This video is the most elegant iteration I’ve seen of the dialogue on the left about the President. What’s so amazing about “Barack Hussein Obama,” written and directed by Jamil Khoury, is that both sides are treated with respect. And what a shame that should be amazing!
Khoury is Artistic Director of the Chicago theater company Silk Road Rising, and this piece is a component of the company’s ambitious work-in-progress “Mosque Alert.”
The video is 13 minutes long. Please make time to watch it.
During primary season, Republicans take a break from their primary activity of lying about Democrats and start lying about one another. Even better, sometimes they actually tell the truth.
Here’s Charles Krauthammer on Newt Gingrich:
Gingrich has a self-regard so immense that it rivals Obama’s — but, unlike Obama’s, is untamed by self-discipline.
Of course Krauthammer is no fool: he understands that Romney could give Obama a run while Gingrich would give him an easy gallop home.
Don’t worry: once the general election starts, Krauthammer will become, once again, incapable of perceiving the President’s virtues.
By Robert Frank
Keith Humphreys’ thoughtful post called to mind some thoughts I wanted to jot down after re-reading Drew Westen’s NYT piece on Obama and Jonathan Chait’s blistering response to Westen in the New Republic. Westen is surely a primary target of Keith’s scorn, and I agree with both Chait and Keith that Westen grossly exaggerates what a leader in Obama’s position could have been expected to accomplish.
Yet it would be a mistake not to acknowledge that Westen is onto something. Obama might not have been able to have achieved substantively different outcomes in many of the recent battles. But he does have the rhetorical skill to have forced Republicans to pay a much stiffer political price for their obstructionism. And his supporters can hardly be faulted for being upset that he chose not to.
Last December’s struggle about the Bush tax cuts on high-income households is a case in point. Many on the left have been bitterly critical of the president for capitulating to Republican demands on that issue. But consider the details of the choice the president faced. Continue Reading…
On Tuesday I’ll drive from Chicago up to Sauk City, Wisconsin, to do voter protection, that is, pollwatching while holding a law degree. Wisconsin historically has offered exceptionally inclusive voter access, including in-precinct same-day registration. But one of the many delightful consequences of the Republican takeover of the state is a photo-i.d. law which isn’t supposed to take effect til the first of the year but is unclear enough to make for messy election days-precisely what the sponsors intended. So I’ll go up there and do what I can to make sure everybody can vote, and hope that the selfsame “everybody” will throw the anti-collective-bargaining rascals out.
(Last weekend at the Bughouse Square debates-the Newberry Library’s annual effort to restore the fine art of soapbox speaking-the central topic was public-sector collective bargaining. The young man speaking in opposition wore a Solidarity t-shirt as he argued that “public employee collective bargaining inserts needless conflict between citizen and citizen.” Does he realize that Solidarity was a public-sector union?)
I’m going to Wisconsin because it’s a political situation about which I can do something-contra the whole debt-ceiling mess, about which I can do absolutely nothing. I disagree with my colleagues on the left who think the President got backed into a corner on the debt ceiling because he’s weak. He got backed into a corner because he’s actually trying to govern and the people he’s dealing with are not.
When the President was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, skeptics wondered what he could possibly have done to deserve it. It seemed pretty straightforward to me: his election meant the restoration of constitutional government in the world’s only superpower. What could be more essential to peace?
Unfortunately, the Constitution had been damaged more than most of us realized, and merely electing a President didn’t guarantee its restoration-not when anti-government idealogues control the legislature and the judiciary. All the finger-pointing on the left ignores the extent to which the right is engaging in the deliberate destruction of our governmental system.
The idea that people who hate government are controlling ours is actually more frightening than the notion that the President somehow betrayed us by averting a default. The scary thing is, he did as much as he could.
The people who’ve spent the past several seasons calling for the head of Coach Lovie Smith on the grounds that he’s “ignorant and weak” and “emotionless” (among many less printable adjectives) are nowhere to be found since he led the Chicago Bears to the NFL Conference championships. Having failed to bury Smith, they absolutely refuse to praise him.
Why? Because Coach Smith is a soft-spoken professional who leads not by shrieking but by—well, leading. Chicagoans, particularly Chicago sports fans, can’t seem to wrap their heads around the notion that this gentle man— this gentleman—could possibly be any good at coaching football. That’s because the mold for Da Coach was set by Mike Ditka, a screaming, foul-mouthed, temper-losing maniac whose heart attack only narrowly missed taking place on the field. If you’re not yelling like that, you must not be leading.
But if Coach Smith behaved like that—berating his players and abusing the press in rants liberally sprinkled with profanity—we’d hear nothing but tut-tuts about what an angry black man he was. Probably neither the fans nor the team itself would be willing to follow him. It’s no accident that the most successful African-American coaches — Tony Dungee, Mike Singletary, Lovie Smith — are all matter-of-fact and free of braggadocio. That’s the way black men have to negotiate the world to avoid waking the not-very-soundly sleeping dogs of white racism.
Which brings us to the case of President Obama. Everyone who derides him for not being tough enough—for not being Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson—seems to forget that they’re speaking of someone whose life has required constant attention to the problem of being non-threatening. That’s quite a challenge for a man who’s tall, brilliant and black.
But the President has succeeded at it through a combination of self-deprecation (“a skinny kid with a funny name”) and unshakable composure (“No-Drama Obama”). If instead he’d emulated FDR in saying of his opponents “I welcome their hatred,” Fox News would have announced that he hated all white people. (Oh, right, someone on that network did that anyway.) If like LBJ he’d insisted a reporter accompany him while he used the toilet, he wouldn’t be considered a lively and original character but just some ghetto type who didn’t know how to behave.
Consider the reportage when the president held a news conference explaining his decision to make the tax-cut compromise. Having answered a series of questions designed to get him to say that he’d betrayed his promises, his party and his people, he was finally irate enough to respond, “It’s the health care battle all over again. Some people would rather rest in their purity than get something done,” or words to that effect. As a rebuke goes, his was a pretty mild one. But it was sufficient to produce several weeks of headlines about how the President had “scolded” his party and how “angry” he was. If he’d actually been angry, we’d probably have seen articles of impeachment.
So all the people who want to give the President—and the Coach, for that matter—lessons in leadership should bear in mind that both men have learned precisely how much force they can use before that force is turned against them. And they haven’t learned it from the Op-Ed pages or the screaming-heads fests. Experience keeps a hard school but we will learn at no other.
I myself wrote—but fortunately did not post—the following incredibly misguided advice:
I understand the President’s unwillingness to assume the role of Angry Black Man into which his opponents wish to thrust him. But when the people on the other side of the table are card-carrying members of the Paranoid Style in American Politics, it’s time to stand up and call them the proto-fascists they are. And hoping they’ll be willing to compromise seems a deliberate act of denial, like whistling past the graveyard. Instead, Barack Obama should emulate Harry Truman. Give ‘em hell, Barry!
WRONG! As the Tucson shootings demonstrate, the last thing we need right now is public officials giving each other high-decibel hell. And even if hell were called for, a black man in power couldn’t be the one to deliver it. That’s an indulgence reserved for powerful white men—and every powerful black man knows it. It’s time the rest of us learned the same lesson.
The volume of reproach and disappointment and disapproval and correction directed at Coach Smith and the President says nothing about their leadership ability. It’s purely a reflection of the fears and fantasies a significant subgroup of American white people have about American black people. The fact that one of them produced a championship team, and the other achieved the health-care reform none of his white predecessors could manage (among many other victories), demonstrates that they’re far better leaders than anyone less challenged could dream of being.
So let’s stop giving them hell.
There was a joke that used to go around about a golf game involving entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. Another player asked his handicap, and Davis replied “I’m a Jewish black man with one eye; how much more handicap do I need?”
This came to mind when I read the New York Times story about President Obama’s White House Seder. It was surprisingly moving for a non-observant Jew to learn of the President’s observance of one of our rituals. But as a Jew, I’m also slightly-and less surprisingly-alarmed on the President’s behalf. People already accuse him of being a Muslim non-citizen; how much more handicap does he need?
It’s illuminating, though, to consider the President an honorary or metaphorical Jew, because it highlights the parallels between the hysteria attaching to Obama’s presidency and the hysteria recurrently directed at Jews. What’s the difference between Sarah Palin’s claim that the President will operate death panels to kill her disabled child, and the classic blood libel that Jews kill Christian babies and use their blood to make matzoh? Only the most ignorant and fearful among us could possibly believe such nonsense, and yet time and again scapegoating has worked because people have believed it and sought to eliminate imaginary threats by killing real people.
And now the President’s opponents have adopted another tactic from the anti-Semites’ playbook. There’s already been way too much talk about Nazis in the course of debating the Affordable Care Act. But when a political group’s response to legislation comes in the form of coordinated window-smashing, only the willfully forgetful can fail to think “Kristallnacht.”
That’s the night the Nazis expressed their disappointment at a political setback by going on a simultaneous rampage all over Germany: killing Jews, beating them, setting fire to their homes and, most memorably, breaking 7500 windows of Jewish-owned shops. The current incidents of vandalism against the offices of Congresspeople who voted for the Affordable Care Act aren’t remotely comparable in scale to that night in 1938, but they’re precisely comparable in purpose. And the sound of breaking glass is the last thing you hear before reasoned political debate is drowned out entirely, and with it genuine self-government.
House Republican Whip Eric Cantor is apparently among the willfully forgetful. His response to the outbreak of violence among those who share his political positions was to claim that he, too, had been the target of political violence and-more important-to blame the Democrats for making public what had occurred. In other words, he claimed victimization while blaming the actual victims.
Consider, if you would, the Wikipedia account of Kristallnacht’s aftermath:
More than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps . . . . After this, the Jewish community was fined 1 billion reichsmarks.
In other words, the Nazis claimed victimization while blaming the actual victims.
Let me be clear: I don’t think the people who broke campaign-office windows are actual Nazis, or that their doing so had anything to do with anti-Semitism or Jews. The fact that Kristallnacht was organized and the latest nonsense mostly not is a big difference, as is the fact that Kristallnacht had official sanction while the window-breaking doesn’t. Everything that happens isn’t about Nazis or Jews.
Being Jewish nonetheless provides a useful set of historical sense memories, and the sound of glass splintering on sidewalks is one of them.
In the early 1930s, plenty of people on the respectable German right disdained the low-class National Socialists. They were a tool, that’s all, useful temporarily for cowing and marginalizing liberalism so the respectable right could regain political power. By the time the respectable German right figured out that the Nazi tiger couldn’t be ridden, the whole country was already inside.
So who on the respectable American right will be the first to condemn wholeheartedly our current eruption of far-right thuggery? Apparently it won’t be John Boehner, who undercut his own criticism of the attacks by describing them as the natural result of insupportable Democratic provocation. It won’t be Sarah Palin, who like her anti-choice allies routinely identifies opponents as “enemies” and “targets,” and like them will doubtless pretend to be surprised when someone gets murdered. And it won’t be Eric Cantor, though as the highest-ranking Jew in the Republican caucus he might be expected to remember history and hope not to repeat it.
So is there anyone left in the Republican Party to speak out, or are they all too busy hoping the Tea Partiers don’t come for them?
Stay tuned.
I’m glad to see that Hillary Clinton has dumped Bill Shaheen as co-chair of her New Hampshire campaign, and apologized to Barack Obama for Shaheen’s references to Obama’s drug use from college days.
Now all she needs to do is fire Mark Penn, who in discussing the issue on TV after HRC’s apology made sure to use the word “cocaine.”
Apologies From the Heart (of Darkness?)By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton apologized personally to Senator Barack Obama on Thursday for a top adviser’s public suggestion that Republicans would go after Mr. Obama for his youthful drug use.
This came a day after Mike Huckabee apologized to Mitt Romney, a Mormon, for remarks that suggested Mormons believe that Jesus and Satan are brothers.
But in the aftermath of the apologies, both the Clinton and Huckabee campaigns kept the original slurs alive through a series of interviews, raising questions about the sincerity of their apologies, especially in the heat of a wide-open campaign with the first voting less than three weeks away.
[snip]
On Thursday afternoon, Mrs. Clinton’s top adviser, Mark Penn, appeared on MSNBC with Mr. Obama’s top adviser, David Axelrod, and John Edwards’s top adviser, Joe Trippi. They argued with one another, and it was there that Mr. Penn dropped the word “cocaine,” saying that the Clinton campaign had not raised the issue of “cocaine use.”
That seemed to infuriate the others. “This guy just said ‘cocaine’ again,” Mr. Trippi said.
Anyone who is fooled by HRC’s assertion that there was no central decision to spread slime about Obama must want to be fooled. A fish rots from the head.
Update Wait! It gets worse.
Obama’s ‘surprises’?Clinton didn’t mention specifics in the taping of an interview on “Iowa Press” this morning, but drew a contrast with unnamed rivals that echoes Bill Shaheen’s now-notorious claim that unexplored elements of Obama’s candidacy will make him an easy Republican target.
“I’ve been tested, I’ve been vetted,” she said. “There are no surprises. There’s not going to be anybody saying, ‘I didn’t think of that, my goodness, what’s that going to mean?’”
This appears to be the emerging core of the electability case against Obama: that elements of his public record and — unspoken — his private past, could scuttle what should be a Democratic sure thing, and that he is untested by real partisan combat.
“Whoever we nominate will be subjected to the full force of the Republican attack machine, and I know that they know I know that and I have no illusions about what this race will entail,” she said.
UPDATE: Asked to elaborate on what she’s suggesting about Obama, Clinton has an answer ready: “I’m only talking about myself.”
I repeat: from the head.
Second update Speaking of going negative … err, “comparative” … Paul Loeb has some comparisons between the conduct of Obama’s “Leadership PaC,” for which HRC has criticized him, and her own conduct. Bottom line: if Hillary hadn’t been such a money hog, spending $40 million to run virtually unopposed and transferring $12 million to her Presidential campaign — if, that is, she’d acted like Edwards and Obama, who raised money for and gave money to other campaigns nationwide — Democrats could have picked up a bunch of extra seats in the House and at least one in the Senate.