Incivility: Republicans as Nazis Yet Again

This matter has become so fraught that I must begin with a DISCLAIMER : I have never thrown a brick through or at the window of any person holding office, or (come to think of it) of any person whatsoever; nor do I intend to, nor do I encourage, give aid, assistance, or support to those that do. It’s just bad manners; I wasn’t raised like that.

But what in God’s name is Frank Rich smoking? Here we have him fulminating in the august pages of the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28rich.html?src=me&ref=homepage.

If you are opposed to one party’s legislative activity, you suffer from “rage,” it appears.

ONE:  The article includes the now stock-in-trade libel against Republicans, that they have staged a “Kristallnacht” though he hedges by admitting it is “small-scale.” Well, a half-dozen (or even a dozen, or five dozen) incidents of incivility, violence, and meanness don’t rise quite to that level, I think. To draw the comparison betrays ignorance and an insulting insensitivity to those who suffered under Nazi rule.

Here are some images, depicting two of many synagogues destroyed: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Essenweinstrasse.html:

Essenweinstrasse Synagogues in Nuremberg

and Aachen Synagogue Destroyed

It might be instructive for Rich and others slinging this charge to visit the Jewish Virtual Library or other websites, and museums, which inform them about the horrors of Nazism; or, if they can travel, to go to Germany to see the prison camps and gas chambers which the Nazi regime used to attempt to exterminate the Jews. To liken the activity of a few angry souls to this state-sponsored terror is simply insane, uncivil, unproductive, hostile, vicious, incorrect. It is wrong on every level. I would not allow a first year college student to get away with such inane comparisons.

And the Democrats want to sign a civility pact? Really? Like hell they do.

TWO:  Rich engages in a recitation of the acts of brick throwing, insult slinging, etc, which have in the past week become boilerplate for liberal attack articles. The basic text, like some bit of contract jargon, is drawn up and ready to cut, paste, and drop into the next article, and the next, and the next. (DISCLAIMER: I neither use the “n” word, nor encourage others to do so; neither spit on political opponents, nor support others that do; it’s bad manners; I wasn’t raised that way.) This is neither impressive nor necessary. It only adds fuel to the fire, stokes a stupid controversy, and perpetuates the vicious slanders against the right. By no means do I justify this behavior (which I think ought to be prosecuted wherever appropriate, and scorned otherwise), but really, do you think people will become more friendly, more inclined to negotiate, compromise, discuss, when you keep calling them Nazis? Seeing the gross disparity between their passions, their actions, and your description of them, they may even be inclined to suspect you of orchestrating a PR campaign against them, and of using your considerable influence to intimidate, threaten, marginalize and destroy them and their voices. But you don’t pick up dirty bricks from the street and throw them; no time to take the suit to the cleaners while so busy writing scurrilous nonsense.

THREE: Mr. Rich winds into his boilerplate outrage the whining complaint that Republicans are using wicked metaphors, with words like “reload,” “target”, and so forth. This is laughable. The Presidential election is figured as a “campaign,” and we have “czars” of various sorts appointed by both Dem and Rep administrations. We have wars on poverty as well as on terror and drugs. We “target” things all the time — markets, voters, demographic groups within markets, audiences, listeners, opposing teams and their leading players, and yes, political opponents. GET REAL! Our language, especially our political language is full of such metaphors; while there may be a time and place for examining the impact of metaphor on political speech, this is surely not the way such an inquiry would be conducted. This is the way a smear campaign is conducted, however. (I’ve used “campaign” [a military metaphor] three, now four times in the last two paragraphs; perhaps I should be institutionalized for my rage?)

FOUR:  Mr. Rich suggests that the only comparison to this turbulent time is 1964, during the passage of the Civil Rights Act. He is partly right in pointing out that extreme rhetoric comes into play in politics; especially over a highly contentious issue. But he fails to notice that liberals are equally guilty. Remember how Ronald Reagan was going to lead us into nuclear Armageddon? And how he was as dumb as a monkey? And Clinton’s sexcapades announced the end times, and G.W. Bush’s stupidity embarrassed us before the world? Rhetoric is by its nature heated. Both Dems and Reps could use a big dose of settle down, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon. It’s too bad the right is raining on the Dems victory lap here, but that’s politics. Grow up. And quit calling your opponents Nazis, for goodness sake. That’s rather harsh and extreme rhetoric, don’t you think? In addition, Mr., Rich is wrong to compare this weeks’ several incidents to the battles over Civil Rights. So far, at least, I have seen no evidence of mass protest, violence, demonstrations, mass arrests, lynchings, widespread vandalism, etc., nor the activity of any organized groups like the KKK (the Tea Part is not that) or the activity (or refusals to act) of state police forces, or governors.

FIVE:  Mr. Rich is willing to play fast and loose with numbers to inflict what damage he can on Republicans and the right. Quoth he: “And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.” AHEM. Even if the numbers are true and accurate, 74% of Tea Partyers self-identifying as Republican (or Rep-leaning indy) is not the same as 74% of Republicans self-identifying as Tea Partyers. I suspect Rich hopes we make the slip of drawing this illegitimate conclusion; if not, it would seem possible, maybe even likely, that the Tea Party is a fringe group; Rich wants us to see the “74%” and get just as flipped out as he is. On the other hand, it would be really interesting if that many Republicans were that fired up about trying to return to the noble tradition of limited government. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening either. And I’m not sure the tri-horned brigade is really what will get us back; didn’t they make their big start in the state of “can’t get there from here”?

But would Democrats and liberals please stop calling Republicans Nazis? It does no one any credit. And Republicans could scale back on the “S-” word, while we’re at it. Or we could just keep savaging each other in this orgy of verbal violence, and watch with shameful delight as our politics descends further and further to the level of reality TV.

Incivility Watch: Republicans As Nazis, Part: ‘n’

Note especially the last paragraphs of this story, on “Wingnuts” in the WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704094104575143713101937570.html

Consider these facts, reported by the Washington Post:

The pitched battle over health care has unleashed a rash of vandalism and attacks directed at politicians, with at least 10 House Democrats reporting death threats or incidents of harassment or vandalism at their district offices over the past week.Here is the reaction of blogger Josh Marshall:

I’m not sure it’s hyperbole any more to say that we’ve now got a small scale domestic terror campaign going on against members of Congress who voted for Health Care Reform.Marshall is a very partisan Democrat, but he is careful to hedge his words (“I’m not sure . . . small scale”), implicitly acknowledging that what he is saying is inflammatory and speculative. Here, by contrast, is Avlon, in The Daily Beast:

The parallels, intentional or not, to the Nazis’ heinous 1938 kristallnacht, or “Night of Broken Glass,” so-named for the 7,000 storefront windows that were smashed, are hard to ignore.This Avlon article has been edited since it was posted yesterday. Originally the very first sentence read: “In a disturbing parallel to the Nazi’s [sic] kristallnacht, windows are shattering in Democratic offices nationwide.” Kristallnacht was a nationwide pogrom carried out under the direction of a totalitarian state. It is in no way “parallel” to small-scale acts of vandalism spurred by impotent rage against the party in power.

Political crime is intolerable. Avlon’s comparison is obscene. Unlike the hapless 20% of Harris poll participants who answered “true” when asked if Obama “is doing many of the things that Hitler did,” Avlon issued this comparison unbidden. Delve too deeply into the world of wingnuts, it seems, and you risk turning into one yourself.

It seems the left and right deserve each other. Go get ’em Liz Cheney!

Health Bill’s Hidden Agenda?

My friend sent me a link to a NYT article, and wrote:  “I think this is interesting.  Maybe all the heated rhetoric about healthcare was informed by something deeper–something you despise and something I welcome.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/business/24leonhardt.html?src=me&ref=general

To which I reply:

I think it IS interesting that relatively little was said about this (attacking inequality) as a rationale during the “debate” on health care. Transparency?  I first saw the NYT article referenced here (first section, on “Obamaklatura”):

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703312504575141693493993692.html

I don’t really “despise” equality, so much as regard it as a second order good, and one that cannot really be created by governmental coercion, at least not without severe consequences that are far worse than the putative and contingent ills introduced by too great inequality of wealth.  Inequality might be bad; government coercion is bad.

One of many reasons to resist government’s attempts to force “desirable” social outcomes is that it always empowers the political class further. “Let us do this, let us do that . . . but we’ll need all ‘necessary and proper’ powers to bring it about.” Outside of government, every “program” creates winners and losers; sometimes this is by design on the part of lobbyists and influence peddlers, sometimes it is helter skelter.

If the “wealthy” pay more and more taxes, why on earth wouldn’t they seek and expect differential political treatment in the form of loopholes, protection for their industries, access, superior representation in court, etc., etc.  All the “inequalities” that count, in other words. The wealthy are paying for government, they deserve a bigger share in it. It is a “property qualification” by other means.

And don’t be fooled by the Democratic rhetoric about “Republican/Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy”; it’s bull.

http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html

http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/15/pf/taxes/who_pays_most_least/index.htm

http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/incometaxandtheirs/a/whopaysmost.htm

http://www.american.com/archive/2007/november-december-magazine-contents/guess-who-really-pays-the-taxes

So we are moving toward a society in which fewer and fewer pay for more and more. Never have so many owed so much to so few. Except the wealthy aren’t being lauded as heroes, are they?

I must affirm. . .

. . . what others have said about a disgusting excess.  Liz, Liz!  Enough of “you are either for us or against us,” and “if you’re not with us, you’re part of the problem,” and questioning the patriotism and integrity of fellow Americans.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/04/liz-cheneys-attack-on-al_n_485329.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/08/liz-cheney-al-qaeda-7-ad_n_490608.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/04/liz-cheneys-attack-on-al_n_485329.html

http://www.aolnews.com/politics/article/conservatives-condemn-liz-cheneys-al-qaida-7-attack-ad/19386210

http://blog.nj.com/njv_guest_blog/2010/03/liz_cheneys_attack_on_lawyers.html

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2010/03/05/liz-cheney-goes-after-justice-lawyers.aspx

To which I might only add the following, about the misleading and dangerous analogy of war in politics:

In his essay, “The Universities,” Michael Oakeshott criticizes Sir Walter Moberly for adopting war as his image of educational reform (as we have done for our “attacks” poverty, crime, drugs, inequality, and countless other things). According to Moberly, “The analogy of wartime experience suggests that to get the most out of a university, it must be enrolled in the service of some cause beyond itself.” Oakeshott’s response is worth quoting at length:

We cannot too often remind ourselves that in politics, and in every other activity, war offers the least fruitful opportunity for profitable change: war is a blind guide to civilized life. In war all that is most superficial in our tradition is encouraged merely because it is useful, even necessary, for victory. Inter arma silent leges is an old adage which can support a wide interpretation; not only are the laws suspended, but the whole balance of the society is disturbed. There are many who have no other idea of social progress than the extrapolation of the character of a society in time of war — the artificial unity, the narrow overmastering purpose, the devotion to a single cause and the subordination of everything to it — all this seems to them inspiring: but the direction of their admiration reveals the emptiness of their souls. Not only is a society just emerged from a shattering war in the worst possible position for making profitable reforms in the universities, but the inspiration of war itself is the most misleading of all inspirations.

“The direction of their admiration reveals the emptiness of their souls.” Indeed.

We are said to be at war now for nine years against a phenomenon, terrorism, that is at least as old as the disintegration of the colonial order — guerillas, terrorists, and ‘freedom fighters’ — and possibly as old as war and politics. Maybe being “at war” with an abstract noun isn’t really possible, and fighting asymetric battles against subversives, insurgents, and rebels is simply a fact of life in modern states, especially those that extend their concerns and activities around the globe as a de facto empire. Maybe we can only take reasonable and on-going measures to protect the country, which measures should be the focus of robust and intense debate.

There are some good points here: [‘There is no war on terror in the UK, says DPP’, January 24, 2007: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article1295756.ece] especially on affirming the vain self-image of the terrorists, and the need to defend our values through our practices.

Why Are Liberals Liberal?

In this article, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, purported philosopher Jere P. Surber shares his views on why liberal arts professors are liberal. It is possible it was meant as satire, but if so, it is poor stuff. The piece reeks with arrogance, shoddy argument, and non-sequitor, which are oftener the result of a lack of irony rather than misguided satiric intent.

See: http://chronicle.com/article/Well-Naturally-Were-Liberal/63870/

——————-

“First, … virtually all instructors in the liberal arts are aware of the disparity between their level of education and their financial situation….You don’t have to be a militant Marxist to recognize that people’s political persuasions will align pretty well with their economic interests. It’s real simple: Those who have less and want more will tend to support social changes that promise to accomplish that; those who are already economic winners will want to conserve their status.”

Ah, yes, the poor are the revolutionaries. Except they aren’t. They tend to be, to the chagrin of many liberal profs, rather conservative, even when they vote Democratic. They suffer false consciousness, you see. Something more subtle might be hoped for, like what Madison lays out in Federalist 10 on the different sorts of economic activity and the different legislative interests attached to them, but no, we get instead the platitude that those who are not well paid will “support change.”  But the necessary changes might occur entirely within a capitalist system — as it might for many other laborers. And what does “change” mean, anyway? I suppose the poor liberal arts professors are all delighted with the recent “change” to campaign finance laws in the recent Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. FEC. No? Ah well.

“A second reason that liberal-arts professors tend to be politically liberal is that they have very likely studied large-scale historical processes and complex cultural dynamics. Conservatives, who tend to evoke the need to preserve traditional connections with the past, have nonetheless contributed least to any detailed or thoughtful study of history….Consider the Greek struggle against Persian tyranny, the struggles to preserve the Roman Republic, the peasant uprisings of the Middle Ages, the American and French revolutions, the abolitionist and civil-rights movements, and now movements on behalf of other groups—women, Latinos, homosexuals, and the physically impaired. As President Obama recently put it, any open-minded review of history (and perhaps especially American history) teaches at least one clear lesson: There is a “right side of history,” Obama said —the side of those who would overcome prejudice, question unearned privilege, and resist oppression in favor of a more just condition.”

This is just too rich. “Large scale” “complex” “processes” and “dynamics.”  Well, I guess anyone who can grasp such things MUST be liberal, right? After deriding conservatives’ lack of interest in history — a simply bizarre claim — Suber goes on to make the most foolish of Whig interpretations. There is a “right side of history,” he says, on the strength of the noted liberal historian, Barack Obama. The Greeks, who believed in holding slaves, along with the Romans, who celebrated their founding in the kidnap and rape of the women of a neighboring tribe, are the moral equivalents of medieval peasants and advocates for the disabled.  I wonder how the disabled would have found life amid the peasants of 13th century France? I guess the detail of history just eluded me, since I thought that there was no such common thread binding together history’s contingencies, and the conflicts and values of one group did not, in fact, tie in seamlessly (if at all) with those of much later groups.

“Finally, most liberal-arts professors come from a background of liberal education, which emphasizes the role that values play in human affairs…. More important, they’ve learned that values inevitably conflict, and they have developed the skills to interpret these clashes with nuance, envisioning various forms of resolution or mediation.”

You have to believe in a definite purpose to history to believe that resolution or mediation will always go your way, and not against you. To value “resolution” is just as empty as valuing “change.” The “resolution” to our economic and geo-political difficulties around 1980 offered by the policies of Ronald Reagan were certainly different from a second Carter term might have offered. And “nuance” covers a multitude of sins, doesn’t it?

This pitifully stupid, condescending, and contempt-ridden article boils down to the basic, often repeated claim that liberals are liberal because they think, whereas conservatives are unthinking. A great many “neurological” studies have been offered in recent years to suggest the same thing, with  the imprimatur of science.

Let us consider the issue. Does “thinking” necessarily lead one to change? I do not think so. I might be invited by a friend to reconsider the route I take when I drive to work. I might earnestly and sincerely take it up, studying maps, consulting with whomever I think has expertise. At the end of my study, which may even include experiments in driving, I might very well decide that the old pattern was better, and stick with it.  I see no reason why the same might not be true in large-scale political matters.

But suppose I do decide to change, after all my hard thinking. Will the “thinking” person’s change always be in the direction of “liberal” policies? Well, I see no reason to think so. From health care to energy policy, to corporate taxation, there is room for open debate and room for good and decent people to disagree — but not in the mind of Surber, who simply thinks anyone who doesn’t hold the “correct” views is some kind of lunatic or evildoer; probably one who studies things under the earth and in the sky, like that ancient Tory, Socrates.

What is a liberal direction, anyway? What is it that liberals support? Surber’s lack of subtlety is alarming, especially in one who claims to be a philosopher. He essentially identifies liberals with resentful social theorists in love with Obama. Is this what philosophy has come to? Anthropology? Do you have a position on whether the “Hobbit” (Homo floresiensis) is a distinct species or not? This must be squared with your vote in the most recent presidential election. This is the stupidest kind of dogmatism.

Instead of showing how thoughtful liberals are, Surber demonstrates liberal self-satisfaction to an extreme degree, contemning his fellow citizens, disdaining debate, spewing platitudes, and failing to examine even the most basic assumptions behind his own string of words — for it would be too generous to call this an argument. If Suber had by chance ever taken it into his head to read Hegel, he might have discovered that there is meaning and significance everywhere, even in all those things that eventually disclose themselves as deficient. Even the negative has a positive moment, and without it, there would be no dialectic at all. So maybe the “Party of No!” could be forgiven, or at least put into context, in the name of sublimation.

Another View on Education

The aim of liberal education at 20 is to save a person from being both bored and boring at 40.

Education for Jobs, Misery and Freedom

Our usual success-driven conception of education and its benefits may lead one to wonder why, in a time of economic crisis, one should pay for an education.  And this is often answered by saying an education will help get you a job.

Shouldn’t we at least ask — what if it doesn’t lead to a job?  Is it still “worth it“?  Only, I answer, if it has prepared us for misery — for a lack of success, or even, on a deeper analysis, for success too.

To take the easy case first: failures.  No job, no fancy car, and so forth.  Huge medical bills, sick children, hurricanes, refusal of insurance coverages.  Education as commonly understood is supposed to help Job from becoming Job — the educated person will have the ‘skills‘ necessary to build a career and establish himself in his chosen profession; in short, to be useful for other people’s projects, and perhaps also his own.  Are the skills we purportedly learn in college (university) really any match for hurricanes, disease, pain — to say nothing of the ordinary ravages of time?  Are we really supposed to ‘skill’ and buy our way out of everything that might afflict us?

If double-book accounting and C++ programming and even Hillel’s 7 Rules of Interpretation all fail to succor us in our misery, what kind of education will do so? Only one that takes up the substance of a human life; that confronts the young mind with the problems of the old body; that prepares a soul to thrive when circumstances are most adverse to all our expectations of success; that teaches the true value of things; that teaches us how, and what and in what manner to ‘expect’, how to govern expectations by internal discipline and acute inquiry into the external world, social, natural, and spiritual — in short, an education for freedom and for happiness, an education that teaches reconciliation to our human fate — which is not death so much as disappointment — a reconciliation to our littleness, and to our greatness, to contingency, and to the peculiar burdens of our nature as talking thinking creatures.

Now.  Suppose we succeed, just as we had long hoped to do.  Is it possible that our education has equipped us for so great a disaster? so grave a peril as . . . worldliness?

Michael Moore’s Silly Christianity

A friend sent me a copy of a message from the king of biased reportage, Michael Moore.  See this link:  http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikes-letter/those-you-your-way-church-morning-note-michael-moore.

Moore’s most basic point — that we should heed the ethical callings of our religion — is completely unobjectionable, except perhaps in its suggestion that Christians and others are totally lacking in introspection and do not already ask these kinds of questions every day, both of themselves and others.  He mentions being a Catholic and going off to Mass, but apparently has not listened to a sermon in a very long time indeed.

The more specific and political aspect of his message is absurd.  That one can quote selectively from the Bible to develop a political program and an ethical system is just silly.  He has taken a page from the playbook of the worst sort of evangelical ravers and ranters.  He’ll be giving us “proof texts” next.  He’s joined the WWJD (What Would Jesus DO?) crowd:  Would Jesus have traded in credit default swaps?  Well superficially, “no,” since they were not known in his time.  But then again, if he had been in business and desired to protect himself, his family, his company, and his clients against certain forms of risk, maybe he would have done something like take an insurance contract against the risk of loan default.  Moore crudely confuses the sophistication of a trade with its moral mendacity.  These are not identical, even if sophistication does sometimes hide fault or depravity.

Moore cites the miracle of the loaves as evidence of Jesus’ incipient socialism, but it might just as well be a parable of capitalism: By the application of human energies (fallen humans, driven by self-interests) you can produce plenty, and more than plenty; you can turn a wheat field into 1000’s of loaves, readily and cheaply available in every store in the land.  Anyway, the world’s actual socialists haven’t come up with a better answer than open markets and private incentives.   By Moore’s reckoning, if Jesus said it would be hard for a rich man to get into heaven, we should all be redistributionists.  And calling capitalism “evil” because there are large income disparities is nonsense.  There were income and power disparities under communist rule in the USSR and elsewhere.  There have been income and power disparities in every land which has known Christianity, to say nothing of Islam, Buddhism, and so on.  To call this system “evil” just shows an astounding moral short-sightedness and arrogance.  This is to say nothing of the fact that most of what Moore is objecting to isn’t “Christian” at all, but political, and both parties, not just Republican’s have had a large hand in making the financial landscape what it is.  Is his a call to reject all worldly aspiration?  Perhaps.  Such calls have a long, illustrious history, but this is tantamount to advocating a religious takeover of the political realm, and Moore’s self-professed “private” religiosity hardly seems to fit with such a  program.  A Great Reawakening with Michael Moore as inspiration?  Puh-Leaze.

As a Catholic Moore ought at least to be aware (what some evangelical independents who, lacking any institutionalized theology and lacking any long history of intellectual development might be excused for not being aware of) that there are long-standing, serious, and subtle arguments about just how far, for whom, when, under what circumstances, our obligations to be “our brother’s keeper” and follow Jesus’ example might extend.  For example, not everyone is called to the clergy.  If we followed Moore’s simplistic rendition of the Gospel, we would all fall back on carpentry, ride donkeys, and martyr ourselves at 33, unmarried.  Women would have a very hard time being Christians at all, since Jesus wasn’t one.  And if Christianity had been so simplistic, it would have extinguished itself after the first generations.

Nevermind the long sequence of historical change which is most famously analyzed by Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; never mind the interpretive possibilities of Islam, as evidenced in Leonard Binder’s classic, Islamic Liberalism.  No, just cut and paste a few striking clauses from the Bible, and SELL THE MOVIE.  By all means sell the movie.  Sell the movie, Michael Moore, you’ve got payments due.

Since Moore makes this an ad hominem challenge to Christians to “fess up” to their “evil” ways, one can’t help but implore Moore for fair disclosure.  What is his net worth?  What percentage of his movie’s profits does he keep?  What percentage does he donate and to which charities?  I’ll be more impressed by Moore when I see evidence of less vain-glory and more Christianity — of a non-silly kind.

The IOC’s “astonishing snub” to Obama?

I’m not sure which is worse, the heretofore best daily newspaper in the world publishing this sentence:  “The IOC also delivered an astonishing snub to US president Barack Obama by eliminating Chicago in the first round of voting” (FT Weekend, Sat. Oct 3/Sunday Oct 4,2009, page 1); OR, the ridiculous spectacle of the US President making a million dollar (maybe ten million: http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDFmMzExYjlmZGFjMmU0NWNhOTkzODdhYzY4MzJlMTc=)  last minute trip to pitch his home town to the IOC.  In the end, I’m willing to cut the FT more slack than the President.  They are journalists; his is a “no slack” job.

In Obama’s statement upon losing, he drew upon a sports analogy.  It may well sum up his presidency in the long run:  “You can play a great game and still not win.”  He will prove to be an excellent game player — skilled at those aspects of politics that are most game-like — campaigning, delivering “key speeches;” having a staged beer with the guys; but less skilled at winning the game, “getting ‘er done” as they say.  He has recently been advised (in the pages of the FT no less), to be like LBJ.  He keeps giving indications that he will be like Jimmy Carter.  Initially charming, then struggling, then grating.  He might even give a sweater speech someday.

But aside from how this wasted and wasteful trip to Denmark might impact Obama’s presidency, or how it might reflect his political style, there is the question at the heart of his analogy:  his assertion that he “played a good game.”  Well, did he?  I think not.

To start, the President is at the center of a nasty tangle of domestic and foreign problems.  No US President has ever personally  canvassed the IOC.  His trip appears to have been hatched last minute; maybe in response to news Chicago was lagging, or had not impressed the IOC, maybe as a distraction, maybe to do favors for friends in Chicago?  God only knows.  No one seems able to explain it.  The worst part is the apparent self-belief of Obama that he would show up, give what was essentially a campaign speech, and win.  At least some parts of the American media seems to have thought his gesture would go far:  Consider these CNN commentators’ responses, as if something momentous has happened:

CNN Commentator (did not get his name from the clip):  “Chicago is OUT?  Chicago is OUT? . . .  Madrid . . . is still IN?  Tokyo . . . is still IN? . . .  Wait a minute.  Chicago is OUT? . . . I want to hear the sound in the room . . . [a different voice] An unconceivable development that we have just witnessed here . . . . No one expected this developement. . . .”  on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzzvvvRaZrg&feature=related.

And so forth.  Yes, unbelievable to think that the IOC actually voted.  It was a minor bureaucratic procedure, one repeated many times in the past, and sure to be repeated many times in the future.  A city was eliminated, a city that managed to gather only 18 votes, the lowest of any city in the competition.  So how surprised should we be, really?  Some sports analogies suggest themselves (since the President favors these):  A runner with the slowest time, a team with the fewest points, a golfer with the most strokes,. . . well, they all lose, right?  So what is “astonishing” about this, and why is it a “snub”?

Judge for yourself if this mixture of schlock and calculation would have or should have won anything:  the first lady emoting about life in Chicago and her father — nice stuff, but more fit for a political dinner, a fundraiser, or maybe an acceptance speech.  Then the President follows with more of the same — rhetoric that would please certain American audiences; rhetoric that sounded good one year ago in the heat of a political campaign, but rhetoric that now, on the world stage, for an Olympic bid by an American city, just seems shallow and self-serving.

Michelle Obama’s speech, on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi098MnUM2k

President Obama’s Speech, on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faXjRIVfzyk&feature=related

President Obama’s statement after losing the bid, on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14Wy4QiCZBk&feature=related

Note that in his statement, he devotes roughly half the time to certain gloomy economic numbers that came out that day.  Whoever allowed THAT decision to combine statements should be fired immediately.  How incongruous and bizarre for the president to have to speak about the ignominious end to his impulsive adventure, and then reinforce the silly recklessness of the whole exercise by reminding the country of one of the prime reasons he shouldn’t have made the trip in the first place.  He’s got important things to do back home.  Even the appearance of taking them seriously would help him.  Maybe a phone call to Copenhagen with low-level press coverage of it would have been enough.  Or maybe the Chicago delegation could have been left to do its work on its own, for better or worse, without Presidential intervention.

By the way:  Congratulations Brazil!

Test iPhone app

Well done if this actually shows up.