posted June 19, 2012 08:13 AM            

I can’t be the only person in America who, at about minute 35 in President Obama’s almost hour-long “framing” speech in Cleveland Thursday, wanted to tell the president, as the Dude famously screams at Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, “You’re living in the past!”

Obama’s overly long, repetitive, and by turns self-pitying and self-congratulatory address was so soaked through with nostalgia that MSNBC should have broadcast it in sepia tones. The speech—which even the liberal Obama biographer Jonathan Alter called one of the president’s “least successful” political communications—revealed an incumbent desperately trying to replay the 2008 election. But no oratory will make up for a flawed record and a vague, fissiparous, and unappealing agenda.

The president himself forced this abrupt re-launch of his reelection campaign. After a bad week that began with terrible job numbers, proceeded to Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall, and culminated in awful fundraising news, Obama tried to recover last Friday by addressing the press on the state of the economy. Except things went horribly wrong. The president uttered six words—“the private sector is doing fine”—that not only will plague him for the rest of the campaign, but also perfectly captured his complacent attitude toward all things outside the realm of government.

The moment prompted a burst of panic throughout the Democratic hive mind, with media types clucking their tongues at the president’s campaign and party strategists questioning the salience of his message. Yesterday’s event in Ohio was thus intended to serve as a sort of domestic analogue to President Obama’s “reset” with Russia. By the looks of things, it will prove to be just as unsuccessful.

The very idea that Obama has the ability to shape his political fortunes through rhetoric is a backwards-looking myth. It is part of the pop narrative of Obama’s 2008 candidacy, in which the young freshman senator was able to rescue his moribund campaign from the evil Clinton machine by giving a single speech at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner in November 2007. More likely it was Obama’s antiwar stance in an antiwar party that gave him the edge in the Iowa caucuses the following January, but that has not stopped the president or his supporters from having an almost theological attachment to his oratorical prowess.

The evidence in this case, however, is decidedly on the side of the nonbelievers. The Washington Post counts over 500 speeches or appearances where the president has mentioned health care, but his overhaul remains remarkably unpopular. The president’s campaign appearances on behalf of Creigh Deeds in Virginia, Gov. Jon Corzine in New Jersey, Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, and Rep. Tom Perriello in Virginia were unsuccessful, which may have been why he didn’t even bother to campaign in Wisconsin for Tom Barrett (who lost anyway). A televised address last July did not win Obama his lusted-after tax increase on the rich, nor did remarks to a joint session of Congress win passage of his American Jobs Act. Eleven “major” speeches on the economy have not generated a full recovery or prevented economic indicators from backsliding. Indeed, one of President Obama’s few accomplishments has been to prove, definitively, the worthlessness of the bully pulpit.

Obama puts his verbal talents to use by fashioning straw men who flatter his ideological prejudices. There are, for example, only two types of Republicans in the president’s speeches: dead or defeated ones who happened to be reasonable people who acted in good faith, and living and successful ones who “believe that if you simply take away regulations and cut taxes by trillions of dollars, the market will solve all of our problems on its own,” and who want to end “the guarantee of basic security we’ve always provided the elderly, and the sick, and those who are actively looking for work.”

Surrounded by this army of hay, Obama and his staff have discovered a strange and newfound respect for Senator McCain, whom they defeated by seven points three and a half years ago, and who regularly denounced his own supporters when he disagreed with them. “I had some strong disagreements with John McCain,” the president recalled wistfully at a Philadelphia fundraiser Tuesday, “but there were certain baselines that we both agreed on,” such as immigration amnesty, global warming, and the regulation of political speech. And so McCain has become, in Obama’s imagination, the perfect Republican: honorable, moderate, and unsuccessful.

This is part of the president’s attempt to turn 2012 into a replay of 2008. In Obama’s absurd telling, every Republican president prior to George W. Bush would have been comfortable with the economic agenda of the contemporary Democratic Party. Lincoln backed the transcontinental railroad, so obviously he would have supported a $4 trillion government, most of which is spent on checks for old people. Eisenhower proposed the Interstate Highway System to maneuver troops, civilians, and missiles in case World War III broke out, which naturally suggests he would have supported stimulus bills that pay off public sector and construction unions and finance alternative energy moguls who donate to Democratic campaigns.

In his Cleveland speech, Obama preposterously invoked the memory of Nixon—Richard Nixon—because the second-most reviled Republican in modern memory “created the Environmental Protection Agency.” Ronald Reagan? Forget supply-side economics and the Strategic Defense Initiative and the 1986 tax reform and Iran-contra. “He worked with Democrats to save Social Security,” and “raised taxes to help pay down an exploding deficit.” All is forgiven.

Obama writes these fictional historical portraits not to pay tribute to his antecedents, but to explain, in a self-serving way, his lack of executive achievements. The economy is suffering and the deficit is hemorrhaging, he suggests, only because today’s GOP is so radical and unreasonable. (This is the same party, incidentally, that won 51 percent of the national House vote in the most recent election.)

The country’s troubles, we are told, were caused by Obama’s direct predecessor, whose decapitated head recently made a cameo appearance on HBO. “It’s like somebody goes to a restaurant, orders a big steak dinner, martini and all that stuff, and then just as you’re sitting down, they leave and accuse you of running up the tab,” Obama told Baltimore donors during one of the six fundraisers he held Tuesday. Of course, not 24 hours later, he stiffed the BBQ restaurant where he had held a Father’s Day lunch with two servicemen and two barbers.

“The problems we’re facing right now have been more than a decade in the making,” he told his audience in Cleveland. He mentioned our “decade” of problems eight times, subtly excusing his inability to improve the domestic situation by diminishing any role he may have had in creating or prolonging it.

The president’s grossest use of nostalgia, however, has to be in his appeals to the aftermath of the Second World War, when “there was a general consensus that the market couldn’t solve all of our problems on its own; that we needed certain investments to give hardworking Americans skills they needed to get a good job, and entrepreneurs the platforms they needed to create good jobs; that we needed consumer protections that made American products safe and American markets sound.”

Here Obama conjures up a progressive Eden, when Democrats and liberal Republicans shared the presidency, and Democrats ruled Congress practically without interruption. He holds this rather peculiar and problematic historical situation as a scenario that might be replicated. It can’t. It shouldn’t. One of the reasons America was doing well economically at that time was that much of the rest of the world was a rubble-strewn junkyard. Nor did women or African Americans or gay people exactly participate in this time of “shared prosperity.” Oddly for someone with intellectual pretensions, Obama never asks why the politics of the New Frontier and Great Society came to a fairly disastrous end. He wouldn’t like the answer.

posted June 19, 2012 08:25 AM            

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posted June 19, 2012 05:24 PM            

if jwhop's trademark post is not screeching, whining and wheezing about some imaginary blunder of obama's, or protesting "leftists" having any opinions at all, then today is not tuesday.

posted June 19, 2012 05:25 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by jwhop:
That's right Ami. The only people on this site who wheeze, whine, wring their hands and screech about others expressing their opinions are the leftists. For them, free speech is a one way street. They get to say whatever they want to say and everyone else needs to sit the hell down and shut the hell up...or, you're hateful, a racist, a bigot, a fascist or a Nazi.

Gone are the days when those tactics will work. Keep up the good work!

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Totally. Thank you, but YOU are my role model, Jwhop

posted June 19, 2012 05:30 PM            

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posted June 19, 2012 05:32 PM            

and i don't recall you ever standing up for MY right to free speech. quite the opposite in fact.

posted June 19, 2012 05:43 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by katatonic:
rush tells it like the money tells him to, ami. you keep talking about waking up but you don't see your cardbord heroes are 2 dimensional.

and i don't recall you ever standing up for MY right to free speech. quite the opposite in fact.

but the thread is not about free speech, so it's another stray bullet comment.

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You have your free speech, Kat. I don't see anyone stopping you

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posted June 19, 2012 06:55 PM            

Do you know that Rush once declared that nicotine wasn't addictive, and smoking didn't lead to emphysema? (Probably read the reports by Jwhop's favorite anti-global warming scientist.) I point this out as an outrageous version of his usual stuff. There's plenty more that he's gotten factually wrong over the years.

posted June 19, 2012 07:17 PM            

Rush as been wrong on a few things. He is VERY wrong on Monsanto. I am not a mind numbed robot

posted June 19, 2012 07:48 PM            

when a talk show host tells you what someone was THINKING you are listening to propaganda or at the very least fantasy.

when a talk show host sees NOTHING but bad in the "other side" you know he is biassed and is probably being paid to be "outrageous".

when a talk show host - or politician - is able to see the good AND bad, to acknowledge the first and criticize the second, their eyes and minds open and not slammed shut.

posted June 19, 2012 10:53 PM            

Yet, it was the leftist set who dressed Bush up in a Nazi uniform and a Satan suit..with horns no less and then had the gall to whine to Randall when they got some nicks and cuts on their thin skins.

Got to love the hypocrisy of leftists.

posted June 20, 2012 09:06 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by jwhop:
It's always the hand wringing leftist pants wetters who are forever running to Randall whining. It's never the conservatives here.

Yet, it was the leftist set who dressed Bush up in a Nazi uniform and a Satan suit..with horns no less and then had the gall to whine to Randall when they got some nicks and cuts on their thin skins.

Got to love the hypocrisy of leftists.

They're as delusional as their little leftist Messiah O'Bomber!

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Yep, you HAVE to have a thick skin when you are a Conservative Minority in a land of......... #@#$#@#$#

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posted June 20, 2012 09:07 AM            

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Passion, Lust, Desire. Check out my journal

posted June 20, 2012 09:28 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Ami Anne:
Dear Friends
Doomlord is from Israel! Welcome DL, to this Forum. I have never seen you here.

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well i have started writing in forums other than astrology... but im not sure il fit in here for my lack of information on american politics ^^

posted June 20, 2012 01:11 PM            

what are you talking about, jwhop? don't you know ami is the first to go to randall when someone doesn't talk nice to her? which leftists do you have in mind when you make this blanket statement?

posted June 21, 2012 01:24 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by katatonic:
[b]It's always the hand wringing leftist pants wetters who are forever running to Randall whining. It's never the conservatives here

what are you talking about, jwhop? don't you know ami is the first to go to randall when someone doesn't talk nice to her? which leftists do you have in mind when you make this blanket statement?

while i know YOU define me as a "leftist" though i am not, i certainly have never gone whining to randall, and i notice he is the very first to jump in and back you up. so again, who/what are you talking about, or is this just another attempt to smear everyone who doesn't agree with you? or just to stop any "leftists" going to randall about your consistently abusive dialogue?[/B]

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Since you don't live inside my ear--THANK GOD--you have no idea what I do

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posted June 21, 2012 02:38 PM            

I've never seen Ami whine to Randall about any poster on this forum.

To be fair, I've not see katatonic do so either. But katatonic, to say you're not a leftist twists, distorts and stretches the English language beyond recognition.

And you acoustic have climbed on the bandwagon several times with others who whined to Randall about getting members banned.