The Temptation of Barack Obama
Senator Polonius and the Siren Song of Mediocrity
By Dan McLaughlin Posted in 2008 — Comments (9) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I caught some of Fox and CNN covering Obama's announcement speech this morning, and it was hilarious because both of them were using the news crawl at the bottom of the screen to report whatever Obama was saying - "Obama: ____." The problem is that what he was saying was an endless parade of cliches, so the breaking news crawl was annoucing things like "Obama: America is a land of hope" or "Obama: Together we can do great things."* The effect was positively parodic.
In theory, Obama should have interesting things to say. He's an intelligent man, he's lived in some interesting places, and if he's a child in political terms (he's the same age Ronald Reagan was in 1957, and not much more accomplished), he's still a decade older than I am.
But the gradual smoothing of everything interesting out of Obama's speech would not surprise a reader of Andrew Ferguson's review of Obama's two books and what his decline as a writer means for his evolution into a conventional politician:
Already his habit of seeing every side of every question--the writerly habit that rescued his memoir from stereotype and cliche - has begun to frustrate many of his would-be allies. The liberal journalist Joe Klein, writing in Time, says he "counted no fewer than 50 instances of excruciatingly judicious on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-handedness in The Audacity of Hope." Articles in the New York Review of Books and Harper's quote the book and fret over his tendency to "equivocation."
And there are points where the tendency does verge on self-parody. He proudly notes that he voted against the nomination of the perfectly unobjectionable John Roberts; then he proudly notes he wrote to the left-wing blog Daily Kos to attack its attacks on Democrats who had voted for Roberts. The book is a long self-advertisement for his own reasonableness, along with expressions of disappointment at the unreasonableness of everyone else: He's not only against John Roberts, he's against people who are against John Roberts.
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The conclusions, though, are another matter. Those frustrated would-be allies like Joe Klein shouldn't worry. On one practical issue after another, at the end of long, tortured passages of chin-pulling and brow-furrowing, after the unexpected praise for Ronald Reagan and for the genius of the free market, the disdain for identity politics and for the overregulation of small business, there's never a chance that Obama will come down on any side other than the conventionally liberal views of the Democratic party mainstream. It turns out that much of his on-the-one-hand judiciousness is little more than a rhetorical strategy.
With Hillary Clinton in the race, even Obama's status as The Chosen One won't prevent him from facing the question Walter Mondale asked of Gary Hart 23 years ago: "Where's the Beef?"
* - Note that these are not actual quotes - my brain was unable to retain the actual cliches he was reciting.
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The Temptation of Barack Obama 9 Comments (0 topical, 9 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
"If a social liberal..." Okay. But a Democrat? Not that I think that Democrat is a pejorative term, but you sound like a Kossack going after Lieberman.
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We would also like to know your advice for somebody like my daughter, who's going to graduate in two years, advice that you would give a young person.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Advice for a young person. Study history.
and run for governor.
In the end I think his lack of experience is going to hurt him-he is very nice looking, he seems to do speeches well (I don't think he is as good off the cuff or in Q and A though), and he is a darling of the media and many of the liberal left-so he has a lot of positives, but a politician like Hillary will in the end chew him up and spit him out.
AT most I think he is really running for the VP slot, which may in the end work well for him and the dems, and if by some chance he gets the VP nod and the dem ticket wins the election, I will be curious to see if the media and the media editorialists will skewer him for his youth in the same manner they did Dan Quayle (and if I was a betting kind of gal, I would bet they don't).
I think that he is a more talented Q&A guy than a scripted speech-giver actually. He's got that early Bush ability to humor everybody in the room and seem completely candid. He's funny. He's cool.
I've met him twice and asked him about mountaintop removal mining, which is ripping up Appalachia where Im from. He gave a satisfactory answer, and remembered me the next time I saw him. Thats always impressive.
All that said, its going to be a very interesting year to be a political geek...
Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
1) He's not Hillary
2) He's taller than Hillary
3) He's not married to Bill
4) Obamamania
I'll keep thinking hard about reasons to vote for Obama, but it may be hard, at least before the sun is under the yard arm.
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Another South Park Republican spouting off !
Ummm, eloquent.
(That's just a joke. I think the complaint the calling a black man "articulate" probably does carry the baggage it's claimed to carry.)
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We would also like to know your advice for somebody like my daughter, who's going to graduate in two years, advice that you would give a young person.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Advice for a young person. Study history.
We can raise taxes, we can build hurtful and demogogic tariff walls, we can inculcate envy and mistrust, we can expand the Federal Register of regulations, you'll love that, we can deny opportunity to alternative schools for lower and middle class citizens while pouring more money into that huge cesspool laughably called public education, close down the North Slope for oil drilling, and in general increase hand outs until there's almost nothing left to hand in.
And we can do all this together. Well sort of.
And all the while I can utter the most vague, banal, uninformative but sweet sounding nothings, the sort of verbal nihilism that my party, of which I'm a proud member, has perfected and rode to undeserved success for lo these many years.
Yes, America is a land of hope, but my hope is just a little different from yours, Love, Barack
"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville
Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
"Y'know, I'm just happy to be here and hope I can help the ballclub. I just want to give it my best shot and good Lord willing, things'll work out... gotta play 'em one day at a time, Y'know..."
Nuke La-looshObamaIf the fates have decreed that a Democrat sit in the Oval Office, I just pray it's Rudy Giuliani.