Kind of a silly piece, but Milbank makes a point about Obama that isn’t made enough:
President Obama has many talents, but he is not good copy. He speaks grammatically, in fully formed paragraphs. He has yet to produce a scandal of any magnitude. He is maddeningly on message, and his few gaffes — “you didn’t build that,” “the private sector is doing fine” — are inflammatory only out of context. If it weren’t for the occasional relief offered by Joe Biden, the Samaritans would have installed a suicide-prevention hotline in the White House press room by now.
Some of is the reverse of the hothouse effect mistermix talked about. Republicans aren’t trained to be careful because conservative media will back whatever crazy shit they say. A Democratic president — especially a BLACK one — can get away with nothing. Obama wouldn’t be where he is if he weren’t belt-and-suspenders careful.
But Clinton did wander off message, produce scandals, most of them total bullshit, but when it comes to having an affair with interns, you play with matches…
Some of the “Obama is aloof and boring” stuff from the Village (which Milbank is mocking here) is simply about the fact that he gets out of bed and does his job without much melodrama.
Upper West
Except for the repulsive Maureen Dowd (I know, when the wind is blowing Dem, like today and Sunday, she’s all over the Reps). But she will seize any supposed “non-manly” or “aloof” or “doesn’t send thank you notes” bullshit to go after a Dem.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
You need to add that the Villager/mainstream media won’t call them out or criticize them for whatever crazy shit they say.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
You hate me. Yesterday I had to face the fact that I agreed with much of what Bobo wrote. Now you have brought to my attention that the dick whisperer has made a reasonable point.
red dog
If only we could convince congress to do the same instead of begging for money and future jobs.
vheidi
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Go read Charlie Pierce– a welcome antidote
Culture of Truth
The White House is aware of this, which is why they did a full court press with the beer making. First the slow reveal, showing Obama drinking the beer, then that he made it, then the FOIA request for the recipe, then the fortuituous bear hug at the pizza place. Of course Letterman brought up beer last night. We learned about the White House beehive.
The press corps ate (or is drank) it all up, naturally.
The other good news is that Romney is such a nightmare that the White House provides good copy just responding his stupidity.
Violet
@Culture of Truth: Yep, they rolled out that beer stuff brilliantly. Day after day of info, with plenty of photo ops and other stuff to fill days of copy. Added benefit Romney can’t drink beer because of his religion. Way to capitalize on that without making a big issue of it, Team Obama!
schrodinger's cat
@Upper West: My prediction, this Sunday she will write a column saying infuriating things about Obama. She has had two op-ed pieces in a row bashing the Republicans.
David Hunt
I have said to many of my friends that Obama is the Jackie Robinson of U.S. Presidents. He has to put up with abuse akin to an unending torrent of raw sewage and smile or he’s Angry Black Guy and we won’t bring any more of Those People up from the minors. If he weren’t constantly No Drama Obama, he’d be portrayed in the media a Barack X and then he’d be done. You don’t get to re-invent your media persona once the public has gotten used to it…at least not in a positive direction.
japa21
This drives the RW absolutely nuts. Several people who comment on my local paper’s LTE section still try hard. They constantly talk about how corrupt the Obama administration is. When asked to bring specifics to the table all they can throw out there is Solyndra and Fast and Furious. When it is pointed out that even Issa couldn’t find anything to go after Obama with their response is “Well, that doesn’t matter because he is still corrupt because…shut up.”
Not all of this is racist, although I am sure there is some. But mostly it is just projection. They just can’t believe a politician isn’t totally corrupt because a) most Republicans are and b) they are in Illinois where the general rule is that they are.
Xecky Gilchrist
Obama’s approach is much the same as what my granddad did to be a successful non-Mormon businessman in Salt Lake City in the 1930s. Don’t give the bastards an excuse to trash you.
The hothouse point is well taken: the Repubs have been unchallenged for so long they’ve atrophied.
Ben Franklin
At least we have a Chief who isn’t just a figurehead. I recently saw an interview of the latest biographer who made an interesting observation. I tied the thought to what I’ve heard about Einstein, who was never a clotheshorse for a good reason. He had a closet full of clothes and shoes, but all the same color so he didn’t have to waste his time thinking about what to wear and freed him for important thought-trains.
Obama wears grey and dark blue suits for the same reason. I like that.
Mark S.
I think Kevin Williamson is a little less stupid than most people who write for NRO, but this shit is hilarious:
Huh? How the hell do you do that?
Oh well fuck it, there’s no way of knowing so let’s just keep saying that tax cuts produce growth.
But this is a fun game. Was George Bush a terrible president? Should we look at where the country was in 2000 and compare it to where it was in 2009? No, of course not, says Williamson, what we should do is compare Bush to hypothetical presidents and throw up our hands and conclude the answer is unknowable.
askew
I hate to say it but Dana has a good point. Obama is incredibly competent and he and his administration are remarkably scandal-free. I think this is one of the reasons that SNL is having such a hard time spoofing Obama.
One of the reasons I didn’t support Hillary in the primaries is I remember what a mess the Bill Clinton administration was. They made so many of their own messes and Bill was known for being undisciplined and surrounding himself with undisciplined/unscrupulous people. A lot of those same people would end up in a Hillary admin. And I can’t imagine the mess Bill would have made as first gentleman.
WereBear
And, to be all dialectical up in here, what capital have they been spending? The New Deal’s capital, that’s what!
None of their crap would work unless the society had been enjoying a good paycheck and lack of children killed by the toaster. These jerks look around and go, Everything’s fine, I can indulge my greed, let’s open the trough.
If Joe Hill had just died, none of this would be entertained for a moment; the fantasy would not work.
Now, they have run that well dry.
WereBear
Yes, but several months ago they did a spoof of the Cosby show that was hilarious.
Sasha
Thank Dog for No-Drama Obama.
Patricia Kayden
Strange because I don’t think President Obama is aloof and boring at all. If you look at the photos of him interacting with regular folks, they look ecstatic and he looks comfortable and relaxed. Unlike The Bot and Lady Ann, he and Michelle are able to talk to ordinary citizens without seeming forced.
President Obama probably knows that he couldn’t survive even one scandal so he plays it safe. Hope he’s re-elected.
Culture of Truth
I don’t believe Obama’s opponents continuously imploding is a coincidence. I’ve heard ‘he got lucky – again.’ His style makes people crazy. They get angry and desperate and say stupid things, and Obama reacts cooly, which bugs them and they get pissed and eventually they say something idiotic, and Obama reacts dissmissively, and that makes them crazier and soon they say something moronic, and Obama reacts contemptuously, which drives them into a righteous fury and they end up holding midnight press conferences denying they despise a majority of the voters they need in 6 weeks.
mdblanche
That’s where the “boring” part comes from. The “aloof” part is because he is aloof… from them. He doesn’t cultivate them the way their favorites like John “Good News for” McCain do. As well he shouldn’t. From what I’ve seen at least two thirds of the people who still care about the contents of the Village Idiots’ word droppings are the commenters here. The internet has made them as obsolete as the rest of the people they share a flattened tree corpse with. The president knows they are living on borrowed time and bypasses them. They don’t like it when he does that.
Legalize
I was wondering how long it would take Harry Reid to start punching Willard in the nuts again:
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/reid-romney-may-be-one-of-47-percent?ref=fpb
Violet
@Culture of Truth: Yep. Agreed. I think Obama worked through his demons at a young age. He knows himself and just doesn’t get very keyed up about stuff that would make most people lose their cool. He’s very rare in that regard. My impression is that he’s done the hard work and knows himself and doesn’t have to waste time on his own reactions to things like many of his opponents do.
Violet
@Legalize: Ha! good stuff! Now is the right time to bring up the tax returns again. “Is Mitt a moocher in the 47%? He doesn’t want us to find out. What’s he hiding?”
the Conster
He’s far from perfect in the policy department, but I’ve always believed that this president’s best quality is his preternatural calm and conciliatory nature, but before all that comes into play he has an a priori sense of the truth of something that has nothing to do with his race, or at least he doesn’t use his biracialism as a filter through which he conveys his sense of things. He has a stable mind. He has developed credibility now, too, which is why he’s made so many people with unstable minds run off their rails.
Mnemosyne
@mdblanche:
Exactly. It’s the same complaint we’ve heard big donors have — Obama is more interested in interacting with ordinary voters than he is in going to parties with Washington power players. It’s how he managed to win Illinois by such a huge margin when he ran for Senate — he campaigned downstate and spent a lot of time talking to the farmers and blue-collar guys in the rural areas, and they decided that they liked him enough to vote for him.
chopper
that’s one of the reasons why they’re trying so hard to fluff romney’s campaign. personally i think the village needs to team up with comedians everywhere. both groups will do much better under a romney presidency.
Legalize
@Violet:
It’s perfect. Wasn’t there someone around here assuring us that the tax return issue was dead – no one cared any more? I think some people don’t fully appreciate what Team O has been doing to Willard all summer and now into the fall. This has all been a longish-term, careful effort to define Willard as a sneering, incompetent, greedy villain – a Snidely Wiplash. The tax return thing was just a step in that process; now they get to go back to the well and make it all new again.
Culture of Truth
“The 47 percent are ordinary, hard-working Americans who deserve respect – especially from a man who wants to be their President,” Reid said. “They’re not avoiding their tax bills using Cayman Island tax shelters or Swiss bank accounts, like Mitt Romney.”
Reid suggested that Romney isn’t paying anything. “For all we know, Mitt Romney could be one of those who have paid no federal income taxes,” he said.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Mnemosyne:
And that’s saying a lot given the might-as-well-be-batshit-crazy-rurl-Missouri nature of southern IL.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Some of the aloofness might be because he figures that most White House pool journalists are, despite their position, petty people with little understanding or interest in policy but care only about he-said-she-said stenography or gaffe-catching, so there’s not really a lot of win to be had schmoozing them.
mdblanche
@David Hunt: Is it just me or did “The police acted stupidly” seem to be the moment when Obama’s post-election support really began dissipating? There seemed to be an awful lot of moderate and liberal whites who were scandalized by the idea that a black president could even have a different perspective on the issue than they did.
pseudonymous in nc
TN-C’s long, majestic piece on Obama touches on this, too.
And I think Michael Lewis’s piece is useful for the way in which it demonstrated how Obama actually embraced Bush’s “The Decider” thing in a completely different direction — he’s subsumed a huge amount of his personality for these past four years, just in terms of choosing a suit or an item on the menu, so that he doesn’t get “decisioned out” for the big things. I see that as service, not aloofness, though I’m sure the Villagers, deprived of their cocktail-party moments, are verklempt about it.
Imani Gandy (ABL)
He has no room for error, as any black American with any modicum of success (by whatever metric you measure success) will tell you.
Nina
Personally, I’m surprised that they haven’t been on Obama’s back for sneaking cigarettes.
The rightwing keeps trying to drum up a scandal every time Obama takes a morning off to golf. Considering how much golf and vacation time Junior Bush took…
Culture of Truth
Because the two worst things liberals want to do are legalize drugs and ban smoking.
quannlace
But, but….what about that anti-Obama film that’s coming out soon, that’ll totally turn around this campaign? At least that’s what that Patriot troll was assuring us last night.
Ben Franklin
@Imani Gandy (ABL):
Just like Jackie Robinson.
Roger Moore
@Culture of Truth:
Note, though, that Obama’s style only works to drive people crazy if they think they deserve a bigger lead than they have. I don’t think the no drama style would infuriate an opponent who was sitting on a comfortable lead.
Roger Moore
@Culture of Truth:
Yup. It’s a classic example of the conservative double standard. Corporations that earn record profits but pay no income tax by using illegal tax shelters are doing their fiduciary duty to their shareholders. Rich people who pull down millions but pay no income tax because they park their money in offshore accounts are paying everything they owe and not a penny more. Poor people who pay no income tax because they don’t earn enough to be worth collecting from are moochers and looters.
arguingwithsignposts
I really look forward to obama letting loose some in his second term.
amk
@Culture of Truth: LOL. Perfect description of mittbot.
Rafer Janders
@Culture of Truth:
What I love about this is that in 2000 and 2004, the press came up with its absurd “who would you rather have a beer with” metric (despite, of course, the fact that Bush, the guy who you were supposed to want to have a beer with, was an alcoholic who didn’t drink beer anymore), all intended to reinforce the narrative that Republicans were reg’lar guys and Democrats were effete snobs.
Now we’re in a situation where the Democrat is the beer brewin’, beer drinkin’, pizza eatin’, basketball playin’ regular guy, and the Republican is the non-drinking teetotaller with a fancy prancing horse and a car elevator…
You wanna have a beer with Romney? Well, you can’t. Try a hot chocolate instead.
xian
@Culture of Truth: this.
remember how Bugs Bunny used nonchalance to drive Yosemite Sam up the wall?
Rafer Janders
@Ben Franklin:
Then again, how many more options are there, really, when it comes to business attire? What’s Obama giving up? Red suits? Pink suits? Seersucker? Pincord?
Rafer Janders
@Culture of Truth:
The more I think of this, the more I laugh.
Rafer Janders
@Legalize:
Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.
Ben Cisco
@Imani Gandy (ABL): As one of those, thanks for getting this out there.
nellcote
@Legalize:
“The Bain attacks aren’t working!”
JustMe
@Ben Franklin: Obama wears grey and dark blue suits for the same reason. I like that.
No, he wears grey and dark blue suits (with a red or blue tie) because any deviation from the “norm” in DC would attract too much attention. George W. Bush dressed the same way, as does Romney. Their choice of suits, shirts, and ties is specifically designed to ensure that the press will never comment on them.
Mnemosyne
@mdblanche:
It kinda did. I was surprised at how negative so many of my fellow white people were about the whole thing, but maybe that was because I was already familiar with Henry Louis Gates and found it laughable that a 5’3″ guy who walks with a cane was so threatening to a police officer that he had to be arrested.
I still think that what happened in the moment between the two of them had more to do with townie vs. faculty tensions in Cambridge than anything specifically racial, but it was really strange how many (mostly white) people insisted that Gates shouldn’t have talked back to a cop inside Gates’ own home after proving his identity. WTF was that all about?
Suffern ACE
@mdblanche: I agree with that quite a bit. Not that something like that wouldn’t have happened sooner or later, but it really was kind of an unforced error on the administrations part. When he was asked the question in the press conference, he could have just not offered an opinion on the matter at all. It was not a federal issue and Dr. Gates knows how to get attention. Had he said “I just don’t know what happened”, the whole thing would have passed.
Brachiator
Has there been anything here about how some conservatives are feeling that Fox News is not …. telling them the truth?
Yes. I know.
This was covered on a recent Rachel Maddow show segment, which featured a story by Frank Rich (My Embed in Red)
Rich is far more sympathetic toward some right wing writers than is reasonable, but his main point is right on, that the wingnuts are increasingly frustrated by the message coming from Faux News and Limbaugh.
It’s not wingnutty enough for them. Nor, apparently, is Mittens. Even the ever despicable Michael Savage had harsh words about “that country club woman,” Ann Romney.
ETA: it was creepy and sad on the Rachel Maddow background piece to see how many Fox News “analysts” were also Romney staffers or volunteers.
Shit, if Obama was as wild as Clinton or a Kennedy, there would be a round-the-clock impeachment watch. It won’t be until we’ve had the fourth or fifth black or Latino president before we can have a good intern banging non-scandal.
Brachiator
Has there been anything here about how some conservatives are feeling that Fox News is not …. telling them the truth?
Yes. I know.
This was covered on a recent Rachel Maddow show segment, which featured a story by Frank Rich (My Embed in Red)
Rich is far more sympathetic toward some right wing writers than is reasonable, but his main point is right on, that the wingnuts are increasingly frustrated by the message coming from Faux News and Limbaugh.
It’s not wingnutty enough for them. Nor, apparently, is Mittens. Even the ever despicable Michael Savage had harsh words about “that country club woman,” Ann Romney.
ETA: it was creepy and sad on the Rachel Maddow background piece to see how many Fox News “analysts” were also Romney staffers or volunteers.
Shit, if Obama was as wild as Clinton or a Kennedy, there would be a round-the-clock impeachment watch. It won’t be until we’ve had the fourth or fifth black or Latino president before we can have a good intern banging non-scandal.
Brachiator
Crap. WP is acting up on me. sorry for the double post (and hope this one is not a double post as well)
Violet
@Rafer Janders:
Nope. No hot drinks for Mormons. Have a lemonade.
MomSense
No drama Obama!
Tone in DC
@Suffern ACE:
I disagree.
The cop did behave stupidly, and did so in Gates’ house after the prof identified himself. I have no problem with BHO saying what he did. A badge does not mean you’re infallible or above reproach.
Monala
@WereBear: Yeah, but even then, the Obama part of the spoof wasn’t funny. What was hilarious was their spoof of Malcolm-Joe Jamal Biden.
Monala
@WereBear: Yeah, but even then, the Obama part of the spoof wasn’t funny. What was hilarious was their spoof of Malcolm-Joe Jamal Biden.
Upper West
@schrodinger’s cat: I will not bet against that.
noabsolutes
Yup, this. And his job is one of the most stressful in the world–a black American father to two young children in a relationship with someone much smarter than him. It’s a wonder he didn’t go gray years ago.
noabsolutes
Yup, this. And his job is one of the most stressful in the world–a black American father to two young children in a relationship with someone much smarter than him. It’s a wonder he didn’t go gray years ago.
DFH no.6
@mdblanche:
I don’t know.
I’m a liberal white guy, and I thought Obama was correct in his initial response to the Henry Louis Gates arrest that “the police acted stupidly”.
Because that cop did act stupidly (I don’t care that Gates got “uppity” with him – cops have a responsibility to defuse situations like that, not inflame them as that “beer summit” cop did).
Other liberal whites I know had the same reaction I did. In fact, I didn’t hear anything different from any such people I know.
It was asshole conservative whites (but I repeat myself) who I know who had issues with Obama over the Gates thing.
Huge surprise there.
Obama’s post-election support was so high it was only going to go down.
And the reason it has gone down so far is almost entirely due to the painfully-slow economic recovery, not anything Obama has said about, well, anything.
JustRuss
@David Hunt:
Jackie Robinson was the first name to pop into my head reading that too, and it does seem an apt comparison. I’m not happy with a lot of what Obama has done, but props to him for returning intelligence and dignity to the Oval Office.
AHH onna Droid
@Mnemosyne: yeah, I was with the president, maybe because I was familiar with who Gates was on a superficial level having grown up in the Hub and I had read Four Classic Slave Narratives, which he had compiled and edited. Also from growing up in the Hub, I was familiar with the enormous attitude of beat cops in Eastrn Mass. These guys have a chip in their shoulder the size of the Irish diaspora. And still I was shocked that they went ahead and arrested a famous Harvard professor in his own home. Gates’ hasty release without charges just speaks to the stupid going on that day. When I lived in Western Mass, some dumb cops in Springfield broke into a car and dragged out a middle aged black man in a diabetic coma and proceeded to beat him in the parking lot. Their lame excuse to the judge was that they thought he was on crack. Next morning come to find out they had just put the superintendent of schools in the hospital.
Heads rolled in Springfield. If the Gates story had stayed local there probably would have been hell to pay. Obama, by virtue of his student years in Cambridge was in the bubble and so was I. But when he opened his mouth he and I found out the truth of as Mass goes, so does not the nation.
jaleh
I was telling my sister that I feel Obama is from another planet, he is perfect! My sister in turn said “oh, I was talking to this guy in Mt. Shasta, who has a retreat and these people actually BELIEVE President Obama was put on earth from another planet to save the earth…I actually think my sister believes that stuff.