Why Obama can’t seem to catch a break
No, this article giving six reasons for the above phenomenon did not appear in the Onion.
My favorites are numbers three, four, and six: Obama’s been stymied by the vast and controlling “conservative media complex”; he’s had too much “policy success”; he’s been too unwilling “to promote and sell his policies.”
You can’t make this stuff up. But apparently Julian Zelizer, Princeton professor and the article’s author, can.
It’s that last point, number six, that interests me the most. I’ve been hearing it from pundits on the left almost since Obama became president, despite the fact that he’s been selling his policies assiduously from the beginning, “communicating” up a storm.
What’s behind argument six? In some cases it’s just propaganda, but in others (and my guess is that Zelizer may fall into this camp) the writer really believes it. If a person accepts as a self-evident truth the fact that Obama is a brilliant man and a great communicator and persuader, and that his cause is just, then his failure to persuade the American people can only have one possible explanation, which is that he just hasn’t tried hard enough to do so.
“then his failure to persuade the American people can only have one possible explanation, which is that he just hasn’t tried hard enough to do so”
I’m thinking most on the left would be more likely to say the “the average american is just to stupid to understand his vision.”
The first explanation would mean O has failed at something and the left will not have THAT explanation.
Leslie Gelb over at American Interest Via Media also has an analysis of Obama’s foreign policy failures. Strangely, he thinks Obama’s instincts have been good but poorly executed. I think his instincts have really been formed by whhat would play with the crowd and that he never bothers to study or think before he opens his mouth. It is amazing how people have to twist to avoid saying the truth.
Really makes me want to read his biography of Jimmy Carter they’re advertising over there in the sidebar.
Like clockwork. Last April, with the Boston Marathon bombings shedding an uncomfortable light on Obama’s record, Professor Zelizer wrote a hit piece on Bush where he blamed Obama’s failures on Bush:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/23/opinion/zelizer-bush-library/
If you’re interested, my response to the professor:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/23/opinion/zelizer-bush-library/index.html#comment-875552995
It is disillusioning that professors who, in their classrooms, can teach their students to be wary of the ways and means of partisan hackery, turn around and apply the warned-of method to engage in partisan hackery in the public marketplace of ideas.
I didn’t go to Princeton, but Professor Zelizer reminds me of one of my professors.
She has a blog on which I occasionally comment. In her class, she taught us to watch out for the methodological partisan pitfalls that distort the input for media consumers. She presented them to us as harmful to body politic. She gave us a good class.
However, despite the balance in her lessons and value judgements she expressed in her class, on her blog, she uses her professor status to validate the same partisan hackery of Professor Zelizer.
The intellectual integrity of her classroom in contrast with the low-brow partisanship of her blog was, at first, startling. It doesn’t surprise me anymore, but it has remained disillusioning.
#6? The Greatest Orator Since (name your poison) can’t communicate? My head can NOT wrap me around that.
#1 is caused by his first term (bummmmmmmmmer!)
#2 is his speciality.
#3: DAMN the NYT/WaPo/Alphabets for trashing Barry every damn day since I don’t know when!
#4: Success, caused by passing legislation over the unanimous or nearly-so objections of the other party; legislation written by Dems which they would not let event themselves read.
#5: Barry’s economy, no matter how much he blames BUSH!!!!11!!!!!!!!11111!!!!!
Thank you Neo! That was FUN.
Eric:
It’s the old “do as I say, not as I do.”
And “physician, heal thyself.”
“The cobbler’s children have no shoes.”
jack said…I’m thinking most on the left would be more likely to say the “the average american is just to stupid to understand his vision.”
Yep. And right on time, as if to prove that point, here’s the New Yorker’s David Remick on MSNBC this morning:
See, it’s us. We’re just not up to the task of not disappointing Obama.
“If a person accepts as a self-evident truth the fact that Obama is a brilliant man and a great communicator and persuader, and that his cause is just, then his failure to persuade the American people can only have one possible explanation, which is that he just hasn’t tried hard enough to do so.”
That’s certainly a plausible rationalization. But the motivation is I believe deeper. Someone once observed that, “If someone dislikes you, nothing you do will ever be quite good enough but if they like you and you offend, if you sincerely ask for forgiveness, they’ll forgive you almost anything.”
I’ve found that to be pretty much true.
“what’s frustrating to me sometimes about Obama is that the world seems to disappoint him.”
It’s not just Obama, all idealists on the left are disappointed with the world’s essential inequality and ‘unfairness’. It’s the source of their rejection of the reality within which they exist. Arrested development and cognitive dysfunction result.
Compare and contrast:
The British foreign minister, William Hague:
“The actions of Boko Haram in using girls as the spoils of the war and spoils of terrorism is disgusting. It is immoral and it should show everybody across the world that they should not give support to such a vile organisation and it is an example of why we have set up the preventing sexual violence initiative.”
Obama:
“In the short term our goal is obviously to help the international community, and the Nigerian government, as a team to do everything we can to recover these young ladies. But we’re also going to have to deal with the broader problem of organizations like this, that, uh, you know, can cause such havoc in people’s day-to-day lives.”
He simply cannot say terrorism. Or even something like vile or disgusting. Instead we get “organizations” that “uh, you know, can cause such havoc”.
Would that fall under your “poor messaging”, Prof. Zelizer?
He has to live in either Colorado or Washington.
The Brits banned Tim Larkin from flying a plane to give seminars training the people of riot prone Britain on how to defend themselves and their daughters from rape, violence, intimidation, etc.
Not sure where the Brits get off talking about “vile”.
“The world seems to disappoint him.”
Let’s look into this, unfortunately some material covering old ground for the majority of neo-neo-denizens here.
He enjoyed a privileged childhood, attending private schools, right up through Occidental and Columbia, and then Harvard Law School. He mastered proper grammar and dignified bearing, and so He was ooohed and awwwed at, particularly once He got to college and law school.
In 2008, I saw an interview in which someone who claimed to have known Him said He was very congenial and open to all points of view. Yeah, I’ll bet. In the pee cee environment within which He so nobly dwelt, who was going to take issue with a Man of Color? Of course He got on well with people, but did He ever encounter people with whom He took *serious* issue? Or were social interactions mere extensions of the childhood ooohs and awwws?
He has no clue how to deal with people who don’t fall at His feet; never did. Never had the experience.
It would be a mystery how He ever got to be editor of the Harvard Law Review, except for the oooh-and-awww phenomenon. He is accustomed to people bowing before Him, ooohing and awwwing along the way — even John McCain, and, less so, but nonetheless in the end, even Mitt Romney. (Stoopid-head Sarah was never impressed by Him, which is (yet) another reason the mainstreamers despise her.)
[Hey, I’ll wager who *doesn’t* oooh and awww before His Majesty: her First Spousehood Michelle Obama. But that’s beside the point.]
So “the world seems to disappoint him.” I’ll bet it does. It doesn’t pause to oooh and awww before His presumed Wonderfulness. It has its own agenda. Hint: that agenda is not exactly pee cee. It doesn’t let Him skate by with mediocrity and failure, rewarding them with accolades — that inane Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding. For the first time, He’s had to *deliver*, and He keeps coming up empty.
Oooh. Awww.
these political elites are all *a piece of work* look at John Kerry
he ‘s finding it so *gosh darn hard* that fellow elitists do not
conform to his will. They need to all take a good look at them
selves in the mirror what makes them think *they* can have any sway
over individuals THAT are as obnoxious as they !
For the first time, He’s had to *deliver*, and He keeps coming up empty.
He keeps going on vacation.
There is a wonderful lesson here. Never, ever assume that someone is rational because of the organizations they are associated with. the degrees that they advertise, or even their asserted IQ. It is essential that you hear their ideas and postulations first hand and do your evaluation based on hard evidence.
Action, over words. Function, over form.
I finally figured out who Obama reminds me of. David Remnick’s fawning piece about him in the New Yorker that lamented that the world disappoints Hussein made me think of it.
warty bliggens, the toad
i met a toad
the other day by the name
of warty bliggens
he was sitting under
a toadstool
feeling contented
he explained that when the cosmos
was created
that toadstool was especially
planned for his personal
shelter from sun and rain
thought out and prepared
for him
do not tell me
said warty bliggens
that there is not a purpose
in the universe
the thought is blasphemy
a little more
conversation revealed
that warty bliggens
considers himself to be
the center of the said
universe
the earth exists
to grow toadstools for him
to sit under
the sun to give him light
by day and the moon
and wheeling constellations
to make beautiful
the night for the sake of
warty bliggens
to what act of yours
do you impute
this interest on the part
of the creator
of the universe
i asked him
why is it that you
are so greatly favored
ask rather
said warty bliggens
what the universe
has done to deserve me
–Don Marquis 1878-1937
–from “Archy & Mehitabel”
[I love Don Marquis.]
Eric Holder: “Justice is not blind. For I am her eyes”
Hussein O: “What need does humanity have for a god, when they have me”
Hi Everyone,
It’s late, and I’m probably at the end of this thread, but I’ll express my opinion in simple terms that everyone can understand:
Obama is a mentally ill poopoohead whose rise was financed by Evil People like Soros, the KGB, the Chinese apparachniks/nomenklatura, etc. (i.e. enemies of the United States of America).
WARNING to those enemies of the United States:
Don’t F**K with us. If we go down, you’ll go down too.
Promethea,
I too am late to the thread, and likewise a simple person…. the messiah is a wicked, nasty, supremely narcissistic robot. I fear not the power of the animal farm, *&^’em (NSA and all alphabet agencies) with a pitchfork used to clean the horse stalls. I fear not because when they come for me, they will come for my children and grandchildren. When people have nothing to lose, people get vicious, as in burn down their houses. The next civil war the left imagines will not turn out how they imagine. Their numbers do not trump our ability.
Leftists are True Beleievers – convinced of their correct moral righteousness in organizing other peoples lives. Thus is the tap root that drives their fascist Clintonian ends-justifies-the-means mind.
So, number 6 does not only apply to Obama but to global warming. Even “climate scientists” are convinced that all that’s needed to convert the work to Beleieving in the “climate emergency” that demands world saving re-ordering of the planet economy is MORE EFFECTIVE MESSAGING!
Climatology professor (really paleoclimatologist) Michale Mann, last June at an AGU conference, 20 minute talk
http://www.politics.ie/forum/environment/33041-climate-change-debate-thread-3086.html#post7167070
General reaction? “it’s part support group to help everyone keep the [man-made global warming catastrophe] faith.”
SPECIFIC REACTION to Mann’s talk, from man-made global warming skeptics.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/09/watch-mann-and-lewandowsky-make-fools-of-themselves-live/#comment-1331120
Hard scientific evidence isn’t required, say these activist scientists – only MORE and BETTER messages – despite the fact that Americans no more care about the “problem” now than they did in 25 years ago.
Like I said, they are True Believes – cause-heads to the core, and all the more dangerous for it.
that demands world saving re-ordering of the planet economy is MORE EFFECTIVE MESSAGING!
Here’s an example of Gaia warming’s msg. More of a threat/warning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE3g0i2rz4w
Science was only a veneer they used to make themselves look reasonable. In reality, the inquisition is gearing up for the torture chambers.
Obey, or Else.
For Obama true believers, an ounce of image beats a pound of performance any day.
On a role: saturated fats.
On the run: Barack Obama.
Has the runs: John Kerry.
Bev, love the poem, gonna read it to hubby !
M J R: “So “the world seems to disappoint him.” I’ll bet it does. It doesn’t pause to oooh and awww before His presumed Wonderfulness. It has its own agenda. Hint: that agenda is not exactly pee cee. It doesn’t let Him skate by with mediocrity and failure, rewarding them with accolades – that inane Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding. For the first time, He’s had to *deliver*, and He keeps coming up empty.
Oooh. Awww.”
Close, but you miss the mark.
The Right regularly makes a presumptive error about Obama that is represented in Neo’s original post and the comments.
The presumptive error made by the Right is that Obama is the source, fount, originator. Obama isn’t the source of current leftist success. He’s not a conventional entrepreneurial leader.
Obama is an avatar of the Left, not its entrepreneurial source, fount, originator.
The source of leftist success is the Left’s collective first, non-stop, and always Marxist-method activist social movement. The “Oooh. Awww.” phenomenon you describe is the fast-track promotion of Obama (and his thin track record) by the Left’s activist social movement because he fills out the checklist of its avatar function.
As you note, when Obama operates outside of the left activist social movement’s area of operations, his capabilities seem dramatically diminished. That’s because the capabilities assigned to Obama aren’t his capabilities at all. Wherever Obama seems relatively effective is actually due to the capabilities of the highly capable left activist social movement within its area of operations.
This Right’s wrong premise on Obama is also represented in people of the Right who believe the solution lies in promoting a fantasy magical messianic savior Republican version of what they believe Obama is for the Left.
That’s a dead end for the Right because that isn’t what Obama is for the Left.
Obama hasn’t been promoted as a messianic leader for the Left, at least he isn’t for the Left’s determinative activists who’ve promoted Obama. To them, Obama is an avatar ordered from central casting to play the part.
There are no magical messianic savior Republicans, nor Democrats. The system doesn’t work that way.
What the Right actually needs is a first, non-stop, and always Marxist-method activist social movement collectively generated by the people of the Right that is influential and powerful enough to dictate terms and pay the social culture/political bills for the GOP, as the Left does for the Democrats.
Once the Right has manufactured a proper Marxist-method activist social movement that can defeat the Left in the social-political arena, then the Right can promote a politician who appears to fill out the checklist of a Reagan 2.0 fantasy, magical messianic savior Republican. If the Right’s avatar also happens to be an actually capable President, unlike Obama, then all the better for America.
The activist game is the only social-political game there is.
Eric:
What about my post has led you to believe I consider Obama the source of leftist success?
I don’t, nor have I written that here or elsewhere, to the best of my knowledge.
I do consider Obama a very good candidate for the left, something they recognize. He is undoubtedly the best candidate they’ve ever had in my lifetime. First of all, he won, twice. Secondly, he somehow managed to convince the American people he was and is not as far to the left as he’s always been. Third of all, he is a very effective liar who seems to have the press in his pocket. Fourth, he has a charm (invisible to me, but that doesn’t mean it’s not effective) that works to make people seem he’s not only a nice guy but an erudite one. Fifth (again, something I don’t perceive but which many people seem to think) he’s good a speech-making. Sixth, he appeals to white guilt and need to make amends for past wrongs. Seventh, people (especially the young) see him as cool.
I could go on, but you get the idea. He’s been a very good leftist candidate, but he certainly is not the source (I would say he’s been a bit more than an avatar, but that’s just quibbling over terms—I mainly agree with you). The source is the left itself and its tireless efforts to pave the way, both in education and media and entertainment. I’ve written a great deal about that on this blog, so I have no idea why you would think I think otherwise.
parker: “When people have nothing to lose, people get vicious, as in burn down their houses. The next civil war the left imagines will not turn out how they imagine. Their numbers do not trump our ability.”
No. The “next civil war” won’t turn out like you imagine. You’ll be crushed because both their numbers and ability trump yours.
War is a type of social movement. If you can’t even manage to create a Marxist-method activist social movement in present conditions, then you won’t manage to create a viable guerilla insurgency. And definitely not in competition with left activists who also control the State.
War is politics by other means, right? The Left already conducts their social politics as war by other means. The Left knows all about guerilla war. They come from the folks who wrote the modern playbook on guerilla warfare.
If you switch the Left’s social-political mode from ‘by any non-violent means necessary’ to an unlimited ‘by any means necessary’ with your “civil war”, the Left will be as vicious as they need to be to defeat the challenge to their alpha dominance. They’ll be pleased you gave them an excuse to take the gloves off. The Left-USG alliance wouldn’t be restrained by the lawfare and propaganda that the Left has hitherto used versus the US military and police.
Worse, if one day you actually talk your loved ones into trying guerilla warfare, without at least first establishing a viable Marxist-method activist social movement as your foundation, you’ll lose and they’ll suffer.
If you lack the necessary activist propaganda capability to compete in the narrative contest versus the Left’s propagandists, your people wouldn’t even be defined as popular martyrs in the collective consciousness as compensation for their suffering.
The fantasy of falling back on the “next civil war” is a cop-out, a rationalization for choosing not to compete in the one way – Marxist-method activism – that can actually make a difference in the only social-political game there is.
Eric:
I absolutely agree that the right is naive if it thinks that numbers and guns would be enough to do the trick in any actual civil war.
Actually, I think the right is naive, period.
Neo,
I’m glad you clarified. And yes you have. Note that I said “Neo’s original post”, not ‘Neo’s constant error’.
However, when your posts are personality-centered with either Obama this-or-that or [Republican] this-or-that, you feed the premise that the source of the problem is Obama, which in turn and by the same token, feeds the misguided notion that the solution for the Right is waiting for a magical messianic savior Republican to do the heavy-lifting of social cultural/political change.
That misguided notion renders your readers ineffective for advancing the solution needed for the problem. In line with their fantasy of magical messianic savior Republicans, they believe a focus on elections, particularly the next election for President, is enough.
It’s not nearly enough.
The heavy-lifting of social change can only come from the people of the Right collectively manufacturing a full-spectrum activist social movement. The GOP has an important role to play, but the GOP’s role is second order and depends first on the people of the Right being activist.
“I would say he’s been a bit more than an avatar, but that’s just quibbling over terms–I mainly agree with you.”
We usually think of an avatar as a passive thing, like the picture IDs for users on some websites, but a living avatar can be active. I have described Obama as a hologram as an exaggerated way to make a point, but Obama is more than a hologram. He’s an avatar of the Left’s activist social movement who is actively an agent of the Left occupying the Office of President of the United States of America.
Eric,
You have an annoying “you people” tone when you comment on this blog. We are not some kind of collective group mind here. This blog is generally a place where we can say what we think without going into lengthy details.
If you the same “Eric” who posted a few years ago, I noted that you continued to identify yourself as a “liberal.”
As some of us have discussed a few times, the political labels that are currently used are essentially meaningless. What’s a “conservative”? What’s is the “Right”?
We can say “liberal” because many if not most of us suffer under the regime (friends and family) of groupthinkers who automatically take up the “next new thing” like antifracking, climate change, wind power, etc. etc.
Right now the liberals/leftists/marxist/fascists are disobeying the laws and the Constitution. When that continues, then neo’s various readers will do what they can. Please don’t write these condescending posts to us. We don’t know each other.
Oops, paragraph 2 “If you are . . . “
Promethea: “When that continues, then neo’s various readers will do what they can.”
What “that” are they waiting for that qualifies as a decision point to act?
Eric,
You want me to tell you my secret plan to save the world on a public website?