"Shushing the Baby Boomers."

I linked to this January 2007 NYT piece in the previous post, and I've linked to it before — here and here. Is Obama a Baby Boomer or not? If Obama the solution to the Baby Boomer problem or part of the problem? Obama's ambiguous generationality. Much to say there.

But I've just got to make a separate post to call attention to the historical artifact that is Robert Grossman's illustration depicting Barack Obama leaping over 6 little figures who represent the Baby Boomers:

"Obama Polishes His 'Regular Guy' Image With Beer."

NPR chooses a good Saturday to polish Obama's image with a puff piece about the President and beer. 

Polls show President Obama has been winning that likeability contest. And he's been raising a lot of frosty mugs on the campaign trail, hoping to press his advantage over the teetotaling Mitt Romney.

The strategy could come to a head in the swing state of Colorado.

As President Obama was holding an outdoor campaign rally in Golden this past week, the signature smell of beer brewing washed over the audience, a reminder of the nearby Coors brewery.

Did anything else happen this past week? Anything relevant to the election? I mean, more relevant that that Obama drinks beer and the White House has its own homebrew with "a secret recipe [that] was just declassified with a video on the White House website."

The White House beer is flavored with honey from the first lady's beehive....

Speaking of teetotaling Mitt Romney, the beehive is an important symbol to Mormons (and Masons):

Freemasons also used the bee and beehive as symbols of cooperative work, and the images are found in early American art and literature. "Many of the founding fathers were Masons, and America had become the new "promised land" of opportunity," says Staker. Many early Mormons were also Masons, including Joseph Smith.

The Book of Ether in the Book of Mormon tells the story of the Jaredites, a tribe that lived at the time of the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament. According to the Book of Mormon, the Jaredites made a miraculous 344-day voyage across the ocean to North America. They brought with them the "deseret" which means "honey bee" in the language of the Book of Mormon.

When Brigham Young and the Latter-day Saints arrived in Salt Lake Valley in July of 1847, Young chose the name "Deseret" for their new home, and the beehive as its emblem, symbolizing the kind of cooperative work that would be required to make the desert bloom....

Mark Twain commented on the Utah beehive symbol in his book on the 1860s American West, Roughing It, "The Mormon crest was easy. And it was simple, unostentatious and it fitted like a glove. It was a representation of a Golden Beehive, with all the bees at work."

If Obama talked like this in 2008...

... how can it be awesomely awful for candidate Romney to articulate his criticism of the present administration?

Video via Ed Morrissey ("I think that policy in Iraq and Afghanistan were perfectly acceptable topics for political debate at that time"), via Instapundit (FLASHBACK: Major-Party Nominee Uses War Deaths To Score Political Points. Yeah, but he was a Democrat, and black, and hence above media criticism.").

Can we get some consistency from the big-media pundits? Shouldn't the NYT, for example, have noticed by now that new media is dogging them, and we have YouTube? I mean, they've got to feel how it's screwed up the economics of newspapers. But to ignore the way they undermine their credibility — don't they see how damaging it is to the political power they clearly want? That is, if they want that power, they need to make sure it is not clear.

The more MSM lets their lust show, the less likely we highly selective swing voters will spend any time with you. You have to insinuate yourself into our minds, and you've triggered our resistance. We're turned off. Yes, the base loves what you're saying, but they didn't need to be seduced.

"Ludicrous, hysterical, brilliant – the top Republican campaign adverts."

Ana Marie Cox assembles and critiques some fabulous material. I don't have time to watch them all just yet, but I did watch Rick Santorum's "Obamaville," and all I can say is I laughed, I cried...



Cox says, about that one: "Hey, people really liked The Ring! Also, the claims are so over-the-top that Obama partisans will be amused as conservatives take slash-fiction pleasure in the visualisation of their most fevered dreams.... The great thing about speculation is that it cannot be fact-checked."

Wow. Ads are getting so good, it's kind of evil. Hold onto your brains, people. It's going to be a crazy year.

Obama is "not spending a whole bunch of time planning for contingencies."

Shouldn't a President plan for contingencies? Obama was talking about the contingency of the Supreme Court possibly striking down some or all of the Affordable Care Act, and his asserted reason for not troubling with contingencies is purported confidence that the Supreme Court will not strike down the act.

I simply don't believe that they aren't planning for contingencies. I believe he doesn't want to talk about contingencies, and I suspect the main contingency is how to present the loss in the Supreme Court to the American people for the purposes of the reelection campaign.

By the way, that quote came in response to a question after Obama angrily scolded Republicans for their budget plan. In these planned remarks, Obama called the Republican's budget "a Trojan horse disguised as deficit reduction plans":

... it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who's willing to work for it — a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward, from the heart of the middle class – and by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that is built to last.

There's video at that second link. He sounds genuinely angry and frustrated. If you're familiar with the history of constitutional law, you will probably connect that reference to "social Darwinism" to the so-called Lochner Era, when the Supreme Court looked more deeply into the reasonableness of legislation. In the case that gives the era its name, Lochner v. New York, Justice Holmes dissented and said, enigmatically, "The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics," which is generally taken to refer to Social Darwinism.

See the resonance with the argument in favor of the Affordable Care Act? Obama has been asserting that if the Supreme Court strikes down the Act, it will be a throwback to the Lochner Era. I think we're seeing his big campaign theme: conservatives — on and off the Court — are the tool of the wealthy in their oppression of the less-than-wealthy.

So let me rethink the disbelief I expressed in the second paragraph of this post, because a different phrase in the post-title quote jumps out at me now: a whole bunch of time. He didn't say he wasn't planning for contingencies. He said he was not spending a whole bunch of time planning for contingencies.

Suddenly, I believe that. It doesn't take a whole bunch of time to slot that Supreme Court loss into the class warfare template. It can be done in the blink of an eye... the jerk of a knee.

Andrew Breitbart, posthumously, vets Barack Obama.

Part I:

In 1998, a small Chicago theater company staged a play titled The Love Song of Saul Alinsky, dedicated to the life and politics of the radical community organizer whose methods Obama had practiced and taught on Chicago’s South Side.

Obama was not only in the audience, but also took the stage after one performance, participating in a panel discussion that was advertised in the poster for the play....

This is who Barack Obama was. This was before Barack Obama ran for Congress in 2000...

This was also the period just before Barack Obama served with Bill Ayers, from 1999 through 2002 on the board of the Woods Foundation. They gave capital to support the Midwest Academy, a leftist training institute steeped in the doctrines of — you guessed it! — Saul Alinsky, and whose alumni now dominate the Obama administration and its top political allies inside and out of Congress...

"They're trying to crucify this man...."

Delving into a presidential candidate's record and criticizing him vigorously is crucifixion?

How about the way we failed — back in 2008 — to delve into Obama's record and failed to criticize him?

Here's a clue: Get yourself perceived as The Messiah and the good people of the United States of America will refrain from crucifying you.

Coming to terms with The Newt.

I told you I went to a classical music concert last night. I'm not very good at listening to music, in the sense that I don't focus and notice all the details the right way or whatever real music connoisseurs do. I don't even respond emotionally most of the time. I do behave. I never cough. I don't get out my iPhone and read. If you were sitting next to me, you wouldn't notice that I'm a bad concertgoer, but I am.

So what I feel I have to do — and I know I should just stop it — is think about all sorts of things. For example, I contemplated various structures for tomorrow's first day of class in Federal Jurisdiction. Debussy was trying to tell me something about Spain, and I was thinking about something that happened "on a dark night" in Hughestown, Pennsylvania.

Inevitably, my thoughts drifted to Newt. Before going out on that dark night last night, I'd seen that he'd won the South Carolina primary. At intermission, I said to Meade: "I've come to terms with Newt." I didn't mean that I was prepared to vote for him. I still regard the idea of President Gingrich as bizarre. But I live in the moment. I embrace the now. It's fine the way things are. Newt has his role to play, and right now, I'm going to say it's a good one.

First, I especially adore the spectacular failure of The Attack of the Ex-Wife. ABC News somehow lured this uncomfortable little woman out of the shadows and into the spotlight. They interviewed her for God knows how long and extracted one seemingly lurid remark — her interpretation of what Newt said to her as a request for an "open marriage." The values-voters of The South were supposed to collapse in horror. He's unclean! But that's not the way they reacted. ABC didn't have that analyzed properly. I like this new culture of religious conservatism — if that's what it is — in which people who care about character don't recoil but reflect. They're not simpletons. They can get their mind around complexity. You can't just push their buttons. Or... at least... you can't push their buttons with big clumsy ABC fingers.

Second, it's good that the Tea Party and other sorts of conservative factions contribute to the political mix in America. Newt — along with Santorum — has established that the Establishment can't dictate who the candidate will be. Whoever ultimately becomes the candidate — and I assume it will be Mitt — he won't achieve his place through the nods of insiders bypassing the people who have imperatives of their own. It's strange that Gingrich embodies their wants, but that's the way this strange campaign has evolved, which leads me to....

Third, Gingrich has achieved his position through the sheer force of putting ideas into words, words that people heard. There's something quite beautiful about that, quite American. And it's beautiful without the man being beautiful. Back in 2008, many of us fell for Barack Obama, who — as Joe Biden put it so memorably was "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy... that's a storybook, man." Today, we question how articulate Obama really is and, with the distance of time, it's easy to see that the whole "storybook" gave us the impression that the speech was wonderful. That was an impressive effect in its time. But with Newt, there's no storybook. There's no newness, only Newtness, which isn't nice-looking or even clean. It's just words. Words! That's a storybook political treatise. A political treatise, man, and we're reading it. You'd think we'd be more influenced by the image of The Newt...



... but we're not. We're hearing the words, the speech, the ideas. I hear democracy maturing! Over The Newt! I think that's pretty cool.

There, now. There must be more that's going on. I'm still absorbing the Newtessence of it all. But that's all I'm going to say at the moment.

I read this out loud to proofread, and Meade said: "That's good. Just don't become a Newtist. In a Newtist colony."

Newsweek's "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" cover story and photo.

First, the photo. Why that photo? Some people think he looks awful — old, squinty, puffy — but I think it's an effort to evoke the old "HOPE" poster. Actually, it looks more like "hope" than the original Shepard Fairey image, which looks a little hunched-up and blank by comparison. The new image shows Obama, burdened and beleaguered, having sacrificed his youth for us, peering into the future... and yes, there is still hope.

Second, the article, by Andrew Sullivan. Based on the cover headline — "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" — I don't even want to read it. It just seems like red meat for Obama fans. And what a cliché! Republicans are stupid. That's what they always say. It's not just red meat, it's the same old red meat they always serve. You know, you have to be kind of dumb to be so easily pulled in by the assurance that you're with the smart people and those other people are stupid.

For the article under that headline to be any good, it would need to offer criticisms of Obama that are ostensibly smarter than the what the supposedly dumb critics are putting forth. A mere defense of Obama — you've got to be dumb not to appreciate him — would be so insipid.

UPDATE: I respond to Sullivan's complaining about my failure to read his article.

"This is populism so crude that it channels not Teddy Roosevelt so much as Hugo Chavez."

Krauthammer interprets Obama's Osawatomie speech:

But with high unemployment, economic stagnation and unprecedented deficits, what else can Obama say?

He can’t run on stewardship. He can’t run on policy. His signature initiatives — the stimulus, Obamacare and the failed cap-and-trade — will go unmentioned in his campaign ads. Indeed, they will be the stuff of Republican ads.

What’s left? Class resentment. Got a better idea?

A good question!

Anita Dunn, the White House communications director: "We’re going to treat [Fox News] the way we would treat an opponent."

"As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don't need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave."

Good lord, they really are "the biggest bunch of crybabies."

***

I'm giving this post my "Obama the Candidate" tag, which means that the man needs to step past his candidate mode and recognize that he is the President.

Obama on Don't Ask Don't Tell: "Do not doubt the direction we are heading and the destination we will reach."

Don't think that just because you elected the man who promised he'd give you want you want, you're going to get it right away. You'll get it some time. Your goal is out there in the future. We're heading toward it. We'll get there someday.

People who loved Obama The Candidate now have to face up to the fact that they elected Obama The Candidate, the Eternal Candidate. You might want him to wake up and know that now he is the President, but Obama The Candidate, Obama The Candidate... we thought that was so wonderful, and he would like you to please think it's still wonderful now?

I remember 40 years ago, when we had Richard Nixon for our President and he couldn't stop saying "I am the President." It was a ridiculous verbal quirk of his. Quite annoying. We knew he was the President. Did he have to keep rubbing it in? Did he think he could get more power by asserting that he was the guy with the most power? But we sure knew he knew he had the power.

Barack Obama is the opposite of Nixon. We feel like we need to keep saying to him: You are the President. He's not some random well-meaning good guy who's on our side. He has the power. He'd better be careful what he uses it for, but it's getting pretty annoying listening to him pretend that he's standing alongside of us observing the unfolding of history.