BEHIND THE CURTAIN
charles in charge.
One week after the God Wants You to Vote for Obama
Newsweek cover, on the same day that a few more pro-Barack, or at least anti-Hillary, pieces poke their uncritical heads
into the Senator's Breath of Fresh Air, it is reassuring, at least, to report
that a few more pundits and columnists have begun to take a peek behind the
curtain and consider that the Wizard may not be all that he seems. Or likes to
pretend.
One of the best of those pieces arrived last Friday, when the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer took a leer at the good Senator's sneer and decided there may be more than meets the star-struck eye:
This "Hillary cried, Obama died" story line is satisfying, but it overlooks an earlier moment played to a national television audience of 9 million that was even more revealing.
It showed a side of Barack Obama not seen before or since. And it wasn't pretty. Asked in the Saturday Democratic debate about her dearth of "likability," Mrs. Clinton offered an answer both artful and sweet -- first, demurely saying her feelings were hurt and mock-heroically adding that she would try to carry on regardless, then generously conceding that Mr. Obama is very likable and "I don't think I'm that bad."
At which point, Mr. Obama, yielding to some inexplicable impulse, gave the other memorable unscripted moment of the New Hampshire campaign -- the gratuitous self-indicting aside: "You're likable enough, Hillary." He said it looking down and with not a smile but a smirk.
If you doubt his characterization of either Senator Obama's or Senator Clinton's responses, you can see them both here, in their entireties. They seem pretty clear to me. And to Mr. Krauthammer:
Rising rock star puts down struggling diva -- an unkind cut, deeply ungracious, almost cruel, from a candidate who had the country in a swoon over his campaign of grace and uplift. The media gave that moment little play, but millions saw it live, and I could surely not have been the only one who found it jarring.
And he wasn't, of course. Even if the people who saw what he say and thought what he thought were far more rare, and silent, than they should have been. But for anyone who was paying attention -- whether or not they admitted it -- this is yet another moment not just to look beneath Obama's veneer, but to look also beyond his horizon, to the possibility of a general election campaign in which he would doubtless be the target of a revved-up, rip-roaring, Republican Party slime-and-awe campaign right out of the gate. If he is what he says he is -- or at least as long as he professes so -- then he won't fight back, and he won't get down and dirty; he'll just sit back, take the high rhetorical road, and trust in the fair-minded intellect of the American electorate. That's great in theory, and maybe even in principle, but we all know how that strategy turned out the last time.
The other option, of course, is that Obama isn't what he says he is and is, in fact, what I've been saying he is: a breath of stale air phony who persists in playing a part that, so far, much of the public and most of the media have lapped up like their favorite flavor of snake oil:
One does not have to be sympathetic to the Clintons to understand their bewilderment at Mr. Obama's pre-New Hampshire canonization. The man comes from nowhere with a track record as thin as Chauncey Gardiner's. Yet, as Bill Clinton correctly, if clumsily, complained, Mr. Obama gets a free pass from the press.
It's not just that NBC admitted that "it's hard to stay objective covering this guy." Or that Newsweek had a cover article so adoring that one wonders what is left for coverage of the Second Coming.
And if it is that option, if Obama betrays the part and succumbs both to his nature and to his ambition and decides to fight back, well, then he'll prove himself quite clearly to be what I and a few others have said he was all along. This emergence will make him a much better general election campaigner. And a much lesser candidate for everyone who now goes all a-schoolgirl-twitter at the thought of his uniting, redeeming, resurrecting political possibilities.
Of course, there's already been plenty of evidence -- some of it chronicled here, almost one year ago to the day (remember the the man who famously lamented that Politics has become...so gummed up by money? he has, as of the last campaign finance report, spent more money than anyone but Mitt Romney) -- to suggest that is the case:
The freest of all passes to Mr. Obama is the general neglect of the obvious central contradiction of his candidacy -- the bipartisan uniter who would bring us together by transcending ideology is at every turn on every policy an unwavering, down-the-line, unreconstructed, uninteresting, liberal Democrat. He doesn't even offer a modest deviation from orthodoxy.
Special interests? Mr. Obama is a champion of the Davis-Bacon Act, an egregious gift to Big Labor that makes every federal public-works project more costly. He not only vows to defend it, but proposes extending it to artificially raise wages for any guest worker program.
On Iraq, of course he denigrates the surge. That's required of Democratic candidates. But he further claims that the Sunnis turned against al-Qaida and joined us -- get this -- because of the Democratic victory in the 2006 midterm elections. Mr. Obama has yet to have it pointed out to him by a mainstream interviewer that the Anbar Salvation Council was founded by Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha two months earlier. Mr. Obama has yet to be asked why any Sunni would choose to join up with the American invaders at precisely the time when Democrats would have them leaving -- and be left like the pro-American Vietnamese or the pro-French Algerians to be hunted and killed when their patrons were gone. That's suicide.
You can argue some of these political points. You can dispute Krauthammer's conclusions. But you can not dispute that there is a lot -- an awful lot -- that Senator Obama has yet to be asked by a press corps so smitten it is likely to ask him to the prom, or at least to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, before it asks him a truly tough or probing question.
Even if you believe that a Clinton restoration would be a disaster, you should still be grateful for New Hampshire. National swoons, like national hysterias, obliterate thought.
A great line. And an especially important thought for anyone still myopic enough to be proffering Obama as the anti-Bush.
The New Hampshire surprise has at least temporarily broken the spell. Maybe now someone will lift the curtain and subject our newest man from hope to the scrutiny that every candidate deserves.
This is a nice start, Chuck. But don't bet on it. After all, look how long it took them to start scrutinizing President Bush -- a guy to whom they gave a pass and a wink and a nudge, and even a Start-a-War-Free card, but whose candidacies never once gave them a case of the messianic vapors.
One of the best of those pieces arrived last Friday, when the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer took a leer at the good Senator's sneer and decided there may be more than meets the star-struck eye:
This "Hillary cried, Obama died" story line is satisfying, but it overlooks an earlier moment played to a national television audience of 9 million that was even more revealing.
It showed a side of Barack Obama not seen before or since. And it wasn't pretty. Asked in the Saturday Democratic debate about her dearth of "likability," Mrs. Clinton offered an answer both artful and sweet -- first, demurely saying her feelings were hurt and mock-heroically adding that she would try to carry on regardless, then generously conceding that Mr. Obama is very likable and "I don't think I'm that bad."
At which point, Mr. Obama, yielding to some inexplicable impulse, gave the other memorable unscripted moment of the New Hampshire campaign -- the gratuitous self-indicting aside: "You're likable enough, Hillary." He said it looking down and with not a smile but a smirk.
If you doubt his characterization of either Senator Obama's or Senator Clinton's responses, you can see them both here, in their entireties. They seem pretty clear to me. And to Mr. Krauthammer:
Rising rock star puts down struggling diva -- an unkind cut, deeply ungracious, almost cruel, from a candidate who had the country in a swoon over his campaign of grace and uplift. The media gave that moment little play, but millions saw it live, and I could surely not have been the only one who found it jarring.
And he wasn't, of course. Even if the people who saw what he say and thought what he thought were far more rare, and silent, than they should have been. But for anyone who was paying attention -- whether or not they admitted it -- this is yet another moment not just to look beneath Obama's veneer, but to look also beyond his horizon, to the possibility of a general election campaign in which he would doubtless be the target of a revved-up, rip-roaring, Republican Party slime-and-awe campaign right out of the gate. If he is what he says he is -- or at least as long as he professes so -- then he won't fight back, and he won't get down and dirty; he'll just sit back, take the high rhetorical road, and trust in the fair-minded intellect of the American electorate. That's great in theory, and maybe even in principle, but we all know how that strategy turned out the last time.
The other option, of course, is that Obama isn't what he says he is and is, in fact, what I've been saying he is: a breath of stale air phony who persists in playing a part that, so far, much of the public and most of the media have lapped up like their favorite flavor of snake oil:
One does not have to be sympathetic to the Clintons to understand their bewilderment at Mr. Obama's pre-New Hampshire canonization. The man comes from nowhere with a track record as thin as Chauncey Gardiner's. Yet, as Bill Clinton correctly, if clumsily, complained, Mr. Obama gets a free pass from the press.
It's not just that NBC admitted that "it's hard to stay objective covering this guy." Or that Newsweek had a cover article so adoring that one wonders what is left for coverage of the Second Coming.
And if it is that option, if Obama betrays the part and succumbs both to his nature and to his ambition and decides to fight back, well, then he'll prove himself quite clearly to be what I and a few others have said he was all along. This emergence will make him a much better general election campaigner. And a much lesser candidate for everyone who now goes all a-schoolgirl-twitter at the thought of his uniting, redeeming, resurrecting political possibilities.
Of course, there's already been plenty of evidence -- some of it chronicled here, almost one year ago to the day (remember the the man who famously lamented that Politics has become...so gummed up by money? he has, as of the last campaign finance report, spent more money than anyone but Mitt Romney) -- to suggest that is the case:
The freest of all passes to Mr. Obama is the general neglect of the obvious central contradiction of his candidacy -- the bipartisan uniter who would bring us together by transcending ideology is at every turn on every policy an unwavering, down-the-line, unreconstructed, uninteresting, liberal Democrat. He doesn't even offer a modest deviation from orthodoxy.
Special interests? Mr. Obama is a champion of the Davis-Bacon Act, an egregious gift to Big Labor that makes every federal public-works project more costly. He not only vows to defend it, but proposes extending it to artificially raise wages for any guest worker program.
On Iraq, of course he denigrates the surge. That's required of Democratic candidates. But he further claims that the Sunnis turned against al-Qaida and joined us -- get this -- because of the Democratic victory in the 2006 midterm elections. Mr. Obama has yet to have it pointed out to him by a mainstream interviewer that the Anbar Salvation Council was founded by Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha two months earlier. Mr. Obama has yet to be asked why any Sunni would choose to join up with the American invaders at precisely the time when Democrats would have them leaving -- and be left like the pro-American Vietnamese or the pro-French Algerians to be hunted and killed when their patrons were gone. That's suicide.
You can argue some of these political points. You can dispute Krauthammer's conclusions. But you can not dispute that there is a lot -- an awful lot -- that Senator Obama has yet to be asked by a press corps so smitten it is likely to ask him to the prom, or at least to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, before it asks him a truly tough or probing question.
Even if you believe that a Clinton restoration would be a disaster, you should still be grateful for New Hampshire. National swoons, like national hysterias, obliterate thought.
A great line. And an especially important thought for anyone still myopic enough to be proffering Obama as the anti-Bush.
The New Hampshire surprise has at least temporarily broken the spell. Maybe now someone will lift the curtain and subject our newest man from hope to the scrutiny that every candidate deserves.
This is a nice start, Chuck. But don't bet on it. After all, look how long it took them to start scrutinizing President Bush -- a guy to whom they gave a pass and a wink and a nudge, and even a Start-a-War-Free card, but whose candidacies never once gave them a case of the messianic vapors.
Posted: Tue - January 15, 2008 at 02:08 PM
Quick Links
Calendar
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
Categories
Archives
Terror Alert
Brilliant Satire
Required Reading
Traffic Count
Official Muse
Syndication
XML/RSS Feed
Some Perspective
Y Chromosomes
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jan 15, 2008 02:25 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jan 15, 2008 02:25 PM