to it as a “floating signifier” or “well established image” weeks from now) is a very poor long term strategy.
It occurs to me, though, that this is also an important difference between the way the left (such as we are) viewed Bush’s “illegitimacy” and the way the right views Obama’s. We are constantly having the fact that “we didn’t think Bush was legitimate” thrown in our faces as a false equivalency. I’ve had a hard time countering this accusation because, on some level, its true. A lot of people did feel that Bush’s “selection” rendered him, somehow, illegitimate as president. But though people thought that, and felt it, it absolutely did not inform the strategy that *anyone* pursued politically or even rhetorically.
No Democrats pursued any bills charging that Bush was illegally in office, no democrats pushed any “we should have a coup” because Bush hadn’t been properly elected, and though people snarked at Bush in lots of ways the notion that he wasn’t entitled to all the perks of the presidency because of the supreme court decision never even entered into the discussion. No one made fun of him for taking air force one, or expecting to choose a new carpet for the white house, or Laura for ordering expensive china. There wasn’t a hint of “who do you think you are?” Because all those things were legitimately attributes of being president–ya get the secret service protection n everything–even if you don’t like the president or think he’s a jerk.
The republican insistence that Obama isn’t good enough, or well liked enough, or too well liked, or too happy, or too confident, or too whatever are all different ways of insisting that, on some level, he’s illegitimate and bad in the role. And its not insignificant that they keep leveling the charges at totally ordinary presidential acts. They just can’t permit him to allow a black democrat in office to be normalized. We’ve all gotten over it, but they can’t.
It reminds me of how enraged anti gay marriage advocates are when gay people walk and talk and look just like “regular folks.” Because it just makes it harder for the antis to argue that the problem with gay people is they aren’t regular people. In the MA context the anti equal marriage people went apeshit over the notion that once marriage became legal then schools might start teaching using gender neutral or sexual orientation neutral texts. Because that would “normalize” …uh…the normal and make bigotry the outlying fringe position. And they knew once all the parents in the school saw the gay couple walk in and just shrugged and said “Hi Pat, didja bring the cookies?” the whole issue was going to die for lack of interest.
Every time Obama acts presidential and does something presidential they *have* to lose their shit, at this point, because otherwise the rest of us are going to go on and elect another black democrat and next time he might even be an actual progressive. Dogs and cats marrying, indeed.
aimai
BFR
semi OT but for a good laugh, watch Betsy McCaughey get thumped on MSNBC today. It made me happy.
Joel
@geg6: I read your post as “Marty Peretz is a moron”, which is equally true.
ironranger
Bob has too much time on his hands. Volunteering at a food shelter would be a good way to divert that over active imagination for a few hours.
Notorious P.A.T.
Has anyone figured out why Glenn Beck is dressed as an Italian Brownshirt on the cover of his latest “book”? I’m dying to hear this explanation.
aimai
Brachiator says it more simply.
And, this reminds me that the entire Bush term post 9/11 reminds me of this line from Buffy:
“How’s the fugue state going?”
It was after the 2000 election that I started reading S.M.Stirling’s alternative post disaster series (Dies the Fire, The Protector’s War, A Meeting at Corvallis, Island in the Sea of Time, etc..etc…etc..). It wasn’t just the right wing that preferred to retreat into fantasy.
aimai
CalD
@Lyle4:
I was about to make the same observation. It’s particularly true of anyone with a big enough ego to seek the office of president of these United States. Takes a lot of chutzpa to think you’ve got what it takes to do that job. If not for clinical narcissists I’m afraid we might have a hard time finding any takers.
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
IIRC, people did make fun of Laura for ordering expensive china, but it was more along the lines of saying that it maybe wasn’t the best idea to order expensive china in the middle of a recession, not that she wasn’t a legitimate First Lady and therefore she shouldn’t be allowed to place the order.
aimai
Mnemosyne,
Yeah! exactly–there’s always some bitching (on all sides) about the expenses associated with the white house–from Jackie Kennedy to Nancy Reagan and her “donated” gallianos. Hell, this has been a problem since poor John Adams couldn’t get congress to give him the money to replace the damn white house furniture.
But I think even this level of bitchiness breaks down along party lines–thrift is seen differently, or represented differently, in the two parties (Nixon’s “good cloth coat” vs the hate on Jimmy Carter for the damn sweater). Another rift between the two kinds of snark is that, as I recall, one of the right wing knocks on Clinton and Hillary was really identical to (some) of the right wing knocks on Obama and Michelle–that is that they are really rubes, bubbas, ghetto. When Clinton and Hillary got in to the White House there were little fringey stories about how they “didn’t know how to treat the help” and this was directly contrasted to the Bushs who were, as it were, to the manor/manner born and apparently knew how to handle servants. Plus, crack pipes on the white house tree.
In other words I don’t at all think that Obama is the first Democrat who has been accused of being too big for his britches, or taking advantage of power and privilege in a way that simply doesn’t happen to Republicans. I think his race is a fillip on the truffle of right wing hate. Its not even the cause of it. Just a form that the expression takes.
aimai
Cheryl from Maryland
Republicans have no policy. Hell, they are so policy free they can’t even discuss opposing policy.
So they obsess on the personal — vote for me, I’m a good person. My opponent, however, is a bad person.
They got nothing.
Chad N Freude
@aimai: I think this observation is very insightful, but I also think that race is more than “a fillip on the truffle”. Which, BTW, is a kind of Dali-esque image for me.
jibeaux
Maybe Bill Frist could make a clinical diagnosis of the president’s narcissism via videotape and settle this once and for all.
aimai
Wouldn’t “phillip on the truffle?” be more dali esque?
aimai
geg6
@Joel:
Neocon…moron…potato…potahto.
Chad N Freude
@aimai: That would be mor South Park-esque.
Chad N Freude
@jibeaux: See @Chad N Freude:
Ed Drone
@kay:
I think the previous eight years spoiled them. W so obviously differed from his image and claims (“compassionate conservative” my ass!). He was an inept administrator, a bumbler, and a son-of-a-bitch of the first water, and the attempt to make him into something else (like that whole “ranch” schtick) was so transparent that now the press is trying to look through the “image” in search of the “real” Obama.
And there is no false facade. There is no smoke machine, no room of mirrors, no trap-doors. There is just this bunch of trees, and the punditry press keeps looking for the forest.
Ed
Demo Woman
@General Winfield Stuck: Thanks for the heads up earlier on the Ratigan smack down.. This is copied with out permission from Ben Smith’s column at Politico
As McCaughey’s presence on MSNBC suggests, she’s in the process of becomng an asset to the left, as her appearances seem to spur debate mostly about her — and by extension her allies — credibility.
I’m told it got even more bitter after the cameras turned off.
“You are a disgrace to journalism,” McCaughey told Ratigan, according to a source on the set.”You were a great guest, except that we usually want answers to our questions,” he responded.
The entire premise about Obama is a narcissist is pretty silly when our last president paraded folks on TV 24/7 discussion his latest terrorist capture.
kay
@aimai:
Obama’s first year is different than Bush’s in one other way. Liberals push back against Democratic Presidents. It’s a big joke in the media (“crazy Democrats! herding cats! idiots don’t know how to march in lockstep!” ) but it’s actually true.
Liberals have opposed Obama: bank bailouts, executive power, rule ‘o law, gays in the military, Afghanistan, to name just a few issues.
That simply wasn’t true of conservatives and President Bush.
Obama has and will continue to take heat from both sides. Bush had liberal opposition, and that’s all.
Brachiator
@aimai:
I think you have this wrong, in part. Nixon’s comment about his wife’s cloth coat was part of his desperate and successful attempt to stay on the 1952 Republican ticket as he defended himself against charges that he was being bought by campaign donors. Carter was mocked for suggesting sweaters as an answer to the energy crisis. None of this had to do with competing examples of thrift.
This is true, but you cannot discount the racial aspect of this. Andrew Jackson was perhaps the first president who was not from the American aristocracy, and was bitterly attacked for bringing the wrong sort of people to the White House. As the Wiki notes:
This alarmed the 1829 version of the Village, who were horrified that they might have to be in the same room as poor and working class people. Contemporary Villagers and the right wing goon squad are terrified that the Obamas are black, and think that black people are just like other Americans.
I used to think that the right wing was simply being opportunistic in their usurpation of birther and racist rhetoric. But this stuff keeps coming up and keeps becoming part of the mainstream conservative attacks on Obama.
The worst Clinton haters believed that Bill was white trash, but more than this, they thought that his behavior and perceived lack of ethics, and his sexual appetites, made him the wrong sort of man to be president, that he debased the office.
But here they believed that voters made a mistake in electing him and in continuing to support him. And even this was not quite the same thing as suggesting that Bill Clinton was inherently unqualified to even be a candidate for the presidency.
By the way: loved the Buffy reference!
Brick Oven Bill
Re: Tire Gauges
Obama riding a bike with an underinflated tire. Also more psychology.
Calouste
@Jason B at Work:
Good thing George Washington didn’t say “Fuck France” during the Revolutionary War, otherwise he would have ended up as the last person to be hanged, drawn and quartered for treason to the King rather than the first President of the USA.
But well, that would require knowledge of real history on the wingnuts’ part rather then their fantasy.
kay
HRC is making my point on CNN about rigorous decision process re: Obama.
Much, much better than I did, incidentally.
The neoconservatives are just going to have to get used to it. They ain’t gonna get that shock and awe they live for. “Deliberate” is what he is.
noncarborundum
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Give me a wanton prude any day.
geg6
@Brachiator:
While I’ll agree with your conclusion, I have to point out a couple of things. The Nixon and the cloth coat was probably the first of the many instances where Nixon whined and cried about his “horrible and poor” upbringing (which was neither quite as horrible or poor as he liked to make it seem). Nixon was always trying to play the “feel sorry for me” game. He did it right up until he was finally dragged out onto the helicopter with his “my mother, the saint” speech to his staff after resigning. It was, most likely, the start of this “woe is me, the libs are picking on poor, little ol’ me!” crap that we have to listen to until this day. It worked for Nixon (though his wife never got over the humiliation of him doing it) and it has worked for the GOP right up until W fucked that whole good thing up for them.
As for Jimmy Carter’s sweater, your characterization of it is no better than McCain’s characterization of the tire gauge thing with Obama. Hopefully, you were going for sarcasm. But if you weren’t, you’re full of shit with that. Sweaters weren’t the solution Carter proposed, but simply one simple thing that Americans could do to lower utility costs and to conserve use of fossil fuels for heating.
geg6
@Brachiator:
Oh, and I forgot to mention that you also need to remember that it was whispered in certain southern circles that Jackson or Rachel or sometimes both were not the race they appeared to be. Talk about your prezzie who took a lot of personal shit during his campaign and presidency. Bubba and the MUP should read what Andy and Rachel went through.
Just Some Fuckhead
@kay: kay, I have some questions about health care and you seem very knowledgeable about the subject. Can I email you or can you email me?
General Winfield Stuck
@Demo Woman:
Poor MS McCaughey wasn’t ready for prime time. She came to party like it was 2001 and Ratigan gave no quarter.
It is a delight to see a pundit tackle our health care and other national problems in wingnut terms. Or, by pointing out the monopolistic aspect that is a huge factor why shit costs so much and bidness has us all by the short hairs. The wingnuts don’t have an answer for that tack, so they throw epic hissy fits like this woman, who refused to answer a simple pertinent question.
Brick Oven Bill
NY Times: Obama ‘cranks up thermostat’.
Underinflated tire above.
Treasury Department = Goldman Sachs lobbyists.
Legislation not placed online for 72 hours prior to vote.
Raise tax on cigarettes as first act in office.
Valerie Jarrett = Lobbyist for Chicago Olympic Games, landowners. WTF is an ‘ethics wavier’ for Valerie? Ethics wavier? (3) 747s, (1) 757, (multiple) military transports, ‘sacrificial’ weekend.
Obama pays male staffers 20.5% more than female staffers, then signs legislation making this illegal.
Per Wikipedia, the mental disorder ‘Delusion’ involves three criteria:
1. Certainty (held with absolute conviction);
2. Incorrigibility (not changeable by compelling counterargument or proof to the contrary);
3. Impossibility or falsity of content (implausible, bizarre or patently untrue)
Anne Laurie
“A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts… “
How about a president who honestly believed that he’d physically fought the Nazis because he’d made a movie about doing so? Or who failed to recognize his own teenage kids, when he met them ‘out of context’? Much less the people he appointed, and worked with every day? Yeah, St. Ronnie was the very model of a modern king-hell narcissist — compared to Reagan, even the C-Plus Augustus had a certain self-deprecating charm. The self-infatuated Media Village Idiots like Peretz and Brooks complaining that Obama is ‘narcissistic’ are just pissed that Obama’s sense of self is not gilded and lighted to better reflect the disco-ball narcissism of courtiers like Peretz and Brooks. All else is commentary.
BDeevDad
@Brick Oven Bill: Yes, we know you’re delusional.
Wile E. Quixote
@The Grand Panjandrum
I like to refer to this as the Israel über Alles crowd and pointedly use the word Lebensraum when referring to the West Bank settlements. I’m not sure that bringing in Nazi rhetoric brings anything to the conversation, but it sure does piss off the Israel über Alles crowd.
p.a.
I have this mental image of a whiteboard pie chart with a spinning pointer. The paleo-neo-theo-money-uni-cons
fill in the wedges, spin the pointer, and that’s this cycle’s meme. But since their only policies are NO’s!, they’re losing their minds and filling the board with drivel. They are quickly
descending into “Obama has stinky feet” territory.
aimai
Well, like Geg, I think Brachiator is wrong to gloss the nixon cloth coat thing and carter sweater thing as utterly different. Of course they took place in a different space and were meant to convey different things. But look at the totality of the situation:
Nixon thought that by claiming frugality and poverty he was going to defuse criticism of himself (and of his party) as being the party of the rich. He was specifically trying to cut against the “fur coat” republican image and its an image that many republicans welcomed–that is it was a contrast as well with eisenhower republicans and with later bush republicans (see michael lind. And although (some) people made fun of Nixon’s poor mouthing no one thought anything odd or inappropriate about the claim as such. In other words, Nixon was free to claim frugality or to claim anything else and try to reframe the republican brand or his brand around that issue.
Carter was pilloried for thrift–his inauguration was compared unfavorably with Regans and he and Rosalind walked as a gesture which was also criticized. The sweater and his fireside chat like talks to the nation were not just about conservation but also meant to reflect his essential, thrifty, middle classeness. The press pilloried him for that because they found that undignified and incongruous to the office which they longed (or said they longed) to have filled by a swaggering, aristocratic, larger than life, daddy figure–not ward cleaver.
I’m arguing that these categories are pre-defined and Obama is refusing to fit into them and that’s driving the republicans crazy. And I’m also arguing that all democrats, to a certain extent, come in for criticism because whether they are high toned aristocrats, out back woodsmen (like Jackson), bubbas like Clinton, cool black dudes like Obama the press keeps insisting (since post Kennedy anyway) that they just don’t fit the imaginary bill of representing republican middle america authentically. Its like watching goldilocks try to choose the “right chair” and the “right porridge.” When the democrat is choosing I feel like we are all being told that everything is either too big or too small, too thrifty too spendthrift, too elegant too classless, too whatever. The unspoken third term is “not one of us” and the “us” that the republicans project is itself always shifting since they are always claiming both to be natural aristocrats and the salt of the earth.
aimai
Daman
HAHAH! Wow! That’s absolutely fantastic!
Yes indeed, what if Obama charm can’t woo the world’s political leaders and people to place their own economic and social interests aside to worship him?
Obama does not simply have a healthy dose of narcissism, Obama has the classic traits of someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and that is NOT healthy. Classic sufferers have been Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Kim Jong-il.
There’s a new game out that in part is a satirical ode to Obama’s narcism, one in which he’s dissolved the constitution of the United States and attempts to establish an North American bureaucratic dictatorship. The American people revolted and he’s now on his last leg, it’s a strategy game. 2011: Obama’s Coup Fails, http://www.usofearth.com/2011-obamas-coup-fails.php
Wile E. Quixote
@Notorious P.A.T.
I lean towards this explanation provided by Joe Jackson in his song Real Men which is one of his more brilliant works in an ouevre (did I use that correctly? I’ve been dying to use ouevre in a post) marked by brilliance.
Beck is wearing the uniform and guys like Brick Oven Bill are playing along. OK, the “tall, handsome and strong” parts don’t apply to Beck, but it’s still a great song.
Brick Oven Bill
These are strange times. This is why our 5 Senses and the 7 Liberal Arts are so important. Our 5 Senses provide inputs to our minds. The 7 Liberal Arts provide a mechanism for these inputs to be processed.
These twelve are our best tools to prevent delusion BDeevDad. Our 5 Senses tell us what we know. The 7 Liberal Arts provide mechanisms for us to think and process information. Taken together, God presents us the tools to understand.
Brachiator
@geg6:
Nope. Nixon was fighting for his political future to stay on the ticket as Ike’s VP candidate. He was specifically contrasting his wife’s cloth coat, and their dog Checkers, with a mink coat, which presumably would be the spoils of someone who had been bought off by special interests.
Ironically, it may have been part of Nixon’s Quaker upbringing that although he later used secret funds for political advantage, he apparently never used this cash for personal aggrandizement.
Whoa. Slow down. I didn’t really characterize it at all. I just blandly said that “Carter was mocked for suggesting sweaters as an answer to the energy crisis.”
The only point here was to show that this had nothing to do with GOP vs Democratic notions of thrift, not to get into Carter’s common sense ideas about dealing with utility costs.
And you rightly note the stupidity of McCain’s response about tire gauges is very similar to the simple-minded criticism of Carter.
True, but with Jackson, class and his wife’s social status (e.g., the charges of bigamy) were more an issue. The bizarre “Petticoat War’ is an example of how the obsession over petty social class issues had political repercussions for Jackson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petticoat_Affair
And Jackson had been a slaveholder, which made him OK to some.
Warren Harding was also pestered over rumors of his possible mixed race ancestry,which greatly upset the birthers of the era. The racial obsessive William Eslabrook Chancellor, a professor of economics and social sciences at Wooster College, believed that Harding’s nomination “was a plot to achieve Negro domination in the United States.”
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1963/3/1963_3_4.shtml
aimai
Brachiator,
I guess I don’t get where the disagreement lies? geg and I, I think, both just think that Obama is coming in for lots of stuff that other democrats came in for along *both* class and race lines and you are saying its more about race? and when geg brings up Jackson’s (or I’d bring up Clinton’s “first black president” thing) race mixing history you say “yeah, but he was also a slaveholder…which made him ok to some.” Sure, some appeals will always appeal to one part of the electorate, and some to another. Some of the shit Obama is facing is straight up racism, some of it is straight up right wing corporate hysteria that he might turn out to actually do something, some of it is paid for by one wing to rile up the other wing, some of it is just convenient. No one thinks its an “either/or” situation–that is that the right wing hates obama either because he’s black or because he’s a representative of an illegitimate democratic/poor people’s axis. Obviously some people think BOTH!, some people think “and also too.” And they’ve thought that in varying degrees for most of american history.
aimai
liberal
@Wile E. Quixote:
Heh.
kay
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Sorry. I didn’t see the question. I’m not knowledgeable. I read what everyone else here reads on health care, but I will be happy to email you.
Post email address and I’ll try to find it? Is that how that works?
geg6
@Brachiator:
He was doing both. But it became a theme of his when battling the Rockefeller wing of the party and is now entrenched as a meme among Republicans. Poor me, all those elites pick on poor me!
As amai says in another context, it can be several things at once. It’s just with the Nixon Checkers thing, it’s become an entire overarching meme of the party, as they project the Rockefeller Republicans as the exact same as all Dems who aren’t brown (and thus leeches upon their productivity). The GOP is like Sybil and has multiple personality disorder.
AhabTRuler
Oh, if your talking about Checkers…
BDeevDad
@Brick Oven Bill: WTF.
Brachiator
@aimai:
I think that your earlier assessment that “that all democrats, to a certain extent, come in for criticism” is too broad.
For example, no one would have slammed Andrew Jackson for not fitting the imaginary bill of representing republican middle america authentically because Jackson was hated precisely because he was seen as being too much like the mass of the people.
Today, some of the mainstream media can’t get a fix on Obama because they can’t get beyond their own racial attitudes. They, like the worst right-wing fools, secretly expect Obama to burst out of his cool and reveal himself to be an angry black revolutionary, because that is the primary view that they have of all black people.
Although it hasn’t been much reported, some right wing Europeans view Obama’s election as “the end of civilization” because he is black. The American right wing is less crude, but keep toe-tapping around this same sentiment. And as I noted in an earlier post, it is unclear whether the right fully embraces this view themselves, or are simply trying to exploit it because they see it as a way to get back into power.
But I make note of this not because I think that Obama hatred is an either/or, but because this strain of hate is deeply corrosive and dangerous, and the rights flirtation with it can easily spin out of control.
Still, to suggest that Obama is just “coming in for lots of stuff that other democrats came in for” homogenizes history into too neat a narrative.
Similarly, when you claim that Nixon “was free to claim frugality or to claim anything else and try to reframe the republican brand or his brand around that issue” it just seems to ignore the simple reality that Ike wanted to dump Nixon as his running mate, and that Ike’s own massive popularity was enough to reframe the Republican brand, if anyone was thinking of anything like this. Nixon, on the other hand, had more prosaic concerns. If the Checkers scandal had succeeded in giving Ike an excuse to dump him as his VP candidate, Nixon’s political career would have been effectively ended. I don’t understand how anyone could claim that Nixon was even subconsciously trying to redeem the Republican Party in the eyes of voters by parading his wife’s cloth coat in front of a TV camera.
Aunt Moe
Peretz will pop up like Old Faithful with a newly tailored anti-Obama column whenever the President fails to bow to Israel.
And MSM will continue to pay constant homage to the AIPAC noise, while most American Jews are much more moderate in their attitudes.
Brachiator
@geg6:
RE: Nixon was fighting for his political future to stay on the ticket as Ike’s VP candidate. He was specifically contrasting his wife’s cloth coat, and their dog Checkers, with a mink coat, which presumably would be the spoils of someone who had been bought off by special interests.
I think you underestimate the degree to which this was a function of Nixon’s own twisted psyche, and not part of a “meme” (God, I hate the word meme!).
But isn’t part of the current GOP message that elites are good for you?
More on this later, perhaps. I have to meet some folks for a late lunch.
Just Some Fuckhead
@kay: jack.jackson0512
at
gmail
Thanks!
dot
com
Laura W
@BDeevDad:
I misread that as FTW and could not wait to link back to see what Bill had said to win a damn thread.
Imagine my disappointment.
I am equally as disappointed in Bill for not acknowledging our Sixth Sense.
We are evolving into multi-sensory beings, you know, Bill.
Some of us, anyway.
HyperIon
testing…upgraded to FF 3.5.3
Is there an edit method?
HyperIon
@HyperIon: Is there an edit method?
surely i jest.
Xenos
@aimai: Is some version of that comment going on your blog? I have a number of people I want to send it to, or to it.
Thanks!
Xenos
@Laura W: Maybe we should just pitch in and send BOB a copy of Darwin’s Radio. It will blow his mind. And if he is going to argue based on fiction, it might as well be science fiction.
PS- Edit function works for Chrome, but sometimes I have to reload the page before it shows up.
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
It is and it isn’t. As others have said, racial insinuations have been part and parcel of American politics pretty much since day one. One of the reasons that the Republican attacks don’t work is that they can’t whisper that Obama is a “n-lover” and insinuate that he’ll sell out white people. He is one of “them.” Their only choice is to try and claim that Obama is an insane dictator along Kim Jong-Il lines because otherwise the crazy is just too obvious. (That’s leaving aside the fact that claiming that Obama is just like Kim Jong-Il is its own fascinating level of insanity.)
Also, for the people debating class vs. race, don’t forget that American class perceptions are strongly tied into race. No matter what he does, no matter what schools he went to or what elections he wins, to some people Obama will always be a ghetto thug because all black people are lower-class (at best, working-class).
All four of Spike Lee’s grandparents went to college. I think that maybe one of mine went. And yet if you stood him and me up side-by-side and asked, people would assume that he was a lower-class guy straight out of the ghetto because, well, look at him!
aimai
Mnemosyne,
I’m not arguing that race doesn’t matter. Of course it does. Hugely. for some people all the time, for all americans, in some way, all the time. But I also think that “race” as in blackness isn’t understood in only one way even in the american context. And I think the right wing speechifiers have been casting about for ways to assign a variety of perjorative forms of blackness to Obama and they aren’t always identical to straight up american assumptions about class/race such as the assumption that blackness always means lower class/ghetto or southern.
For example when Mugabe was in the news there was a flurry of attempts to tie images of Obama to specifically Black African Dictators. At the height of the campaign there was a big push to identify him with arab muslims and indonesia (playing off of his light skin), at the same time there was an attempt to undermine his “blackness” in an american electoral context by referring to him as a “halfrican” and trying to position him as some kind of black skinned “carpetbagger” coming in to *use* his physical blackness when he was “really” white.
This stuff is incredibly complicated and watching it is like watching a very fast, but quite obvious, game of ball. Brachiator’s disagreement seems to be that he doesn’t like any higher, or lower, order interpretation of big “memes”–he likes to dissolve everything into particulars. For instance, when I say that Carter and Nixon both appealed to common american tropes like middleclassness and thrift Brachiator says “yeah, but its different because they did so for different reasons.” Sure, but the common cultural thread was there–the notion of thrift and virtue is what they were appealing to and the public instinctively understood it. They neither of them made some other, culturally incoherent claim like “I argle the bargle with the moon pies.” My point in invoking them was not to say that they did the same thing, in the same context, or even were appealing to the same electorate/voter base or whatever. Obviously they weren’t. My point in the comparison is that if you go back and look at the way their claims were recieved I think that the Democrat came in for more generic scorn as a poser and a loser than Nixon did. And I think that the democrat always comes in for more scorn from the media because of modern, embedded, post Reagan control of media outlets and a fixation (post Nixon) with the notion that there is a real, true, middle america (Nixon’s silent majority) that can never be fully represented by a Democrat in power. To my mind the republicans we are discussing here, the one’s Kay (?) I think said memorably are following the line “ABC” always be criticizing, are assuming that they can just keep trashing the democrat *on any level* and *for anything* and the press will gallop after. But they think that with very good reason, because its been true.
aimai
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
I think we’re all mostly in agreement. I just wanted to take the opportunity to remind people that, when it comes to race and class in the United States, it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.
Jay C
@MNPundit:
I know, I feel the same way every time I read his neocon crapola – and I’m Jewish!
Brachiator
@aimai:
.
Actually, that was me, earlier in this thread.
https://balloon-juice.com/?p=27890#comment-1391531
I appreciate narratives as much as anyone, but some fiction is not the same as good political history.
No, I say that your interpretation is not entirely persuasive and misses some of the more interesting things that were really going on.
.
It takes a mighty powerful time machine to apply any of this post-Reagan/post-silent Majority Nixon meme to the public reaction to Nixon in 1952. And you totally miss how a psychically twisted Nixon came up with his Southern strategy in part to immunize himself against his feelings of personal inferiority with respect to the Republican elites, including, oddly enough, Ronald Reagan.
That’s all I’m saying.
bob h
I do hope the Iranians offer to end their bomb activities in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from the settlements. But then the Israelis do have God as their real estate agent, so that will be tough for Peretz.