If you’re an Obama supporter, you can’t comprehend how Michelle Obama’s remark, “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback,” could possibly be perceived as a dismissal of every American achievement of the past 25 years.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you wonder, as Sasha Issenberg put it, “So what did Michelle Obama think of the United States before her husband decided he wanted to run the place?”
Now, thanks to Lauren Collins in the March 10, 2008, issue of The New Yorker, we know what Michelle Obama thought — and thinks — of the United States.
It isn’t pretty.
Collins’ article, “The Other Obama: Michelle Obama and the politics of candor,” depicts Michelle Obama in a generally positive light, both praising her “lack of pretense” and attempting to explain why Michelle says the things she does.
Problem is, Michelle comes across as angry and bitter — especially at the lousy hand she’s been dealt (never mind her superior private education and income, both personal and household, which is more than most Americans could ever dream of grossing) — angry at everyone and everything. This is not a role her husband’s campaign advisers want her to portray. (”‘Occasionally, it gives campaign people heartburn,’ David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s chief strategist, admits.”)
She also just can’t seem to shut the hell up. While we’re all for outspokenness, especially from a woman (and especially from a woman belonging to a minority group; remember, yours truly is an outspoken woman who belongs to a minority group, too), she is the spouse of a presidential candidate, who, every time she opens her mouth, manages to insult a wide swath of the electorate.
It’s not difficult to envision the way her tendency — no, her compulsion — to shoot from the hip would play in her role as First Lady, especially when the precarious art of international diplomacy demands discretion.
Unfortunately, Michelle Obama hasn’t the first clue about discretion.
Beyond the cringe-making spectre of Michelle’s tactlessness offending some less-than-understanding head of state (can you say “international incident”?), the United States cannot afford to be represented by a First Lady (the official “hostess of the nation”) who repeatedly denigrates her own country. Our standing in the international community is on life support as it is; we do not need a First Lady who agrees with our detractors that the United States is a hellhole of greed and hate.
It doesn’t matter what Michelle thinks she means, or how her nebbish husband (who, notes Collins, has been “working the hapless-hubby routine for a long time”) or his campaign advisers try to “clarify,” explain, spin, or dismiss her words; it’s how her words come across. Anyone who thinks the American public is going to sit down, parse out those words, and spend any time trying to find a deeper layer of meaning (assuming there is one) is a fool; Americans have been conditioned to make snap decisions on first impressions and sound bites.
Worse, it appears Michelle is unlikely to be reined in; Collins writes that she knows what to say and what not to say, but “her pride visibly chafes at being asked to subsume her personality.”
Here’s a newsflash: “Personality” does not preclude tact. And if one’s “personality” is so literally compulsive that one cannot contain one’s unthinking brashness, there are bigger issues involved than mere pride.
Michelle Obama, Collins writes after witnessing a speech at a little South Carolina church, “acknowledged … that some advisers have lobbied her to take a sunnier tone, with little success.”
When Michelle made her “really proud” remark, a casual online acquaintance suggested, in a public forum, that perhaps it was indeed time someone in the Obama camp take her aside and advise her in the art of finesse. Barack supporters, predictably, flew into a rage at the idea of putting a gag on the irrepressible missus; most spat out accusations of “sexism” (ironic, as genuine sexism is usually the first resort of offense against Hillary Clinton), and more than a few attacked my acquaintance as a racist “threatened by an uppity black woman.”
This reaction was, apparently, not atypical, as it is echoed by Collins in her re-cap of the wider fallout over Michelle’s gaffe:
The sentiment — that America was in a mess, and Mrs. Obama was not happy about it — was not a new one, but her unfortunate formulation instantly drew charges that she was unpatriotic. Bill O’Reilly spawned his own scandalette, remarking, “I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels.” Victor Maltsev, of Rego Park, wrote to the Post, “Obama wants to be our next first lady? Watch out, America!” Cindy McCain seized the opportunity to draw a sniffy contrast between the Obamas and her and her war-hero husband, telling a cheering crowd, “I don’t know about you — if you heard those words earlier — I’m very proud of my country.”
It was a manufactured controversy, but it reflected a real cavalierness on Obama’s part — not toward the Blue Angels and 9/11 and the Berlin Wall and America’s armed forces, as her various critics had it, but toward the reality that it might be wise for a person whose spouse is running for President not to say something that could be construed that way. The controversy over her brand of household humor may have been a matter of cultural misinterpretation. But Obama’s blitheness about politics may have less to do with race than it does with class — conservative commentators pegged her as a paragon of élitist leftism — or, more likely, for a daughter of blue-collar Chicago, with personal disposition.
Of course, the Obamacans missed the point. As usual.
The point, again, is: Michelle’s unbridled derision of the United States makes Barack look bad. If she becomes First lady, she’s going to make the United States itself look bad.
If you think that assessment is a knee-jerk overreaction, consider this exchange between Collins and Michelle:
In Wisconsin, I asked her if she was offended by Bill Clinton’s use of the phrase “fairy tale” to describe her husband’s characterization of his position on the Iraq War. At first, Obama responded with a curt “No.” But, after a few seconds, she affected a funny voice. “I want to rip his eyes out!” she said, clawing at the air with her fingernails. One of her advisers gave her a nervous look. “Kidding!” Obama said. “See, this is what gets me into trouble.”
“I want to rip his eyes out!”
I’m sorry, but there’s no “clarifying” a remark like that, no “kidding” away a remark that, made by you, Mr. or Ms. Average Citizen, would bring the Secret Service to your doorstep. (Don’t laugh; law-abiding Americans have been hauled in for a lot less than wishing physical harm — “kidding” or not — to a President of the United States.)
It is clear, however, that not all of Michelle Obama’s outrageous remarks are unrehearsed. Collins observes:
Pundits have portrayed Obama as an oversharer and a taskmaster, demeaning her husband by acknowledging his morning breath and his body odor. But the domestic carping that commentators have taken as some sort of uncontrollable T.M.I. tic serves Obama’s husband well, and this may account for her frequent recitation of the mundane details of their housekeeping arrangements. …
. . .
The ordinary card, in fact, may be one of the Obamas’ best assets. It assuages fears of difference — “We’re just like you” is the cumulative message of all the back-and-forth about the breath and the bread — and inoculates against jealousy, a smart bit of self-deprecation on the part of a young, gifted, attractive couple whose fortunes have risen quickly, like movie stars insisting that they were unpopular in high school.
But the Obamas are anything but “ordinary.” By now we all know the basic facts about Barack Obama’s life:
The product of a brief marriage between a black Kenyan scholar and a white Kansan mother, fellow students at the University of Hawaii, Barack was abandoned at age two by his father, but, despite his standard stump-speech sob story of being “raised by a single mother,” was hardly fatherless; his mother was remarried to an Indonesian student, and when Barack was six, the family moved to his stepfather’s homeland.
Barack’s “critical boyhood years,” Hank De Zutter reminds us, “from two to ten — were spent neither in white nor black America but in the teeming streets and jungle outskirts of Djakarta.”
By the time Barack was ten, his mother divorced again, and sent Barack to live with her parents in Honolulu. Barack’s grandparents enrolled him in the prestigious (and expensive), racially diverse Punahou prep school. From there it was onto Columbia University (he earned his bachelor’s in political science in 1983), and then Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1991.
The former Michelle Robinson wasn’t exactly raised on food stamps in a tenement slum, either. A graduate of the Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, a highly selective, highly competitive Chicago public college preparatory requiring “special application and entrance testing” for admission to its 450 student openings.
She went on to Princeton (majoring in sociology), and then, writes Collins:
Obama went straight from Princeton to Harvard Law School. After graduating, she became a junior associate, specializing in intellectual property law, at the Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin. She worked there for three years, eventually becoming, as she says in her stump speech, disenchanted with “corporate America.” Valerie Jarrett hired her as an assistant to the mayor, Richard Daley.
Collins also crunches the numbers:
The Obamas’ financial standing has risen sharply in the past three years, largely as a result of the money Barack earned from writing “The Audacity of Hope.” In 2005, their income was $1.67 million, which was more than they had earned in the previous seven years combined. …
. . .
Just after Barack was elected to the United States Senate, Michelle received a large pay increase — from $121,910 in 2004 to $316,962 in 2005.
What’s more, the Obamas have no need to worry about such mundane things as daycare, housework, or having to actually go outside to get some exercise:
Last summer, Obama’s mother retired from her job as a bank secretary in order to look after Malia and Sasha when Barack and Michelle are on the road. (The Obamas employ a full-time housekeeper, and Michelle tries to see a personal trainer four times a week, but they do not have a nanny.)
Yet, Michelle still complains about the “struggle” to “balance work and family.” Never mind that having people to babysit your kids, clean your house, and make you work out four times a week are the kinds of luxuries completely off-limits to Joe and Jane American as they struggle to balance work and family.
It’s not lost on Collins (or on the reader) that Michelle Obama sees the world through a deeply-tinted lens of self-absorption:
Her frame of reference can seem narrow. When she talks about wanting “my girls to travel the world with pride” and the decline of America “over my lifetime,” you wonder why her default pronoun is singular if the message is meant to be concern for others and inclusiveness.
The question is: How genuine is that message of “concern for others and inclusiveness”?
Perhaps the sentiment is, but the “just plain folks” schtick makes the message ring hollow. The Obamas are not “just plain folks” by any stretch of the imagination — they just play them on television.
And in speeches.
At the Pee Dee Union Baptist Church, in Cheraw, South Carolina, “a hamlet of about six thousand known as ‘The Prettiest Town in Dixie,’ Michelle Obama pulled out all the stops to connect with her “mostly elderly, almost all-black crowd,” to prove she was just like them.
“On behalf of my church home and my pastor, Reverend Wright, I bring greetings,” Michelle began, and then went on to talk about her “people” (they’re from from South Carolina, too), and her grandparents’ membership in “an A.M.E. Baptist church in Georgetown.”
Notes Collins:
Obama was playing to her audience — later she riffed on “those relatives who have plastic on the furniture” and reminded the churchgoers to get “ten other triflin’ people in your life” out of bed and down to the polls on Saturday. Her appearances at the church, and many like it, were a key point of strategy in a state that would be the first real test of whether or not Barack could attract significant numbers of black voters. “In South Carolina in particular, because she had family from there, it made a lot of sense for her to speak in the African-American community,” David Axelrod said.
That’s fine, but even in print, the “plastic on the furniture” and “triflin’ people” business sounds as empty — and condescending — as her husband’s frequent — and phony — “lapses” into Southern-fried preacher-man talk. (Oh, it’s phony, all right; the man who spent his entire childhood outside the continental United States, and never knew “the black experience” during his most crucial formative years, admitted in his book, Dreams from My Father, that he had no clue what it meant “to be a black man in America.” And with precious few African-Americans around him in Hawaii, he learned how to “be black” from “TV, movies, the radio; those were places to start. Pop culture was color-coded, after all, an arcade of images from which you could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style.” Which tells you his racially-charged “Cousin Pookie” remark is utterly and completely meaningless, and merely calculated stagecraft aimed at drawing a connection between himself and a version of Black America to which he has no real connection at all.)
It’s right at the beginning of her speech to the Pee Dee Baptists that Michelle Obama, true to form, gets herself “into trouble” again.
Writes Collins:
Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents.
A nation of “cynics, sloths, and complacents”?
A country that is “just downright mean”?
I don’t care if you agree with her or not; these remarks fly right in the face of her husband’s frothy, ethereal “hope and change” meme. In fact, she answers Barack’s oft-repeated question: “Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?”
It’s clear what kind of politics his wife is participating in. (Hint: It ain’t hope.)
“We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews.
Who are “we,” Michelle? You have no idea what it means to be “struggling folks who are barely making it every day.” None.
“Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”
Conditions have gotten worse for other people over your lifetime, Michelle. Your family has experienced nothing less than meteoric success, year after year — and your children have never known, nor are they ever likely to know, what it means to go without… or what it feels like to hear their parents arguing over money.
From these bleak generalities, Obama moves into specific complaints. Used to be, she will say, that you could count on a decent education in the neighborhood. But now there are all these charter schools and magnet schools that you have to “finagle” to get into. (Obama herself attended a magnet school, but never mind.)
So did you have to “finagle” your way into Whitney Young, Michelle? Or did you earn your way in?
Health care is out of reach (”Let me tell you, don’t get sick in America”), pensions are disappearing, college is too expensive, and even if you can figure out a way to go to college you won’t be able to recoup the cost of the degree in many of the professions for which you needed it in the first place. “You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,” Obama said. “See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!”
“Give” you “something here”? Thanks, Michelle, for making “us” (whoever “us” is supposed to be, but I’ll generously assume you mean Americans who don’t have it as easy as you and your husband) sound exactly like the worst right-wing stereotype of “entitlement mentality” liberals.
(The point isn’t lost on Collins: “Some observers have detected in Obama an air of entitlement. Her defenders attribute these charges of arrogance to racist fears about uppity black women. While it’s a stretch to call the suggestion that Obama projects an air of self-satisfaction bigoted, it may at least reflect a culture gap: last April, after Maureen Dowd wrote a column criticizing Obama for undermining her husband’s mystique, a blog riposte, circulated widely on the Internet, was titled ‘The White Lady Just Doesn’t Get It.’”)
It’s not that I’m too concerned with the damage you’re inflicting on your husband’s campaign, Michelle; I don’t like his positions, I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him, and I want to see him lose the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton. But if Barack does win the party’s nomination, this idiocy you’re spewing is going to help guarantee a win by President McCain.
Even more damaging is the longlasting pall you’re casting over the Democratic Party — to which I still belong. You’re making Democrats look spoiled, and demanding, and unreasonable.
Yet you just go on and on. And if your crack about ripping out Bill Clinton’s eyes weren’t enough, you go on to denigrate the very real, measurable gains of the entire Clinton administration:
In Cheraw, Obama belittled the idea that the Clinton years were ones of opportunity and prosperity: “The life that I’m talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. . . . So if you want to pretend like there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I want to meet you!”
Then you want to meet me, Michelle. I grew up without a trust fund, too, and worked crap jobs throughout my young adulthood in the 1980s. Even after I finished school, my whiz-bang computer-programming skills languished while I had to take anything I could find to pay the rent — I was a school photographer in the very worst, violence-ridden schools in the Los Angeles Unified District, and off-season I jumped at the chance to proctor the state bar exam, or the state cosmetology licensing exam, from one to three days at a time — because there was nothing else available.
Then came “the Clinton years” you disparage so easily. Almost overnight, I was awash in offers to put my professional skills to work. I climbed the ladder at breakneck speed, and my salary rose practically exponentially. Just before George W. Bush was sworn in for the first time, I was earning $110,000 a year.
Then I was laid off. The jobs dried up, and the industry I loved so much (information technology, primarily for medical manufacturing — an area in which I felt, sincerely, that I was contributing to a greater good) has never come back.
Today, I eke out a very meager living doing what I can. Two-week vacations to Hawaii are just a memory. I stay home a lot. And when something breaks, I fix it myself.
Michelle, have you ever soldered a loose wire back into place when a burner on your stove stopped working? (Have you ever even opened the top of your stove to see what’s inside, or would that get your hands too dirty?) Would you even know how to do that?
Yesterday, I fixed the silverware drawer in the kitchen. It’s the most used drawer in the house, and it finally warped to the point that it couldn’t be pulled in or out. So I took it apart and, with nails my late father had squirreled away in a cigar box, put it back together again, and made it work. I even rubbed a wax candle along the runners to make it slide in and out more easily.
Could you do that, Michelle? Would you do that, Michelle? Especially when it’s just too easy for you to pick up the phone and call a repairman — or have someone call a repairman?
I’d rather call a repairman, too. But I don’t have the money to call a repairman.
So I guess you want to meet me, Michelle, because that “point over the last couple of decades” when my life was easy was hardly a single “point”; it was eight long years of “opportunity and prosperity.” Eight years.
But your revisionist history of the first Clinton era is no surprise, Michelle. Your husband does it all the time, even going as far as venerating Ronald Reagan and praising the GOP as “the party of ideas … over the last ten, fifteen years.”
“Barack Obama’s upscale white supporters (and those too young to recall the 1970s and 1980s) tend to describe Clintonism as a betrayal of liberalism, a sellout to Wall Street, and proof that ‘the Clintons’ won’t bring about change — a view encapsulated in the Daily Kos blog’s visceral aversion to Terry McAuliffe’s mug. Yet while the courting of big donors with stays in the Lincoln Bedroom left a bad odor, as a historical matter, the Clinton years were unquestionably a time of progress, especially on the economy. And it seems that as Obama mania sweeps the educated classes, the party’s struggling lower-income base still prefers Hillary. One reason is that they’re less prone than their better-off party mates to vote out of an enthusiasm for stirring rhetoric or viral videos or a wish to play their part in a grand narrative of racial reconciliation. Having been battered by globalization, rising health care and education costs, and the subprime mortgage disaster, they’re remembering the Clinton years and voting for who they think will help them. …
“Clinton detractors … like to grouse about “triangulation.” This was pollster Dick Morris’ cynical term for the election-year opportunism behind Clinton’s moderate-seeming but mostly inconsequential ideas in 1996, like the V-chip (to screen out television violence) and school uniforms. On economics, however, Clinton’s construction of policies that defied traditional left-right categories was substantive. The Earned Income Tax Credit, which originated in a pilot form in the 1970s, attracted conservative support in the 1980s as an alternative to transfer payments as a way to help the working poor; Clinton made it a signature policy, expanding it in his 1993 bill to an additional 15 million families — a result that added up to the most significant anti-poverty measure since the Great Society. The virtuous cycle engendered by Clinton’s balanced budgets — which by paying down the debt won the confidence of bond traders and helped bring down interest rates — eventually won over many who had doubted the strategy. …
“By the end of the Clinton presidency, the numbers were uniformly impressive. Besides the record-high surpluses and the record-low poverty rates, the economy could boast the longest economic expansion in history; the lowest unemployment since the early 1970s; and the lowest poverty rates for single mothers, black Americans, and the aged. Real wages, after declining over the course of the Reagan and Bush years, rose under Clinton. To be sure, the gap between the very rich and everyone else widened — as it has continued to do since — but gains for the rich, for once, didn’t leave behind the poor and lower middle class. …
“It’s the economic achievements of the Clinton years that people recalled when they scratched their heads at Obama’s claim that during the last 10 to 15 years — i.e., the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies — Republicans had the “new ideas.” On the contrary, while it’s possible to argue that the GOP claimed the mantle of newness in the 1980s, when Democrats were still groping for their postindustrial vision, it was precisely in 1992 — with the emergence of Clinton’s fusion of populism and neoliberalism — that Democrats did find a program for the globalization age. And it worked.”
Nevertheless, the Obamas, and their supporters, continue to disparage “the Clinton years” — even despite Barack Obama’s own rather schizophrenic admission: “I think there’s no doubt that there were good things that happened during those eight years of the Clinton administration. I think that’s undeniable. … And, particularly, when looked at through the lens of the last eight years with George Bush, they look even better.”
To both Obamas, and to their supporters, I ask the old bumper-sticker question: So, what was it, exactly, about eight years of peace and prosperity that pissed you off so much?
Yet while attempting to stay on-message and deny everything good about the first Clinton era, Michelle Obama suffers from her own schizophrenic treatment of the Obama campaign’s “out with the old, in with the new” meme:
She exudes a nostalgia, invoking the innocence and order of the past, as much as her husband beckons to a liberating future. Listening to her speeches, with their longing for a lost, spit-shine world, one could sometimes mistake her, were it not for the emphasis on social justice, for a law-and-order Republican. “It’s not just about politics; it’s TV,” she says, of our collective decay. And, wistfully: “The life I had growing up seems so much more simple.”
Michelle, honey, you grew up when I did — you’re all of two years younger than I am.
I do agree that life was indeed simpler when we were younger, and I long for it too.
But you need to make up your mind: Do you want a return to a secure, more orderly past, or do you want to gamble what tenuous hold we have on that past and barge into the future with a set of half-baked — and often contradictory — ideas about what to do with that future?
There’s much more in Collins’ lengthy profile, well worth the full read if you want a clearer picture of the outspoken and often outrageous Michelle Obama, as well as her family (in response to Michelle’s brother Craig’s complaint about Michelle’s overbearingness in college, their mother advised: “Just pretend you don’t know her”), her marriage (”…[Barack] got me into one of these discussions again, where, you know, he sort of just led me down there and got fired up and it’s like you’ve got blah blah blah blah, and then dessert comes out, the tray comes out, and there’s a ring!”), the Tony Rezko mess, and the Obamas’ close relationship with their highly controversial, Louis-Farrakhan-admiring, racial-separatist pastor, Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. (who portrays America as “a Eurocentric wasteland of lily-white lies and outright distortions”).
But we’ll end with one last quote from Collins — two paragraphs buried between pages eight and nine of the piece — which sum up the problem with Michelle Obama:
The self-assurance that colors Obama’s assumption that her personal feelings are some bellwether of American achievement is also palpable in her forceful declarations that her husband is the only person who can solve the country’s problems. “I tell people I am married to the answer,” she said, in a speech in Harlem. “The man . . . who I am willing to sacrifice,” she called her husband, in Iowa. In November, on MSNBC: “Black voters will wake up and get it.” There is a hectoring, buy-one-while-supplies-last quality to Obama’s frequent admonitions that Americans will have only one chance to elect her husband President. Someone who has spent a good portion of her life gaining purchase has suddenly been asked to sell something, and she seems to find it slightly beneath her.
Perhaps Obama’s high-handedness is preëmptive, her way of “claiming a seat at the table” — as she is fond of calling enfranchisement in the power-brokering structure — rather than waiting to be offered one. It’s as though she figures she might as well say that she and her husband are all that before someone can say that they aren’t. And there’s a sort of strategic genius to her presentation of campaigning as grinding work that takes her away from her family, rather than a glorious tour of the world’s greatest country that she would be thrilled to be undertaking even if she didn’t have to. … By loudly voicing her distaste for retail politicking, Obama makes people feel as though, by showing up, she were doing them a favor.
It’s not that Michelle Obama isn’t “grateful” for her high socioeconomic status in this country (on the contrary, she needn’t be grateful to anyone; there is no question she worked for it, and earned it), or her constant dismissal of what’s right with America, or even her deliberate blindness to how much better we had it with Bill Clinton at the helm.
It’s that she has little love for her country, and even less dedication to service to her country. She “makes people feel as though, by showing up, she were doing them a favor.”
You’re not doing anyone any favors, Michelle.
Don’t do me any favors, either… unless, of course, you really do want to meet me for a real-life lesson in how good the Clinton years really were.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you look at Obama and see no “there” there.
If you’re an Obama supporter, nothing gets your goat like a Clinton supporter saying Obama is all style and no substance.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you ask Obama supporters to show you Obama’s substance.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you tell Clinton supporters that Obama is a “blank screen” onto which you’re supposed to project all your own hopes and dreams.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, the “blank screen” line just means there’s no “there” there.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you get angry when the Clinton supporters dismiss the “blank screen” concept.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you ask the Obama supporters to explain, in their own words, what Obama intends to actually do.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you direct all Clinton supporters to Obama’s Web site, to read somebody else’s words — and then complain that nobody reads Obama’s Web site.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you’ve combed through Obama’s Web site, repeatedly, and find no “there” there.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, Obama’s entire campaign smacks of a preachy, religious tent revival.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you rail against religious or “cult” comparisons — while you refuse to discuss issues and policies, instead following your “Camp Obama” leader’s directive to share only “personal conversion stories.”
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you hate using such a heavily-loaded word as “cult,” but you’re extremely uneasy about the many ways in which the Obama supporters resemble the followers of… well… sorry to say it, but… yes… Jim Jones.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you take extreme umbrage at being branded “cult-like” — but you have to consult Wikipedia to find out who Jim Jones was.
If you’re an Obama supporter, once you find out who Jim Jones was, you suddenly understand what “drinking the Kool-Aid” means, and you’re positively aghast anyone would aim that Jonestown allusion at you.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you want to scream at the Obama supporters: “What do you think everybody meant about ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ in reference to the Bush administration all these years?!” And then you go bang your head against the nearest doorjamb until the pain stops.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you revile Bill Clinton — and by extension, Hillary — for signing NAFTA.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you’re still stunned that Bill Clinton was impeached over lying about a lousy blow job, yet all attempts to impeach George W. Bush, a bona fide war criminal, have failed.
If you’re an Obama supporter, Bill Clinton deserved to be impeached for lying about a lousy blow job, but you don’t support impeaching Bush or even Cheney, because Obama told you that he doesn’t support it, explaining that “you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breeches, and intentional breeches of the president’s authority” — which means that Bill’s lousy blow job is a far more “grave, grave breech” than anything Bush or Cheney has ever done.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you remember when former U.S. ambassador Joe Wilson risked everything to blow the lid off BushCo’s “yellowcake” lie and expose the treasonous, criminal betrayal of his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame — which not only endangered her life, but endangered national security.
If you’re an Obama supporter, Joe Wilson is a paid Hillary operative, and Valerie Plame is a ditzy blonde who needed her husband to bail her out of an embarrassing situation.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you think Paul Krugman is a brilliant economist and fine political commentator, whose progressive perspective has remained consistent since the early 1990s.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you think Paul Krugman is an inbred knuckledragger too stupid to balance his own checkbook.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you’ve always thought Peggy Noonan was a bitter, nasty, right-wing hack, and your opinion has never changed.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you never realized how wise and erudite Peggy Noonan really was, until late January of 2008, when she ripped both Clintons up one side and down the other.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, nothing Peggy Noonan writes surprises you, since Noonan was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, after all, and— by the way, speaking of Ronald Reagan…
If you’re an Obama supporter, you agree with Obama’s praise of “that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship” Ronald Reagan employed in curbing “all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s.”
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you know that the “excesses of the 1960s and 1970s” Reagan’s right-wing backlash was targeting included the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the women’s liberation movement, the gay liberation movement, the consumer-protection movement, and the environmental movement. For starters.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you cry, “That’s not what he meant by ‘excesses of the 1960s and 1970s’!” but when pressed to explain what he did mean by “excesses of the 1960s and 1970s,” you start to mumble something about “fiscal excesses,” but stop mid-sentence when you realize that Reagan was a union-busting tax cutter who gutted the middle class and racked up the largest federal deficit in U.S. history.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you can’t comprehend how Michelle Obama’s remark, “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback,” could possibly be perceived as a dismissal of every American achievement of the past 25 years.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you wonder, as Sasha Issenberg put it, “So what did Michelle Obama think of the United States before her husband decided he wanted to run the place?”
If you’re an Obama supporter, you’re quick to correct the quote; what she really said was “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country, not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you don’t see how the addition of the word “really” changes the meaning — especially since both quotes are correct, as she made them in two different speeches on the same day.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you respond that no one can possibly understand what Michelle Obama really meant unless you’re black, because America has yet to earn the pride of a minority that has been oppressed, demonized, and dehumanized throughout the entirety of America’s 232-year history.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, and you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, you wonder how you manage to find plenty of things to make you proud of America while remaining oppressed, demonized, and dehumanized throughout the entirety of America’s 232-year history.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you also wonder how Obama supporters can keep claiming that Barack Obama “transcends race,” when they keep using lines like “You can’t understand what Michelle Obama really meant unless you’re black.”
If you’re an Obama supporter, you’ve been demanding Clinton release her tax returns, right damn now!
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you’re not allowed to wonder why public access to Michelle Obama’s 1985 sociology thesis has been “Restricted until November 5, 2008.”
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you remember that too — and you also remember the way the Clintons were raked over the coals for it.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you remind the Clinton supporters that Michelle Obama’s thesis is irrelevant — Michelle isn’t running for president.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you remind the Obama supporters that Hillary Clinton wasn’t running for president in 1993, either.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you know Obama is going to take the general election in a landslide — just look at how he’s knocked Hillary flat on her butt in 24 state primary races already!
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you know that Obama wins caucuses and open primaries (in which registered Republicans and in some cases even unregistered voters) can vote for whoever they want, while Clinton wins closed primaries. (Obama has won eleven caucuses, five open primaries, and eight closed primaries — while Clinton has won nine closed primaries, three open primaries, and one caucus.)
If you’re an Obama supporter, you snark at Clinton supporters because they’re essentially saying: “Some states don’t count.”
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you know that Republicans who “cross over” to vote for the weaker Democrat in open Democratic primaries — like the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Bluey — are not an anomaly.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you scoff at Clinton supporters who just can’t believe that Obama is accomplishing exactly what he said he was going to do: convert Republicans and Independents to the Democratic Party.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you’re stunned by how deeply in denial the Obama supporters are about the Republicans’ long tradition of gaming the system.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you just don’t believe the Republicans are that smart, or that organized.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you wonder if the Obama supporters have even the first clue about the real meaning of “Rovian tactics.”
If you’re an Obama supporter, you’re convinced that Obama’s healthcare plan will give every American the same health-insurance coverage Obama himself enjoys.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you know Obama’s plan is a mandate for 15 million uninsured American children — and nobody else.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you rail against Clinton’s healthcare plan because you think it involves “wage garnishment.”
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you ask Obama supporters if they think Social Security (a.k.a. FICA) deductions are a form of “wage garnishment,” too.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you point out the vast unfairness of Clinton’s healthcare plan, as it will “penalize” childless Americans who have to pay for the coverage of somebody else’s kids.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you point out — again — that Obama’s plan is a mandate for 15 million uninsured American children, and nobody else — which means childless people will be paying for the coverage of somebody else’s kids.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you’re stuck for an answer to this one, especially as the Clinton supporters turn to the next logical question: “Do Obama supporters complain just as loudly about their taxes paying for ’somebody else’s kids’ to attend public school, too — or would they prefer school vouchers?”
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you’d never in a million years dream of attributing any of Obama’s negative campaign tactics or unlikeable personal characteristics to the fact that he’s black — that would be a truly despicable, racist thing to do.
If you’re an Obama supporter, there’s a strong chance you attribute everything you hate about Hillary Clinton to the idea that she’s having her period, or she’s not having her period, or she’s past having her period — all of which makes her “unhinged,” “hysterical,” “shrill,” “screeching,” a “harpy,” a “shrew,” a “bitch,” a “nag,” a “virago,” “weepy,” “emotionally unbalanced,” “losing it,” “cracking up,” “like your ex-wife yelling at you,” “an angry schoolmarm,” “insane,” subject to “mood swings,” “bipolar,” having “Mommy Moments,” having a “case of the vapors,” “on the rag,” and “in need of a Midol” — or, as Obama himself so slyly put it, “the claws come out” and she “launches attacks” … “periodically when she’s feeling down.”
If you’re an Obama supporter, you know it’s not your place to judge whether or not anyone is a “true Christian” — but you’re well within your rights to judge whether or not anyone is a “true Democrat.”
If you’re a Clinton supporter, the familiar strains of “You’re either with us or you’re against us” sends a chill down your spine.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you wax poetic over the way Obama is going to unite all Americans.
If you’re a Clinton supporter, you tremble when you think of the last presidential candidate who billed himself as “a uniter, not a divider.”
If you’re an Obama supporter, “unity” means: Vilify, marginalize, ostracize, and ridicule Hillary Clinton and her supporters — while “reaching out” to Republicans; gloat like a soccer hooligan over Obama’s popularity; and tell Clinton supporters Obama doesn’t need their support, their donations, or their votes.
If you’re an Obama supporter, you can’t understand why Clinton supporters respond with: “OK, then win without us in November. Good luck.”
Yes, it looks like we’re going to have a Part 3!
Copyright (c) 2008 LavenderLiberal.com. Permission is granted to reproduce “If You’re An Obama Supporter… / If You’re A Clinton Supporter…” in part or in full, on the World Wide Web or through email only (i.e., not in any hardcopy or other permanent storage medium), solely on the condition that 1) this copyright notice, 2) proper attribution (”Lavender Newswire”) and 3) a live hyperlink back to this post or to the Lavender Newswire home page ( http://news.lavenderliberal.com ) is included with the reprinted content.
There’s little I can say that hasn’t already been said in the wake of Barack’s love-fest with Ronald Reagan, in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal (given in order to gain the paper’s endorsement) — except: If you don’t understand the outrage, you’re either too young to remember, or appreciate, the enormity of the damage Reagan and his nest of freedom-hating vipers inflicted on America — and don’t give a damn about learning your nation’s history — or you were a Reagan voter who’s still in denial.
For the rest of us still trying to heal from the Reagan Era, this is what the fuss is all about — or, more accurately, this is what Obama is all about:
Ronald Reagan More Effective Than Bill Clinton:
“I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”
Obama did not specify what he believes those “excesses” were. But Reagan is widely credited with leading a rightwing backlash against the gains of the civil rights and feminist movements that preceded his 1980 election.
Those excesses, of course, were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement. The libertarian anti-government ideology of an unaccountable large liberal government was designed by ideological conservatives to take advantage of the backlash against these ‘excesses’.
What about the civil rights movement, which had a huge effect on the ’60s. Was that an excess? Were people who protested the Vietnam War, because they felt it was fundamentally wrong, much the same as many of us feel concerning Iraq, an excess? What about the strong feminism movement? Was that an excess? Or how about the new found concern of the environment? Was that an excess too?
His narrative completely excludes stagflation, high gas prices, and the hostage crisis in Iran. Think they might have been factors in the 1980 election?
He also fails to reconcile the fact that Reagan won just 50.7% of the vote in 1980 (his landslide was in 1984) with his theory that there was a unified national mood.
He also fails to explain why, if the nation was so unified, 1980 saw one of the strongest third-party campaigns in 20th century American history.
Moreover, Obama ignores the racism that was fundamental to Ronald Reagan’s campaign. Recall that Reagan began his campaign with a call for state’s rights in Philadelphia, MS.
He [Reagan] was openly — openly — intolerant of unions and the right to organize. He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country. He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment.
I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change.
Sen. John Edwards January 17, 2008
[Reagan] never did make a similar peace with the “welfare queens” he fabricated out of whole cloth to push his anti-compassionate conservatism. Nor with the African Americans he insulted by launching his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were slaughtered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. Nor with the Berkeley students demonstrating in a closed-off plaza whom he ordered tear-gassed by helicopter in 1969.
Nor, last but not least, with the tens of thousands of AIDS corpses whose disease he did not even deign to publicly acknowledge until 1987.
When I think about the 60s and the 70s, I think about Medicaid, Medicare, the Environmental Protection Agency, Community Development Block Grants… It’s astounding to me to have this blanket endorsement of a right wing attack.
When he says government in effect grew too much in the 60s and 70s… Reagan agreed with that. This is not simply a tribute to Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric but an endorsement of some of the substance.
Barney Frank (D-Mass.) Conference call January 18, 2008
Republicans: The Party of Ideas
“I think it’s fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there… over the last ten, fifteen years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom.”
So I suppose that means George Bush (past 7 years), had some good ideas? I suppose he thinks Bob Dole’s ideas were better than Clinton’s in ‘96? Does he think Gingrich had the right ideas in the ’90s?
The Republicans were the party of ideas for the last 10 to 15 years, because they were challenging conventional wisdom? OK, now I’m completely boggled. Is Obama talking about the same GOP I know — the Republican party of Tom DeLay and George Bush? The party in which candidates compete to see who can do the best Reagan impersonation? This is the party that’s challenging conventional wisdom? What’s going on here?
Paul Krugman Reagan and Obama The Conscience of a Liberal January 17, 2008
That’s not the way I remember the last 10 to 15 years.
I don’t think it’s a better idea to privatize Social Security. I don’t think it’s a better idea to try to eliminate the minimum wage. I don’t think it’s a better idea to undercut health benefits and to give drug companies the right to make billions of dollars by providing prescription drugs to medicare recipients. I don’t think it’s a better idea to shut down the government, to drive us into debt.
Sen. Hillary Clinton Conference call January 18, 2008
The Republicans have been the party of ideas for the past ten to fifteen years? Including the last seven years of Bill Clinton’s administration? Really, Mr. Obama?
So just what did William Jefferson Clinton do for blacks and Latinos?
Since the economy is the hot topic these days, let’s just look at what President Clinton did for minorities in terms of economic gains. …
Unemployment Rate for African Americans and Hispanics Remains Historically Low. Under President Clinton and Vice President Gore, the Hispanic unemployment rate has dropped from 11.3 percent in January 1993 to a record low of 5.8 percent in March 1999. The unemployment rate for African Americans has fallen from 14.1 percent in January 1993 to 8.1 percent in March 1999 — one of the lowest levels on record for African Americans.
Here are additional economic accomplishments of the Clinton/Gore administration — as of 1999 (during the administration’s second term) — that also had a direct positive effect for minorities…
. . .
Listen, Mr. Obama. If you think that President Clinton and Vice President Gore accomplished those amazing turnarounds for the economy and for minorities by singing “Kumbayah” with Republicans, you’ve just shown how naive you are.
And you’ve exposed how uninformed you are about the brutal history of U.S. politics where every progressive step is spattered with the blood, sweat and tears of all who fought so hard for those gains.
How we yearn for those 1990s that you dismiss, Mr. Obama.
[The interview] also re-aroused my suspicions that Obama is not a real Democrat, given as he is to touting GOP talking points on Social Security and presenting far weaker economic stimulus and health care plans than his rivals. Are his real political views more like Reagan’s than the Democraty party’s? It’s quite possible.
Worst of all, it reminded me of Obama’s dreamy attitude about the presidency. He thinks he can just be the “vision” guy and get “smarter people” around himself, and that the governing will take care of itself.
Never mind that George W. Bush — taking off where Ronald Reagan began — has decimated all key federal agencies of their most experienced staffers and devastated the agencies’ budgets, so much so that some will have to be rebuilt from the ground up.
JedReport was unable to reach Newt Gingrich, the chief intellectual of the Republican Party for comment. JedReport was able to confirm that Albert Gore, has had an idea or two over the last fifteen years, however.
Not “Invested” in the 1960s, Yet Can Read Baby Boomers’ Minds (Oh, and By the Way, the Boomers Can Go to Hell)
“I didn’t I didn’t come of age in the battles of the 60s, so I’m not as invested in them. So I think I talk differently about issues and I think I talk differently about values, and that’s why… um, I-I think we’ve been resonating with the American people.
“I think… And, by the way, when I say this sometimes, it’s-it’s interpreted as ‘I don’t think anybody who’s a Baby Boomer should be president’ — that’s not what I’m saying, but what i’m saying is… I think the average Baby Boomer has moved beyond a lot of the arguments of the 60s but our politicans haven’t. We’re still having the same arguments, you know, it’s all around cultural wars and it’s all, you know, even when you discuss war, you know, the frame of reference is all Vietnam — well, that’s not my frame of reference, you know, my frame of reference is what works. And my— even when I first opposed the war in Iraq, my first line was: ‘I don’t oppose all wars.’ You know… it… it… specifically to make clear this is not just a… anti-military, you know, 70s love-in kind of approach.”
In one fell swoop, Obama disparages the success-filled, non-stop efforts of millions of people during the 1960s and 1970s…
News flash: Barack Obama isn’t invested in the 1960s. No kidding. He’s not invested in reality either.
. . .
The 1970s peace movement helped stop the Vietnam war. It’s what drew John Kerry to the Senate to give one of the most electrifying speeches from a military veteran in U.S. history.
. . .
The cult of personality of Reagan, now Obama, has another thing in common. The arrogance to seduce the masses into believing something that isn’t so. Obama is convinced that Reagan was transformational, but misses on what grounds that transformation occurred.
That Obama made his case by attacking the “anti-military” Democratic rabble who Reagan also blamed for bringing this country to its knees in the 70s, because of the peaceniks’ love-in kind of approach, which was the in thing after the carnage of the Vietnam war, without realizing what he’s doing proves Mr. Obama’s cluelessness.
Reagan was the antithesis of “an anti-military, you know, 70s love-in kind of approach.” Now we find out that Obama is too. Who’s going to tell John Kerry?
Good Grief! That’s Me on the Left January 18, 2008
Astounding isn’t it? Yep, let’s put the guy who brought us “Iran-Contra, “Star Wars,” and “the largest deficits then ever known” up on a pedastal and claim he transformed this nation with “clarity” and “optimism.”
“One of the things I’m very proud of about this campaign is that I think we’ve already changed the political dialogue. When you think about it, you know, when Mitt Romney starts talking like me — which wasn’t the case… You have somebody like Huckabee who is doing very well basically taking a similar tone… I think we are shifting the political paradigm here.”
He was talking about the very same Mitt Romney who has spent more money on attack ads than all the other presidential candidates combined. Just over two weeks ago, CNN reported:
Two negative ads recently launched by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who has spent more on advertising than any other candidate, either misrepresent his rival’s records or include distortions, according to a CNN analysis of the commercials. (emphasis added)
This is the man who Barack Obama proudly cites as evidence he has brought about a shift in political paradigms?
. . .
Confused? So am I. I honestly have no idea what in the hell Obama is talking about.
It’s either another one of Obama’s completely meaningless bloviations or a political analysis conducted on a geometric plane I’ve never heard of before (perhaps for those times when triangulation just won’t do).
Mind you, I’m not saying that Obama didn’t put on a fine display of triangulation in the video. …
After Obama’s Reagan love-in, a quote I posted January 16 from Ed Pilkington is, if not prescient, far more pertinent than ever:
“Look further back still and the pattern is repeated. In 1990, while a second-year student at Harvard, [Obama] had the audacity to stand for election to head the Harvard Law Review, one of the country’s most prestigious legal publications. He beat off 18 other candidates to become its president (savor the moment: He was elected president Obama).
“David Goldberg, a civil rights lawyer who was a runner-up in that poll, recalls that Obama won by reaching out to right-wing law students, several of whom went on to become key legal advisers in the Bush administration: ‘We were a really polarized group of students, and he managed to span us all.’”
Notice a pattern yet?
Reagan — the Hollywood red-baiter who rose from president of the Screen Actors Guild to president of the United States even though he was already senile. Reagan who gave us tax cuts and “trickle down” economics that didn’t work — except for the rich and richer and richest. Reagan who let “mommy” (Nancy) run the white house with the aid of her astrologer. Reagan whose horse was smarter than he was.
Give me a break. One of the most disgusting sights in recent years was the genuflecting before this total fraud that went on at his funeral. And the hypocritical bullshit being trumpeted by the networks! Where were all the actors and writers and directors whose lives he ruined? I guess they were dead. But — what, me worry? — in America nobody knows one crumb of history, so Ronald Reagan’s vicious red baiting, how he rose to prominence by smearing other actors and writers and directors, was totally forgotten.
I suppose Mr. Obama has forgotten too — scholar of history that he is. Perhaps he was not alive in the 50s so he knows nothing about it — the Army-McCarthy hearings, the smearing of creative artists who donated to Spanish Civil War Relief even though they were not “card-carrying” communists. They happened, like my parents, and their friends, to have given money to help little Spanish children, orphaned by the Spanish Civil War — and ever after they trembled lest Ronnie Reagan and his ilk witch-hunt them.
Nowadays, as we grapple with the malevolence of President Bush, it’s Reagan we remember as the sensible one. At the risk of speaking ill of the dead, let memory at least acknowledge that there was much about Reagan that was not so sensible.
It’s not just more evidence that Obama was willing to say whatever it took to get the conservative editorial board to endorse him. It’s worse. It’s much worse.
It is further evidence that not only does Obama have no sense of the history of the last half of the 20th century — wait until you see the video below the fold — but also that he really is as conservative as his weak health care plan and far weaker economic stimulus plan have hinted. (Then there’s his use of GOP scare-tactic talking points on Social Security, and how he has been embraced by the right — including George Will who last year compared Obama to Ronald Reagan…
On the issue of Obama’s lack of “investment” in the struggles of the 1960s and 70s, and his obvious lack of personal experience of recent American history, here’s another quote from my post of January 16:
“Despite his skin color versus mine, I am not at all convinced that Barack Obama’s ties to the Civil Rights era equate with mine; when my snow-white third-grade class was being introduced to our first black classmate, Obama was living in Indonesia. We both attended Catholic school — but somehow, I cannot imagine that young Barack was inundated by the issue of American race relations (on the news, in the movies, on the cover of newsweeklies, and in lengthy class discussions — yes, even before my age reached double digits) as I was.
. . .
“I wasn’t quite four when the Watts riots exploded — and exploded with such repercussion that I remember them as well as I remember the endless news footage of the Vietnam War, and the nightly body count out of Southeast Asia.
Does Obama remember any of this? Did he even hear about it before he returned to the U.S. at the age of ten — when even the Summer of Love was a quickly-fading memory?”
Liberals always talk as if only the conservatives of our own generation were scary, and the conservatives of a previous generation kind of cuddly. Not helpful. Reagan really did almost blow the world up.
Look, I know this is weedy stuff and probably doesn’t matter to the average voter under the age of 45. But to long time liberals who lived through this period as an adult, it’s like waving a red flag in our faces. Reagan ran explicitly against the left (and in the process normalized the kind of indecent talk that made Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter millionaires.) Because he won big in 1984, leaders in both parties accepted this omnipotent Reagan myth and have run against liberalism ever since — and have ended up, through both commission and omission, advancing the destructive conservative policies that brought us to a place where we are debating things like torture. It would be helpful if ending the era of Democrats running against the liberal base could be part of this new progressive “trajectory.”
Some of us also remember the early devastating AIDS epidemic sweeping through the gay community without a word of support, comfort, or recognition from Ronald Reagan.
Some of us remember the lies about “Welfare Queens” he used to justify horrible callous, usually racist rhetoric about vulnerable fellow citizens.
Some of us remember illegal drugs sold on the streets of our cities to pay for illegal arms to the Contras and torturers and death-squads, while Nancy piously suggested we “Just Say No” as the racist War on Drugs ramped up here.
Some of us remember that an extreme minority of anti-democratic fundamentalist zealots started calling themselves “The Moral Majority” in the Reagan years.
Some of us remember Reagan telling us “government is the problem” and then seeing to it that whenever Republicans are in charge they would damn well prove it.
Some of us remember how Reagan sold the lie that giving to the rich and taking from the poor would create prosperity that would “trickle down” to the poor anyway.
Some of us remember Reagan tearing down Carter’s solar panels from the White House and his choice of James Watt as environment secretary.
Some of us remember “Ronbo” belligerently making war noises, throwing his weight around, and joking about nuclear strikes.
Some of us remember PATCO, and Reagan’s war on the unions that created a democratizing middle class (even if it never managed to extend to people of color as it so urgently needed to do).
Ronald Reagan was an evil bastard and he set the stage for the even worse Killer Clowns of the present Administration.
Feel good bullshit about the affable Gipper is dishonest and dangerous and damaging and we will not stand for it.
No, Ronald Reagan didn’t appeal to people’s optimism, he appealed to their petty, small minded bigotry and selfishness. Jimmy Carter told people to tighten their energy belts and act for the good of the country; Ronald Reagan told them they could guzzle gas with impunity and do whatever the hell they wanted. He kicked off his 1980 campaign talking about “state’s rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi — the site of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964’s Freedom Summer. He thus put up a welcome sign for “Reagan Democrats,” peeling off white voters who were unhappy with the multi-ethnic coalition within the Democratic Party.
One of his first acts was to fire 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 — one of the most devastating union busting moves of the past century. And his vision of deregulation didn’t free the country up for entrepreneurship, it opened it up for the wholesale thievery of the savings & loan crisis. He popularized the notion that all government is bad government and in eight short years put in place the architecture for decades of GOP graft and corruption.
There’s enough hagiography of Reagan on the right, I don’t think Democrats really need to go there.
…if you think, as Obama does, that Reagan’s rise to power was premised on a sunny optimism in contrast to an out of control government and a society rife with liberal excess, then you don’t understand the conservative movement. Reagan tapped into greed and fear and tribalism, and those are powerful forces. Ignoring that isn’t going to make them go away.
It’s not as if nobody saw this coming — the warnings were there, over and over and over again. Did anyone think the Donnie McClurkin flap was an isolated incident? The easy dismissal of the Baby Boomers? The attack on church-state separatists?
(What “attack on church-state separatists,” you ask? Better you should ask, “Which attack on church-state separatists?” But here’s just one example, from his keynote address at the Call to Renewal’s Building a Covenant for a New America conference: “At worst, there are some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word ‘Christian’ describes one’s political opponents, not people of faith.” Nice job broadbrushing those of us who believe in Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” as a bunch of Christian-haters, Obama.)
Here are just a few — a very few — of the warning signs (note the dates):
Just before U.S. Sen. Barack Obama admitted on the TV television program “Meet the Press” last fall that he was thinking about a run for the presidency, host Tim Russert asked him to define a great president.
. . .
Then, waxing more philosophical, Obama addressed the broader, cultural significance. “When I think about great presidents,” he said, “I think about those who transform how we think about ourselves as a country in fundamental ways so that, at the end of their tenure, we have looked and said to ourselves, that’s who we are. And … you know, there are circumstances in which I would argue Ronald Reagan was a very successful president.”
. . .
In terms of political philosophy, professional background and racial heritage, Obama and Reagan are distinctly different, one a figure of the new century and the other a representative of the previous one.
Look more closely, however, and you see a number of striking parallels between the young senator contemplating a White House campaign and the late, Illinois-born two-term president. …
. . .
Are such parallels predictive? Of course not. The disparity between Reagan and Obama in governmental experience is profound. Eight years as governor of the country’s most populous state is executive training that eight years in the Illinois state Senate and less than a full term in the U.S. Senate could never offer. And other differences abound.
But the intriguing similarities reveal two political figures possessing common traits, including vivid personalities with rare skill in connecting with the public. Both, in their ways, speak American, the distinctive dialect of the nation’s ideals and yearnings. Reassuring smiles and welcome wit of self-deprecating humor notwithstanding, electoral ambition is an animating drive for each.
In Reagan’s case, it took three campaigns spanning 12 years to reach the White House. Will Obama’s future follow such a course? His much-anticipated decision about 2008 will start to answer that question.
I recommend that every Dem read Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope” and read it with a critical eye.
I didn’t know much about Obama so I bought the book. It was an eye-opener.
He is laudatory of Ronald Reagan for his involvement in ending the Cold War. He makes no mention of the bloated military budget taking down the Soviet Union.
He says “Bush won two elections”. There is no mention of election fraud in either Florida or Ohio. He tells stories about first meeting Bush; he definitely was taken in by Bush’s “folksy” charm.
He refers to the “bankruptcy of socialism”.
He claims the press is only “distracted” not bought.
His discussion of 9/11 says nothing about questions disputing the “official” story of how it happened.
I found enough in it to give me pause about Obama, especially since he’s running a campaign on personality as opposed to policy.
That Reagan’s message found such a receptive audience spoke not only to his skills as a communicator; it also spoke to the failures of liberal government, during a period of economic stagnation, to give middle-class voters any sense that it was fighting for them. For the fact was government at every level had become to cavalier about spending taxpayer money. Too often bureaucracies were oblivious to the cost of their mandates. A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities. Reagan may have exagerrated the sins of the welfare state, and certainly liberals were right to complain that his domestic policies tilted heavily toward elites, with corporate raiders making tidy profits throughout the eighties while unions were busted and the income for the average working stiff flatlined.
Nevertheless, by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, cared for their families, loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster.
pp. 156-157:
The conservative revolution Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan’s central insight — that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing he pie — contained a good deal of truth.
As SusanUnPC wrote two days ago: “If that not-a-real-Democrat gets nominated, I’ll be watching ‘Mourning in America.’
“And so will all those young people so smitten with Barack Obama now.”
Here’s a nice, long thread at Democratic Underground that spells out many (’though hardly all) the reasons Ronald Reagan was the devil incarnate. Read it and weep, Obamaites — for that two-faced Janus you call a candidate, for your own naïveté, and most of all for the country you’re so willing to give up to the dogs — again:
…from a Reagan defender who admits he’s “too young to remember most of Reagan’s years, but… The research I’ve done indicates that he did not start any significant wars during the 80’s. He was very poised and did not act based on knee-jerk reactions.”
(The poster, thank goodness, has since been banned from DU.)
Are there any Obama cultists who don’t get it yet? Well, get this: You’re getting PLAYED, suckers.
We were wondering when we’d see the phrase “Great White Hope” headline an op/ed about Barack Obama (The Great White Hope was a play-turned-1970-film fictionalizing the life of black boxer Jack Johnson), and this past Sunday, we found it in the Washington Post: “Why Obamamania? Because He Runs as The Great White Hope.”
David Greenberg recaps the “giddiness bordering on exhilaration among voters” following Obama’s win in Iowa, and utter intoxication among “voters and pundits … heady with the hope that he can deliver not just ‘change’ … but a categorically different kind of change from Clinton or the Republican candidates.”
For a moment, our hearts skipped at the possibility that Mr. Greenberg was about to explain the words “hope” and “change” — words rendered completely indefinable by Obama and his supporters. “Hope for what?” we keep asking. “Change what, exactly?”
Mr. Greenberg is to be forgiven for being as unable to define these words in the context of Obamamania; neither Obama nor his starry-eyed supporters have been able to define them either. Confront an Obama supporter, and you’ll likely hear (as we have, repeatedly) some inane, autom
