Those mischievous folks at Gawker say that Obama is more popular than Jesus and Angelina Jolie, and they’ve got the evidence:

Barack Obama is on the cover of Rolling Stone again! So soon after the last one. And just one week after he showed up on the front of publisher Jann Wenner’s UsWeekly!

Well, I have it on good (perhaps!) authority that “Nothing sells like celebrity,” and Barack Obama is the Messiah of celebrities and all other correct-thinking Americans.

Today—as opposed to 18 months ago, when Obama was launched as the Messiah—pretty much everybody who matters agrees that Barack Obama is (as I’ve been saying for a while) the coolest Machiavellian dude in the presidential race.

David Brooks launched the debate by positing a “Fast Eddie” Obama (as a peer of “Slick Willie” Clinton).

All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.

Ann Althouse digs deep into Obama’s dissembling and sees a positive sign. Note her response to one of her readers:

mporcius said…”Ann likes that Obama has betrayed a pledge about or changed his mind about campaign financing because Ann doesn’t want to give up on the war effort in Iraq. Ann wants to believe that Obama will change his mind about Iraq (or that he has been lying the whole time) and when Obama pulls something like this, Ann is encouraged.”

[Althouse answers:]That’s basically the answer. In fact, I think Obama may be a better bet than McCain on Iraq.

My number 1 concern about Obama is that he won’t check the Democratic Congress. But I’m not confident that McCain will either.

Look, you can’t trust either man completely. You can’t trust anyone running for President. Remember when George Bush assured us that he opposed nation building?

Jonah Goldberg pokes the biggest hole in Brooks’s and Althouse’s “theory.” He points out that being a great in-fighter and ruthless politician does not make you adept at handling foreign policy:

But it’s worth noting that being cutthroat and savvy in electoral politics doesn’t necessarily translate into being cutthroat and savvy, never mind wise, in power. George W. Bush — we’ve been told — was ruthless in getting elected. When in power, he discovered Putin’s soul. (Bush’s dad, who did what it took to crush Dukakis, is a better example of Brooks’ fast-eddie thesis). Ted Kennedy is arguably the most ruthless politician in America, that hardly means he’d be a great foreign policy president. In fact, I would argue that despite Kennedy’s toughminded political cynicism, he’s still naive about foreign policy. If Brooks is right about Obama’s campaign smarts, my guess is that Obama would still be naive about foreign policy. All his throw-’em-under-the-truck maneuvering is likely rationalized by his desire to “do good” once elected. And that do-goodery is not (necessarily) any less naive simply because he’s doing whatever bad he deems necessary to do good.

Andrew Sullivan, who for months on end tore down the Clinton’s for their “Rovian” tactics, is now a fan of these underhanded tactics when they’re carried out by his American idol Obama, and especially when Obama bests the Clintons by doing them.

As for me: I admire Obama’s political skills—and indeed I’ve advocated for Democrats to get just as tough and ruthless as the Republicans are wont to be. But I just don’t trust him, because I don’t know one thing that he stands for and stands firm on. And I’ve been saying the same thing, like a broken record, ever since I started writing about Obama—and his “narrator.”

Why does a candidate for president of the United States need a “narrator” unless he is spinning tales? Some months ago, I wrote:

[The novelist Richard] 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.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask a presidential candidate who is an unknown quantity to the American people (because he has no track record) to be clear about what, specifically, he stands for. Do you?

In my loose postmortem of campaign ‘08, I wrote that the MSM was a handmaiden to Obama’s “victory.”

Courtesy of the WaPo, here’s how it went down [e.a.]:

He did not win Indiana, but he got the next-best thing. A resounding victory in North Carolina dominated the news all night while the media waited for delayed returns to roll in from Gary, Ind. Obama’s victory speech was televised. Clinton waited, and waited. By the time her narrow Hoosier State win was declared, any momentum she gained had disappeared.

Time after time after time, Obama won on television, every single one of his humiliating defeats whitewashed by the media’s Obama Love (and Clinton hatred).

Michael Dukakis recently had some advice for the Dems about that. He wants a massive on-the-ground operation for the Democrats in the fall [e.a.]:

So I want to see [someone] in every single one of the 200,000 precincts in the United States. If we do that, we’re going to win those people over. If we think we’re going to win it on television, then we’re kidding ourselves.

Can you win an election just on television [with the complicity of the media]? That is just one of the many questions this campaign has raised. One day perhaps we’ll find out.

As Politico notes, Obama asked for it, and he got it—evidence for all to see that, like every other politician known to man (and woman), he is a liar:

[youtube][/youtube]

I mention this, and not Hillary Clinton’s repeated lies, because we all expect Clinton to lie. She’s a Clinton, after all, and is advised by the former Liar-in-Chief. Her lying isn’t newsworthy.

When Obama lies, however—and when he challenges his interlocutor to prove him wrong and the cyber elves do prove him wrong and the rest of us then spread it around for everyone to see—well, then Obama loses.

If his genius campaign manager David Axelrod hadn’t created a totally false image of Obama the Messiah, none of this would matter now. But because he launched a celebrity with a halo instead of a warts-and-all politician, his client will continue to have problems.

Or so I think. We shall see.

Just in time for the Episode Two of The Petraeus Show, which pre-game “reviewers” analyzed and critiqued well in advance of opening night (see the headlines on Memeorandum (at 9:30 a.m., just before showtime),
Gallup releases poll results on Americans’ attitudes toward the war in Iraq.

Upshot [e.a.]:

The 2008 presidential election will present voters with a clear choice on Iraq, with Republicans putting forth one of the Senate’s fiercest supporters of the war and Democrats choosing one of two leading Senate opponents, including Obama, who has made his opposition to the war from the beginning a major focus of his campaign. If McCain is elected, U.S. policy on Iraq will likely continue as it has under the Bush administration, with slower troop drawdowns tied to progress in establishing security in Iraq. If Obama or Clinton is elected, finding a quick end to the war will likely be the new president’s top priority.

In general, the public tends to side with the Democrats from the standpoint of favoring a timetable, but relatively few advocate a quick withdrawal. And most seem sympathetic to the Republican argument about the United States needing to establish a certain level of security before leaving Iraq.

Call me crazy, but it looks to me as if, all things considered, Americans would rather stick around and do the right thing by Iraqis than just get out.

It’s my opinion, based on an anthropological reading of the culture, that Americans would like to win in Iraq—as we like to win everywhere, because we Americans are a profoundly competitive people—but the conventional wisdom these days says otherwise.

See Glenn Greenwald, for example, in a post titled “Cokie Roberts speaks out on the war on behalf of the American people”:

Yesterday, Cokie Roberts — while expressing scorn for the “Responsible Plan for Withdrawal” advocated by 42 Democratic Congressional candidates and numerous military experts, and described by fellow panelist Katerina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation — said this:

VANDEN HEUVEL: It is not, but you know what, the responsible thing to do is withdraw. [you hear Cokie odiously chuckling at this point]

VANDEN HEUVEL: If we withdraw responsibly, the region would be more stable in the long term, America will be restored as a responsible global leader, and there are 42 challengers, you are absolutely right Cokie, who have a responsible plan to withdraw.

ROBERTS: Convincing the electorate of that I think would be very difficult, and I also agree that the notion that Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham you heard this morning putting forward, that Americans would prefer to win, is–

VANDEN HEUVEL: But what is winning? This war is unwinnable, there are no military solutions.

The video is also here. Roberts’ claim — that Americans agree with McCain, Graham and her that withdrawal is a bad idea and that they want to stay until we win — is just a lie. There’s no other way to put that.

Really? I don’t see any evidence to back up your claim, Mr. Greenwald. We may quibble about whether Americans want to “win” (since they’re repeatedly told by the MSM that we cannot win) or whether they just want to do the right thing, but the polling (for what it’s worth) suggests that relatively fewer people want to just get the hell out of there and call it “responsible.”

All things considered, people seem much more interested in the political theater surrounding The Petraeus Show. Here’s a gem from the NYT:

Testimony by General Will Test Candidates for President

All three senators running for president — John McCain of Arizona, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois — will have a chance to question General Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Baghdad. Each of the three is determined to use the spectacle to advantage, but all face political risks as well as opportunities in the back-to-back hearings before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. …

Mr. McCain, a Republican, has the logistical advantage in appearing before his two Democratic competitors. General Petraeus is set to testify first to the Armed Services Committee, beginning at 9:30 a.m., and Mr. McCain, the ranking Republican member, will be the second to speak, after the committee chairman, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Mrs. Clinton, a more junior member of the panel, will speak later. Mr. Obama, a junior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, which is holding its hearing in the afternoon, will be the 13th on that panel to speak, perhaps after the evening news.

The headline of this piece (referring to a “test”) is yet more evidence of Andrew Tyndall’s thesis about the nexus between the campaigns and the media and the gameshow-type coverage that has evolved during this election cycle.

As for the substance of the NYT’s Elizabeth Bumiller’s piece: she suggests that Obama’s testimony occuring “after the evening news” would be a bad thing.

What century is she living in? Her own paper today cites the woes of the networks’ news divisions. The “evening news” is a woolly mammoth.

Cable “news” is the thing, dontcha know? Who cares if Obama’s “test” occurs last on the floor of the Senate? It will happen just in time for Campbell Brown of CNN and Keith Olbermann to lead with it!

I’ll try to follow up tonight. Stay tuned.

Al Gore will launch a $300 million campaign whose sole purpose is to influence public opinion.

“The whole idea of the campaign is to be inclusive and to be bipartisan and to bring people together to a place where meaningful change can happen,” an organizer said. “It aims to be a game-changer in terms of the politics of climate.”

I wasn’t in fact aware that there is a “politics of climate.” I thought climate is a given. Of nature.  Foolish me!

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 PRopaganda^TM 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.

Fun with Obama iconography:

Based on their latest cover, here’s a short list of who Rolling Stone thinks Barack Obama is:

–The totally awesome, glowing, superhero/savior spawn of Jesus and Superman

–A dewy Venus, majestically stepping forth from a serene ocean mist, but, like also a guy who’s running for president.

–Not just the president of the ShinySuit 3000 Club For Men, but also a client.

(via the BlogFather, Glenn Reynolds)

p.s. I haven’t check out Tim Noah’s place to see if he’s added it to his Obama Messiah Watch series.

Those of you who are interested in going deep in the weeds of Obama Messiah iconography should visit this blog.

In today’s New York Times, I read about the importance of the rapid response in political campaigns. (I shouldn’t have been surprised to see Brian Stelter’s byline on the story, he (formerly) of TV Newswer fame. Bravo!):

Today, campaigns act within hours to anticipate the news cycle and twin their response with the original attack in voters’ minds. In the fall, Mrs. Clinton’s team swiftly knocked down an NPR report that said she had failed to tip a waitress in Iowa (the campaign had kept the receipt).

Parrying a television advertisement with another, however, has typically taken days if not weeks.

“There’s no question that the Obama response to Clinton’s 3 a.m. ad was created to make news,” said Larry Rasky, the communications director for Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2008 presidential campaign. “It seemed fast and effective in terms of repositioning the story.”

The Obama campaign has proved to be far and away—by miles—the most effective in working the current media terrain. They get New Media, and they get Old Media. They have left no stone unturned in the brave new world of  politics and geopolitics, which is, to a large extent, driven by the global media.

Obama began his quest for the presidency with the most coveted prize of all in the world of pop communications: a send-off from the Queen of Infotainment. Since then, the Obama folks have shown that they understand every demographic and interest group in America—including the rich and untapped pool of voters who read tabloids. 

I’m not mocking the Obama campaign but admiring it, because it understands that the old categories in politics have broken down. The campaign has a superior grasp of media.

But it will always be the politics that does you in, as David Brooks notes today:

Clinton had sounded like Old Politics, but Obama created a vision of New Politics. And the past several months have revolved around the choice he framed there that night. Some people are enthralled by the New Politics, and we see their vapors every day. Others think it is a mirage and a delusion. There’s only one politics, and, tragically, it’s the old kind, filled with conflict and bad choices.

The Obama campaign had the bad luck of bad timing yesterday. But the campaign has also made a lot of bad choices.

Toward the end of the press conference, the question of Goolsbee’s meeting was raised again. Obama answered curtly and then walked out after a staffer called last question. The press erupted with shouts, but Obama continued to walk out.

He paused only to say, “Come on guys; I answered like eight questions. We’re running late.”

Eight whole questions! What a great effort!

But that’s nothing compared to the lawyerly parsing from Team Obama that makes Bill Clinton look like a D student:

“At no point did anyone in our campaign convey to anyone that there had been any backing away from Obama’s position on Nafta,” a campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, said Monday …

The controversy began last week when CTV, a Canadian television network, reported that an Obama official had called the Canadian ambassador in Washington to play down the significance of Mr. Obama’s criticism of Nafta.

The campaign and the Canadian Embassy issued denials that were, it appears, technically accurate. But they were incomplete because they did not address Mr. Goolsbee’s meeting with Canadian officials.

This is by now a well-known Obama tactic: to provide “evidence” that the person making an attack against him is not telling the whole truth. This tactic has been referred to as jujitsu, and it has worked well to repel the attacks of his opponent Hillary Clinton. He has often appeared to win an argument by getting in the last word.

When your opponent is the media, however, you never get the last word. Besides, while words do matter, impressions matter more, as today’s New York Times piece points out [e.a.]:

The memorandum exposed Mr. Obama to accusations of hypocrisy on a touchstone issue …

The memorandum raises questions about the transparency and the ability of the campaign to address problems before they grow.

Yes indeed: if you project the image of being above-it-all, then you’d better be above-it-all. The aura around Obama changed yesterday. Seen from the position of a defensive crouch, he’s no longer such a cool cat.

Such is the awesome power of having one bad PR day.

The final word on that goes to CNN’s Candy Crowley, the star of my posts yesterday for her beginning the day with her flat-out denial that there was a NAFTA-gate and then signing off with what may become Obama’s euolgy:

CROWLEY: Also, today, Anderson, Hillary Clinton put out an ad talking about Obama and how he has talked so much about Afghanistan, but noting that, as committee — that as chairman of a subcommittee with some jurisdiction over U.S. policy in Afghanistan, he has failed to chair a single committee meeting.

All of this, Anderson, under one single umbrella. This is Hillary Clinton saying, Barack Obama is not the guy you think he is – Anderson.

COOPER: It’s an interesting point that she made in the sound bite that you played, where she said, look, if this was my campaign, which had had a meeting with the Canadian government and then people from my campaign had denied it, you know, how would you be covering this story?

This certainly does seem, for Obama, a candidate who’s talked about transparency and a campaign which has tried to pride itself on transparency, a black eye.

CROWLEY: Well, absolutely.

And this is a double whammy, the trade and the NAFTA issue, as to whether this aide of Obama’s went and talked to the Canadian government and said, oh, listen, he’s not actual really serious about this. The problem is not just, where does Barack Obama stand on NAFTA? His campaign makes a credible argument that he’s been for — against NAFTA, at least portions of it, the labor and the environmental part, for some time.

The question here is, for a guy that says no more Washington- speak, I’m going to tell you exactly where I stand, this becomes a public relations issue. And, you know, we have talked before, Anderson, sometimes, the perception of something is worse than the reality.

And for a candidate whose entire campaign is built around an adoring public’s perception of him as a Messiah, that is one pretty big goddamn problem.

Does it mean something that even the “Obama Girl” didn’t bother to vote?

On Tuesday night, City Room ran into Ms. Ettinger at an election-watching party in Greenwich Village and asked how things went at the polls.

“I didn’t get a chance to vote today because I’m not registered to vote in New York,” she said.

So where is Obama Girl registered to vote?
“New Jersey.”

Um, but didn’t New Jersey also hold a primary?

True. The problem, she explained, was that she was sick in New York City and was unable to get back across the Hudson River to the polls in Jersey City.

“I was in Arizona for the Super Bowl — every time I get in the airplane I get sick,” said Ms. Ettinger, who did manage to make it to the Svedka Fembot election returns party at Chinatown Brasserie at Lafayette and Great Jones streets.

Okay, maybe the Obama girl isn’t a good example of the flakiness factor evident in Obama’s supporters. But what about the very respectable Kevin Drum, who voted for Obama and then found himself hoping that Hillary would win [e.a.]?

And although Obama obviously made up a huge amount of ground over the past two weeks, what it felt like to me was disappointment. He seemed to be coming on so strong that it seemed inevitable he’d win one or two of the big Hillary states — or at least make them into close races — but he didn’t. In the end, Hillary won California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts by double digit margins. It really seemed to take a lot of wind out of the Obama surge.

The other thing inside my head that I didn’t expect was that as the results came in, I found myself sort of rooting for Hillary. Why? Buyer’s remorse? Rooting for the underdog? Guilt for having “betrayed” her by voting for Obama?

Outsize, overinflated expectations—like the insane hype created by the Obama campaign and its friends and supporters in the media—can easily lead to crushing disappointment (and even more voter apathy than the “hopeful” started out with).

I predict that young people will not be inspired to help “change” America. (For one thing: where would they go to effect that change? It’s not as if Obama has suggested, as JFK did, that his supporters actually give something of themselves to their country. So far, all the contributions have been to his campaign. What does that do to bring about “change” in America?

And that’s just one of the risks of running a vapid “inspirational” campaign. The other risk is that you’ll have much more battle-hardened and much less mushy folks, like, say, Jeff Jarvis and me (here and here and here and here, for example)—not to mention Bill Clinton—to remind you that Obama is selling snake oil:

His supporters, including many New York friends of mine, buy his image and believe he is less political and that he is indeed different. I think he’s more political and his campaign is the greatest example of the selling of the president I’ve yet seen. To state it harshly, I say that relying on these stock phrases — believing that we are going to swallow empty oratory about “change” punctuated with chants of “yes we can” — is a cynical political act.

But then again, I can’t argue with the fact that it’s working. It’s working with voters and it’s certainly working with the media, which have given Obama more attention through much of the campaign.

It worked for a while. But the media didn’t give the whole picture, as this picture posted by Ben Smith attests:

Note the many empty seats.

You won’t see this in most of the news photography, because photographers are packed into press risers, opposite whatever backdrop — a crowd, a flag — the campaign prefers.

But while Obama has held some very large rallies in some very small cities — 14,000 in Boise! — there have also been quite a few empty seats at some of the bigger venues.

Does it come as a surprise to you that the media and the campaigns worked together to create the impression of a “surge” for Obama? It shouldn’t.

I boldly predict no mo’ Mo for Barack Obama.

But I could be wrong … because hope springs eternal!

full disclosure: I voted for Bill Clinton twice, and for Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate, and for Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination yesterday. This despite the fact that I am no fan of the Clintons.

On the other hand, I don’t expect to be a fan of my president. I expect my president to work hard at the business of our nation so that I and my friends and family can go about our lives doing the things we like to do, and go to sleep at night knowing that a responsible person is overseeing the big, scary mess that is the United States of America.