The New Neo

I know we’ve discussed this before, but…

Posted on August 23, 2012 by neoAugust 23, 2012

…every now and then it hits me again: how is it that so many people still see Obama as likable? Or even saw him that way in the first place?

To me, it became clear early on in the 2008 campaign that Obama had a petty nastiness that was extremely unlikable, as well as being a ruthless narcissist. That’s different from just being a tough campaigner.

And it wasn’t about disagreeing with his politics, either. Back in the 80s I disagreed with Reagan’s politics for the most part, and I thought him somewhat of a phony as well. But he never seemed to me to be anything other than a basically nice guy. In contrast, Bill Clinton always roused a certain generalized distrust in me, although I agreed with him politically and voted for him twice. In other words, I didn’t much like him, ever, and this was long before Monica Lewinsky came into his life. So likability and political synchronization did not always go hand in hand for me.

I know that many people think the polls on Obama’s likability reflect polite lying by the respondents, who dislike Obama more (or perhaps like him less) than they let on. It’s a common notion that people are saying they like him more than they do because they don’t want to be perceived as racists. But my impression (based mostly on a small sample: my friends) is that the liking is very genuine, and it has not budged despite some disappointments with his achievements.

And these people are not generally gullible pushovers, nor do they ordinarily have poor judgment about people in regular life. Nor do I expect them to vote against Obama and for Romney; after all, they’re liberal Democrats. But this “he’s such a great guy” thing is a mystery to me.

Norah O’Donnell takes Obama to task

Posted on August 22, 2012 by neoAugust 22, 2012

Something’s been going on with the MSM lately.

First it was the Boston Globe, criticizing Biden’s “chains” remark.

Then it was Tina Brown’s Newsweek, publishing a Niall Ferguson cover story on why Obama needs to go.

Then we got Politico‘s expose of the narrow, petty nature of the Obama campaign and the infighting among his operatives.

And now I notice that CBS’s White House Chief Correspondent Norah O’Donnell has jumped on the bandwagon of critiquing Obama. I’m not ordinarily a watcher of network news—or even TV news, for that matter—so I’m not really familiar with O’Donnell’s prior reporting, or when she started being a bit more critical of the president. But when I looked her up, I saw that her credentials for the usual sort of pro-Obama reporting seemed impeccable: gigs on NBC and MSNBC and then CBS, as well as substitute hosting for Chris Matthews (he of the Obama-induced leg thrill).

But something has evidently been going on that led up to this:

Note, also, that although it’s O’Donnell who is toughest on Obama in the clip, her response was to a question that seemed to purposely set up the critique.

So why is CBS news suddenly starting to sound a bit like Fox every now and then? I submit that at least one of the reasons may be that Obama has been ignoring the press lately. That makes it personal for them, and these small and probably temporary defections are being fired as warning shots.

Another reason for it may be that the press is mad at Obama for what they see as committing unforced errors. They’re been carrying his water and they expect him to do his part.

Jake Tapper, one of the few MSM correspondents who’s been relatively fair about Obama from the start, has this to say:

“I have said before”¦ [that I] thought the media helped tip the scales. I didn’t think the coverage in 2008 was especially fair to either Hilary Clinton or John McCain,” Tapper said.

On the 2008 coverage, he noted, “Sometimes I saw with story selection, magazine covers, photos picked, [the] campaign narrative, that it wasn’t always the fairest coverage.”

It is emblematic of the whole problem with press bias that critiques as exceptionally mild as Tapper’s—that the 2008 coverage wasn’t [emphasis mine] “especially fair” or “always the fairest“—now qualify as newsworthy criticisms of the press.

Write-in rules in Missouri

Posted on August 22, 2012 by neoAugust 22, 2012

If Akin won’t quite the race, perhaps there’s some charismatic Missouri Republican who would jump in to challenge him in a write-in campaign?

It really depends on how the polls shape up. But unfortunately, there’s no chance under Missouri law of simply writing in either of Akin’s Republican challengers from the primary (who even at the time seemed more popular than he):

If a candidate files for nomination to an office and is not nominated at a primary election, that candidate cannot file a declaration of intent to be a write-in candidate for the same office at the general election. (Section 115.453(4) RSMo)…

If a candidate is on the ballot for an office, write-in votes are counted only for the candidates who have filed a declaration of intent to be a write-in candidate with the proper election authority. (Section 115.453(4), first sentence)

I think it’s an unnecessarily restrictive law, but I guess the Missouri legislature disagreed.

[ADDENDUM: I just found something I was looking for in vain when I wrote this post—the rules governing who can vote in Missouri’s senatorial primaries. Interestingly enough, crossovers are allowed. This may explain Akin’s unanticipated win in the first place.

I think completely open primaries are a travesty. They are especially dreadful when only one party has a contest and the other features an incumbent, which means that there is no real penalty for crossover votes designed to sabotage the opposition party. A terrible idea, and an open invitation to dirty tricks. This was the situation in this year’s Missouri senatorial primary: McCaskill was the unopposed incumbent, and the Republican primary was hotly contested among many candidates.]

Revealed: Obama suffers from Romney Derangement Syndrome

Posted on August 21, 2012 by neoAugust 21, 2012

My oh my:

Obama really doesn’t like, admire or even grudgingly respect Romney. It’s a level of contempt, say aides, he doesn’t even feel for the conservative, combative House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Hill Republican he disliked the most. “There was a baseline of respect for John McCain. The president always thought he was an honorable man and a war hero,” a longtime Obama adviser said. “That doesn’t hold true for Romney. He was no goddamned war hero.”

Time and again Obama has told the people around him that Romney stood for “nothing.” The word he would use to describe Romney was “weak,” too weak to stand up to his own moneymen, too weak to defend his own moderate record as the man who signed into law the first health insurance mandate as Massachusetts governor in 2006, too weak to admit Obama had done a single thing right as president.

The entire article is worth reading. Hard to say whether any, some, or all of it is true, but it’s certainly an indication that—at least for the moment—Politico is willing to present a portrait of Obama that is decidedly unpleasant. There’s hardly a paragraph in the piece that doesn’t describe a leader and a group of underlings consumed by pettiness, narcissism, and disorganization. So just on that score alone, the story has the ring of some sort of truth, although I remain distrustful of unsourced anonymous insider info.

If the “Obama hates Romney” bit is correct, it’s both interesting and informative. Why such strong antipathy towards Romney? My guess is that one reason would be that Obama has been unpleasantly surprised by Romney’s toughness as an opponent, and that rouses his anger. So far, except for Bobbie Rush, Obama has been very lucky in his opponents—and that was especially true of McCain in 2008. The “war hero” part is not why Obama “respected” him (I think that idea is poppycock); it was McCain’s unwillingness to slug away at Obama that almost certainly is why Obama appreciated McCain, and why the president now fervently wishes Romney would follow the McCain rulebook, as he’d been expected to. How hard must it be to expect that your opponent will be a pushover and then find that he’s determined to give you the battle of your life?

Another issue may be (and here I’m going to go all psychological on you) envy on Obama’s part, most specifically father-envy. After all, Mitt had a strong, loving, and helpful father and Obama most assuredly did not. “Romney had it so easy, and I had it so hard” could be the source of a lot of outsized rage.

Hatred of one’s opponent can sometimes help motivate a person to fight harder and more effectively, especially if the two people are involved in a fistfight. In a political campaign, perhaps not so much; it can cloud the judgment considerably, and lead to errors.

Akin and the rape comments

Posted on August 21, 2012 by neoAugust 21, 2012

Since the Akin rape comments story seems to have reached a fever pitch, let me just say that I think the man is politically tone-deaf and probably should leave the race for that reason alone. The battle for the Senate is too important to leave to people who can’t present coherent thoughts in a coherent fashion, and who hand outrageous sound bites to the opposition on a silver platter.

There are two problems with Akin’s remarks. The first is his bizarre phrase “legitimate rape,” which appears to imply that some rape could be okay (i.e. “legitimate”). The second is his suggestion that getting pregnant through rape is nearly impossible because in “legitimate rape” a woman’s body has some sort of built-in protection that rejects the pregnancy.

When I first heard this story, I thought Akin’s remarks to be so surpassingly weird that two possible explanations came to mind. The first was that Akin holds offensive and fantastical ideas about rape. The second is that there was some at least semi-rational explanation for what he said.

Working on the latter theory, I Googled a bit. It didn’t take but a moment to find this piece on the subject at a site called Physicians for Life. The gist of the argument is that, in what is ordinarily referred to as “forcible rape” (Whoopi Goldberg’s “rape-rape” by another name) as opposed to, for example, statutory rape, the woman is under stress and is therefore less likely to become pregnant.

There’s little doubt that’s what Akin meant by his remarks (here’s more background on the history of the medical arguments behind them). But it sounds as though he’s implying that woman who get pregnant from rape weren’t “legitimately” raped, a toxic assertion.

What’s more, even if it were true that stress reduces the number of pregnancies that would have otherwise been expected to result from rape—and it’s not at all clear that it’s true—how would the relative frequency of rape-induced pregnancies matter? There is no question that some women become pregnant through rape, and anyone recommending policy connected with abortion (whether pro or con) needs to deal with that particular population.

As for whether stress actually does help to prevent pregnancy, as Akin appears to be alleging, the jury’s been out an awfully long time on that one, with no end in sight.

Akin will be going on the air to say his mea culpas to the voters, and to try to explain himself. It remains to be seen whether they’ll buy his story, but interestingly enough, so far the polls haven’t budged.

[ADDENDUM: DrewM at Ace’s thinks the polls are spurious, and agrees that Akin needs to go:

PPP has a poll out showing Akin still leading by 1. Alas, it’s total bull. Almost as if Democrats want to keep Akin hanging in there. Even if were a legit poll, it’s early and 1 point is within the margin of error. How do you think it will look after a couple of weeks of pounding with no Crossroads or national GOP money in the game?

If Akin stays in and we are one vote short on in the Senate then he and John Roberts will have saved ObamaCare. Great.

One last thought. This whole notion of we have to be loyal to guys like Akin is nuts. He broke the faith by putting a slam dunk win in danger. We owe him nothing. ]

Ryan Derangement Syndrome: MoDo’s got it bad

Posted on August 20, 2012 by neoAugust 20, 2012

Paul Ryan has flummoxed the left. They know he’s evil, and yet he seems like such a nice guy. Therefore he’s doubly evil, because his smiling facade houses a soul so dark.

Witness Maureen Dowd’s latest column on the man, which is a good example of the growing genre that one might call the Picture of Dorian Gray mode of Ryan critique.

Did you know that Ryan’s a hater? Yes indeed, as described by no less an authority than (as Dowd admiringly writes):

…Tom Morello, the Grammy-winning, Harvard-educated guitarist for the metal rap band Rage Against the Machine, [who] punctured Paul Ryan’s pretensions to cool in a Rolling Stone essay rejecting R&R (Romney ’n’ Ryan) as R&R (rock ’n’ roll).

Morello’s statements in his role as (Harvard-educated!) political commentator were apparently important enough not only for Rolling Stone to publish, but for Dowd to highlight at the beginning of her NY Times column:

[Ryan] is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades,” Morello writes, adding: “I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta ”˜rage’ in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically, the only thing he’s not raging against is the privileged elite he’s groveling in front of for campaign contributions.”

Dowd goes on to evoke the many ghosts of hated GOP VP-nominees past. Ryan’s like Sarah Palin because he uses the word “awesome.” He’s like Dan Quayle because he’s young enough to be Romney’s son, as Quayle was to Bush senior. And he’s like Dick Cheney because he sounds reasonable but that’s merely an example of “la belle indifférence, or “the beautiful calm” of hysterical people” (and note that Dowd uses the term in a manner that demonstrates an almost total ignorance of what it actually means; see this].

And then there’s the usual reverse-racist crap du jour about “white guys,” so popular in these enlightened days:

Republicans find the tableau of two rich white guys ”” same shirts, different generations ”” comforting.

Actually, it’s Democrats like Maureen who find it comforting to think so.

It’s often said that conservatives believe liberals are stupid but liberals believe conservatives are evil. If Paul Ryan is one of the most conservative members of Congress, ergo he must be one of the most evil, even if his demeanor and words and personality and history project nothing of the sort. But that’s the beauty of it, according to Dowd, whose last paragraph begins this way:

Beyond the even-keeled Ryan mien lurks full-tilt virulence.

Full-tilt virulence, thy name is Dowd.

Annals of math: how integral calculus did me in

Posted on August 20, 2012 by neoAugust 20, 2012

[NOTE: This fond reminiscence was sparked by a comment on the Periodic Table thread.]

The college I attended had a fairly rigorous set of science requirements for its liberal arts candidates: two (count em, two) year-long lab science sequences, or a year of a lab science and a year of math. Not business math either; math math.

Even though I’d been good at both science and math in high school, this was a daunting prospect. I started out thinking I’d do a year of biology and a year of math. The biology worked out, but not the math; not at all. I somehow managed to slide though the first course, differential calculus, although I can’t say my understanding of it was very deep. But with integral I hit the wall.

The professor was from Turkey and could not speak English in anything but the most rudimentary way. Each class meeting followed the same format: he turned his back on the students and his face to the blackboard, and then covered the board’s entire surface with a faint and squiggly scrawl of numbers and symbols that were virtually unreadable, all the while engaged in nearly-inaudible mumbling.

I tried to keep up by reading the book, but the text (although nominally in English) was impenetrable as well, at least to me. I don’t think I even knew that tutoring might be available—I’d never struggled with a subject before—and by the time I realized I was in deep do-do, I felt helpless to reverse the trend.

It was too late to drop the course, and I managed to pass the midterm. But the final was another matter. Finals at that particular university were three hours long, and this one consisted of five problems. I don’t remember anything about them except that I had no idea how to tackle a single one.

I spent about fifteen minutes staring at test paper and then at the empty bluebook, back and forth and back and forth, as though by sheer concentration and force of will I could figure out some way to respond. But absolutely nothing came to mind and—after looking around at the class of about eighty fellow students, most scratching away diligently, but some immobile and sweating, like me—I closed the pages, stood up, walked resolutely to the front desk, and placed my bluebook there.

The entire class gasped in unison. I never knew whether they were flabbergasted because they mistakenly believed I had completed the test in fifteen minutes, or whether they were stunned because they realized I had given up so very early and dramatically. But I walked out of the room knowing that my grade would be a big fat “F” and I would have to pick up either another entire year of a lab science to make up for it, or another math course that would almost undoubtedly be over my head.

I later discovered that about a third of the students in the class had failed along with me, although not as flamboyantly. I never knew what happened to the professor, because I transferred soon after, to a university that serendipitously required only a single year of a lab science and no math at all, a fact for which I was exceedingly grateful.

Onward and upward with the Muslim Brotherhood

Posted on August 20, 2012 by neoAugust 20, 2012

The Muslim Brotherhood is tightening its control over Egypt, and there doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about it.

Dennis Ross seems to believe, though, that Obama could arrest the slide with some toughlove:

Egypt’s president and people should…know that we are prepared to mobilize the international community, and global financial institutions, to help Egypt ”” but that we will only do so if Egypt’s government is prepared to play by a set of rules grounded in reality and key principles. They must respect the rights of minorities and women; they must accept political pluralism and the space for open political competition; and they must respect their international obligations, including the terms of Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.

I’m not sure what dream world Ross is living in. But I’m cynically amused by the notion that our threats might induce Egypt’s government to “respect the rights of minorities and women” and “accept political pluralism” as well as make nice to Israel. I’m also cynically amused by the idea that the Obama administration has any notion of making such demands of Egypt and/or following through on them.