Occasionally, I get nostalgic for the good old days, when the biens-pensants would look at, say, the Eliot Spitzer story through the prism of Moliere rather than Nathaniel Hawthorne. But this is America, and in times of social and political and geopolitical turmoil, we tend to fall back on a reliable and dusty old ethos, the (new) New Puritanism.
At least some people haven’t lost their sense of humor, though. Here’s Mickey Kaus on Obama:
If it offends you I condemn it!
“All of the statements that have been the subject of controversy are ones that I vehemently condemn.” –Barack Obama
This seems to be the General Rule of Obama–if it’s going to damage him, he condemns it! And rejects and denounces. Vehemently!
And here’s Michael Kinsley:
Let me be absolutely clear where I stand on all of this. There is no room for sexism in a modern political campaign. There is no room for racism either. There is no room for remarks that could reasonably be interpreted as sexist or racist. In fact, given the history of sexism and racism in this country, there is no room for remarks that could even be willfully misinterpreted as sexist or racist. There is no room for rudeness, or for the appearance of rudeness. There is no room for comments of any sort by anybody a candidate might have met under any circumstances in the course of his or her life, unless they have been vetted for sexism, racism, rudeness, or the appearance of these qualities by the campaign’s senior staff. There is no room for unfair accusations that the opposition candidate has engaged in sexist, racist or rude remarks, or that anyone he or she has ever met has engaged in such remarks. And of course there is also no room for perfectly fair accusations of this sort, which can be misinterpreted, and usually are.
Charles Johnson of LGF documents the disappearance of Rev. Wright from Obama’s website:
As others have noted, however, it isn’t Wright’s support of Obama that’s the problem.
What those of us who like Obama want to know is how he reconciles his personal message of unity and post-racial harmony with the message of hatred that emanates from his bile-spewing spiritual mentor.
We may need a novelist like Richard Russo to try to explain it. Here, he takes a stab at trying to understand the enigma that is Eliot Spitzer. He starts by clarifying the real obstacle, however: our human need to believe in heroes [e.a.].
Back when I was teaching fiction writing, I used to pitch my students, especially the beginners, on complexity. They seemed to think that readers would be attracted to their characters’ virtue and would recognize shared humanity in their strength and courage; I argued — perversely they thought — that unrelenting virtue is not just unrealistic but uninteresting. …
For most people, mine is a losing argument, and one night recently, as I stayed up watching television coverage of Eliot Spitzer’s disgrace, I found myself losing it all over again as the media turned a complex drama into a simple story line: Now that he’s no longer their unsullied white knight, Spitzer must be a complete hypocrite.
Russo gets at the issue: the media’s storytelling reduces everything and everyone to a binary choice—Spitzer is either All Evil or All Saint, take your pick.
A similar dynamic is at play in the Reverend Wright scandal. Obama’s problem is that there isn’t a simple story line that can explain his 20-year affiliation with Wright and allow Obama at the same time to hold on to his own pacific, post-racial Magic Negro Healer image.
In order to keep believing that Obama is the Magic Negro, you’ve got to write off Wright as an inconvenient uncle. If you can’t bring yourself to believe that the bile-spewer is a harmless old fool, then you are left doubting the sincerity of the Magic Negro. He begins to look like just another cynical politician who makes alliances that will advance his career.
Either way, Obama loses (and we voters lose our illusions). And the blame can be laid directly at the feet of his “narrator,” David Axelrod, who manufactured a PRopagandaTM image of Saint Barack Obama that no human being can live up to and thus put him inside a box from which he cannot escape.
Axelrod himself saw the dangers early in the campaign, as Ben Wallace-Wells noted in April 2007:
David Geffen gave an interview to Maureen Dowd, the Times columnist, in which he said that the Clintons lie “with such ease, it’s troubling.” The Clinton campaign immediately called on Obama’s team to repudiate the comments, but they refused, and afterward the two camps volleyed barbs back and forth for a day or so. It was one of those early campaign spats that get endlessly analyzed for who won some minor tactical advantage, but to Axelrod it was a mistake, a self-induced undermining of the transcendent character he spent so long helping to cultivate. The Geffen episode was “a good object lesson about how easy it is to slide into the morass,” he told me. “I’m mindful of the responsibility not to lose our way, not to disappoint, …”
Well, we’re at the point now where the PR-concocted images and ugly reality keep colliding. And Obama is bound to keep “disappointing” us (or those of us who believed that Obama really is the “transcendent character” that David Axelrod created for our benefit from the exotic strands of Obama’s life).
From now on, Obama and his advocates and surrogates will have to work really hard (though they’ll have the help of a favorably disposed media) to get us to keep our minds off the things that make us doubt him.
And we’ve got months and months and months and months to go.
Andrew Sullivan says that unless you buy into Obama’s absurd saccharine glossing over of his spiritual mentor’s proud racial animus and defiant anti-Americanism, you are betraying The Dream.
You also have a choice: to believe that this is a sincere message given by a sincere person; or a phony message delivered by a fraud.
That’s funny, because I see another choice. I believe this is a sincere message given by a reptilian politician, who use political correctness to deflect all uncomfortable questions about himself.
But that makes me a cynic and thus another target of Andrew Sullivan’s judgment:
Reveling in cynicism and partnisanship [sic] is the act of those who truly do not love America.
I see. Now I have to be part of the drooling-idiot band of Obama worshippers in order to prove that I truly love America.
I wonder what other loyalty tests will be in store us if we’re unlucky enough to have to live under an Obama administration
