Barack Is Back!

It appears that the only Barack we've got launched a tirade against a room of big Democratic donors the other day.

“I think it’s going to require a little bit less navel-gazing and a little less whining and being in fetal positions. And it’s going to require Democrats to just toughen up,” Obama said at the fundraiser, according to excerpts of his remarks exclusively obtained by CNN.

“You know, don’t tell me you’re a Democrat, but you’re kind of disappointed right now, so you’re not doing anything. No, now is exactly the time that you get in there and do something,” he said. “Don’t say that you care deeply about free speech and then you’re quiet. No, you stand up for free speech when it’s hard. When somebody says something that you don’t like, but you still say, ‘You know what, that person has the right to speak.’ … What’s needed now is courage.”

And more.  In a way these remarks are unexceptionable, but that's just it: they're platitudes.  If you imagine them being delivered in Obama's grating scold's voice, they become more annoying, especially when you remember that the speaker collaborated with the most far-right elements of the GOP in the apparent hope that they would be nice and work with him.  He let Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy continue before the Republicans asked for them (he later admitted it was a mistake, but so what?).  He appointed a commission of deficit hawks in hopes they'd demand cuts in Social Security, and when they didn't he accepted the demand anyway (though again, he wasn't able to do it).  He fired at least two staffers when right-wing attack media lied about them.  Having kneecapped potential opposition in advance, he scolded activists who criticized his right-wing, anti-immigrant, antigay policies publicly.  

And speaking of whining:

WHAT SOME WOULD HAVE PREFERRED: “Now, I know there are some who would have preferred a protracted political fight, even if it had meant higher taxes for all Americans, even if it had meant an end to unemployment insurance for those who are desperately looking for work.” The assumption here is that he would have lost the fight. It’s pretty much always Obama’s working assumption that he will lose any fight. And then, funnily enough, he does. 

Read the whole post, which consists of quotations from one of Obama's press conferences.  His apologists like to claim that he was helpless because the Democrats didn't control Congress, but that's false. They did control Congress for the first two years of his term, but he was still appeasing the Republicans anyway.

Of course at other times he put up his dukes and announced his readiness to take on all comers (these are from the same press conference);

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY: “And I will be happy to see the Republicans test whether or not I’m itching for a fight on a whole range of issues.”

WHAT HE SUSPECTS: “I suspect they will find I am.”

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY: “I’m happy to have that battle. I’m happy to have that conversation. I just want to make sure that the American people aren’t harmed while we’re having that broader argument.” 

He took a similar tack in a meeting with CEOs in 2009:

"My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

It was an attention grabber, no doubt, especially that carefully chosen last word.

But then Obama's flat tone turned to one of support, even sympathy. "You guys have an acute public relations problem that's turning into a political problem," he said. "And I want to help. But you need to show that you get that this is a crisis and that everyone has to make some sacrifices."

According to one of the participants, he then said, "I'm not out there to go after you. I'm protecting you. But if I'm going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation."

No suggestions were forthcoming from the bankers on what they might offer, and the president didn't seem to be championing any specific proposals. He had none; neither Geithner nor Summers believed compensation controls had any merit.

After a moment, the tension in the room seemed to lift: the bankers realized he was talking about voluntary limits on compensation until the storm of public anger passed. It would be for show.

I think his leaked remarks to his donors are the same: for show.  They bring to mind Kamala Harris giggling "I told you so!" to a room of her fans.

“Stop looking for the quick fix. Stop looking for the messiah. You have great candidates running races right now. Support those candidates,” Obama said, calling out the New Jersey and Virginia elections, according to the excerpts of his remarks.

“Make sure that the DNC has what it needs to compete in what will be a more data-driven, more social media-driven cycle, which will cost some money and expertise and time,” he continued. 

Again, not such bad advice, though I wouldn't trust the DNC with my money, and he apparently didn't mention Zohran Mamdani, whom various party leaders are doing their best to undermine - "Vote Blue No Matter Who" was never meant seriously.

Beating the Socialist with the Socialist's Shtick

Is anybody else old enough to remember when right-wingers were furiously circulating a meme that showed Barack Hussein Obama putting his dirty feet on the precious, sacred desk of the Oval Office?  The desk that was a gift from Queen Victoria of England, so it was like Barack "Not Their President" Obama was stomping on the Virgin Queen!  No?  Well, it was a long time ago, almost eight years, nobody can remember that far back.

 

Militant leftists from Medium to Snopes.com took delight in finding pictures of Obama's predecessors, from Nixon to Dubya, kicking back with their feet on the sacred desk, and soon the fuss died down.  It was recalled when Donald Trump's advisor Kellyanne Conway was photographed with her feet on an Oval Office couch.  

 

The two cases were obviously completely different, of course: Conway, unlike Obama, is white.  Besides, it wasn't clear from the photo whether Conway was wearing shoes, though her pose inadvertently revealed that she is actually a male homosexual.

I remembered this today when I learned that the San Francisco Chronicle had published an op-ed attacking Bernie Sanders for exhibiting white privilege when he appeared at the Biden inauguration wearing the now-notorious coat and mittens, instead of a custom Schiaparelli gown.

The author, Ingrid Seyer-Ochi, began with a salad of culture-of-therapy jargon that reads like an outtake from the Onion:

Three weeks ago I processed the Capitol insurrection with my high school students. Rallying our inquiry skills, we analyzed the images of that historic day, images of white men storming through the Capitol, fearless and with no forces to stop them. “This,” I said, “is white supremacy, this is white privilege. It can be hard to pinpoint, but when we see, it, we know it.”

Across our Zoom screen, they affirmed, with nods, thumbs-ups, and emojis of anger and frustration. Fast-forward two weeks as we analyzed images from the inauguration, asking again, “What do we see?” We saw diversity, creativity and humanity, and a nation embracing all of this and more. On the day of the inauguration, Bernie Sanders was barely on our radar. The next day, he was everywhere.

... wearing, as Ms. Seyer-Ochi put it, "a puffy jacket and huge mittens."  This indicates that she doesn't "see" very well:

That's not what I'd call "puffy."  I'll return to that presently.

Seyer-Ochi continues:

We talked about gender and the possible meanings of the attire chosen by Vice President Kamala Harris, Dr. Jill Biden, the Biden grandchildren, Michelle Obama, Amanda Gorman and others. We referenced the female warriors inspiring these women, the colors of their educational degrees and their monochromatic ensembles of pure power.

One of the markers of privilege is wearing outfits that give little or no protection against cold weather, especially for women.  It signifies that they will be whisked out of their heated carriages for a few minutes, then whisked back into shelter.  Such women aren't "warriors," they are clotheshorses, whose costumes bespeak the wealth of the men who pay for them.  Anyway, after listening for years to Barack and Michelle attacking poor and working-class black people for being unworthy of them, I'm not interested in this kind of discourse.  

And why should Bernie Sanders, who is definitely not part of Biden's inner circle, dress as though he were?  He was up in the cheap seats on a working day, dressed for warmth by Vermont standards.  But all Seyer-Ochi could see was a "a wealthy, incredibly well-educated and -privileged white man, showing up for perhaps the most important ritual of the decade, in a puffy jacket and huge mittens."  What (as the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote) do we see? What do we not see?

Seyer-Ochi is nothing if not fair and balanced: "I mean in no way to overstate the parallels. Sen. Sanders is no white supremacist insurrectionist. But he manifests privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege, in ways that my students could see and feel."  I mean in no way to suggest that Seyer-Ochi is an anti-Semite, but her bizarre attack on a Jewish politician manifests Gentile privilege.

I think Sanders knows quite well the privilege he has, given his working-class parents and childhood, the Brooklyn accent that infuriates so many people, and his left-wing politics.  He also knows that as a senior US Senator he has tremendous privilege.  (There is a large literature on the conflict, even guilt, many working-class people feel about the gulf an education and a profession opens between them and their parents; it's been a big help to me personally.  If Seyer-Ochi is unaware of it, she should check it out, for the sake of her students.)  Seyer-Ochi also has a lot of privilege, as "a former UC Berkeley and Mills College professor, ex-Oakland Unified School District principal and current San Francisco Unified School District high school teacher."  Perhaps she thinks she can atone for her privilege by writing an empty-headed screed like this.  As analysis of a politician's sartorial choices, it ranks down there with the Great Tan Suit Scandal of 2014.

She bears down on the "blindness I see, of so many (Bernie included), to the privileges Bernie represents. I don’t know many poor, or working class, or female, or struggling-to-be-taken-seriously folk who would show up at the inauguration of our 46th president dressed like Bernie. Unless those same folk had privilege. Which they don’t."  So is Seyer-Ochi saying that if poor, working-class, etc., people showed up for the inauguration in anything but their Sunday best, she'd shame them, or nod approvingly while others did? 

The best reply to Seyer-Ochi, I think, is the reply given to frothers who countered the pictures of Obama using his desk as a footstool with pictures of other Presidents doing the same.  In Sanders's case, there are two.  There's this one, of the context:

Of course all those other people are just showing white privilege too, maybe they'd been assigned to the White Privilege section.

And then there's this one, of the new Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, desecrating the holiest day of the past decade with her white privilege.

C'mon, would it kill her to smile a little?

I understand why Seyer-Ochi's students might be confused by the way Sanders dressed on that day, just as I understand the confusion of late 20th-century American Indian students who enter graduate school armed with 19th-century essentialist concepts of race and culture, only to discover that the discourse has changed.  I don't understand (well, okay, I do) why a teacher would let them stew in their assumptions instead of encouraging them to think about the meaning of the norms of dress and deportment that had shaped their lives and those of their parents and grandparents.  The class assumptions in African-American culture, the Talented-Tenth arrogance of those who managed to get an education and a profession against brutal odds, the Paper Bag Test which valued light skin over dark, are also understandable, and they're tragic, but they shouldn't be treated uncritically.  It doesn't mean that Seyer-Ochi's students should dress like Bernie Sanders if they go to an inauguration, but they do need to know what their choices mean, no less than Sanders'.  As Virginia Woolf may or may not have said, the real trouble with privilege is that everybody doesn't have it.

What's in a Name?

I feel for writers and journalists who cover politics, because they have to attend to the corporate news media: Fox, CNN, the corporate broadcast networks, public broadcasting, and a range of print media.  Just listening to NPR for an hour or two each morning makes me climb the walls: how much worse would it be if it were my job to follow it and all the others?

Last Sunday, for example, NPR's Weekend Edition gave airtime to an instructor in government at Dartmouth College, to opine on Donald Trump's refusal to concede the election to Joe Biden.  Host Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Brendan Nyhan "Why is he doing this? Is this a soft coup? And what I'm hearing you say is that this misses the larger picture of what's happening to democracy itself."

NYHAN: That's right. I think coup is the wrong way to think about this. We're not seeing an attempted military takeover. What we're seeing instead is a violation of the norms of democracy that we depend on to make the peaceful transfer of power possible. And as those norms get called into question, we start to see more of what political scientists call democratic erosion, where a system of government remains a democracy, but the norms and values that make democracy work start to be called into question.

Most of this is unexceptionable, a string of the buzzwords you'll hear on any network.  I do take serious exception to Nyhan's claim that "coup is he wrong way to think about this."  While most Americans probably do think that "coup" (short for "coup d'état") refers to a military takeover, it actually means any sudden and extralegal seizure of power in an institution.  Violence is optional, the icing on the cake.  An academic should know better, and clarify the issue rather than obscuring it.  Instead the one substantive assertion Nyhan made was false.  But this is NPR we're dealing with.

Later in the week, on Friday, Morning Edition brought in a heavy-hitter, an intelligence officer in the Trump regime until 2019.  Host Steve Inskeep asked Sue Gordon, "I'm thinking about the fact that you have briefed presidents. If this event were happening in a different country and you were briefing the president about it, what would you call it?"

Gordon worded her response with some care:

SUE GORDON: We would talk about it as basically - if it were a purported democracy, I think we would say the democracy's teetering on the edge. If I were briefing the president on this at this moment in time, and this White House were doing what this is doing and I happen to be in the Oval, I would say stop it.

"If it were a purported democracy"?  This is hard to take seriously.  Whether a country is a "purported democracy" has little to do with its political institutions and practices and a lot to do with how the US views it.  During the Trump years the US has backed and even participated in at least two coups against elected governments, in Venezuela and Bolivia.  Harking back to Brendan Nyhan, in Venezuela the military didn't back the coup, much to the indignation of US commentators, so by his standards it may not count.  In Bolivia the military carried out the coup with considerable violence, so Nyhan would presumably be satisfied.  Mainstream US and UK commentators and political authorities were reluctant to label either action a coup, partly for reasons I'll into presently, but for now the fact that two democratically elected governments were overthrown, with various degrees of violence, didn't concern the media or the US government: they denied the legitimacy of the elections instead.  (Does that sound familiar?)  Contrary to Sue Gordon, in such cases US intelligence would not say to "stop it."  Nor would NPR or other mainstream news media.

We all know that Trump is a very bad man, though.  President Obama was good, right?  Actually, no: he supported numerous oppressive dictatorships and backed the far right-wing Venezuelan opposition with millions of taxpayer dollars.  He hedged a bit when the Honduran military overthrew an elected President, fiddling with aid payments for a little while, but eventually gave in.  

Obama's initial response to the 2013 military overthrow of the elected president of Egypt was somewhat firmer.  Obama wasn't pleased, but many in his regime were.  President Morsi was unpopular in US government circles because he was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his incompetent governance seems to have turned the populace against him.  There were street demonstrations demanding that Morsi step down, much like those that had led to the removal of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011.  Back then Obama had been

naturally inclined to side with young, Internet-savvy protesters against an 82-year-old dictator who ran a cruel police state. But Mubarak was also a longtime U.S. ally who opposed Islamic radicals, honored a peace treaty with Israel and gave the Pentagon vital access to the Suez Canal. Younger aides like Rhodes, Power and Antony Blinken, then Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, urged Obama to get “on the right side of history” and give Mubarak a decisive push. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would later describe them, in her memoir, as being “swept up in the drama and idealism of the moment.” 

I wonder, though: if Morsi hadn't inspired such intense personal dislike in US rulers and their clients, couldn't they have cut him some slack, as they would for any struggling new leader?  Morsi "spent much of his energy struggling against resistance from an entrenched establishment — the soldiers, spies, police, judges and bureaucrats left in place from six decades of autocracy."  If he failed "to fulfill the promises of the Tahrir Square uprising" that removed Mubarak, shouldn't wiser heads have urged that Morsi be given more time?  Two years in office against six decades of dictatorship isn't that long.  I can't help thinking that our champions of democracy were relieved to have a "strongman" in charge again - the kind of person US elites and their cronies are accustomed to doing business with.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose rulers feared elections and dreaded them even more if they were presented as Islamic, lobbied hard to convince Washington that Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were a threat to American interests. And American officials later concluded that the United Arab Emirates were also providing covert financial support for protests against Mr. Morsi.

Wait a minute - Saudi Arabia is afraid of Islamism?  That does not compute: the Kingdom is a notorious Islamist regime.  And the UAE were undermining Morsi?  Who's at fault here, really?

When a murderous autocrat is a longtime ally to the US and a friend to Israel, his country becomes an honorary "purported democracy."  Democracy is all very well until the wrong people win an election, and then "drama and idealism" must be set aside.  Obama wasn't exactly pleased, we're told, when General Sisi massacred at least a thousand pro-Morsi demonstrators, but what can you do?

Supporting a military coup would hardly send a positive message about democracy. But declaring Sisi’s power grab a coup would, by law, cut off all U.S. military aid to Cairo. So be it, argued Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who wrote in the Washington Post: “we may pay a short-term price by standing up for our democratic values, but it is in our long-term national interest to do so.” Obama wasn’t prepared to go that far. The administration publicly danced around the word “coup” for weeks until, at an August 6, 2013, briefing, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki memorably announced: “We have determined that we do not have to make a determination.” (“What is a coup?” Wael Haddara, a senior adviser to Morsi, asked the New York Times. “We’re going to get into some really Orwellian stuff here.”)

At first Obama dug in his heels, freezing military aid, cancelling joint military exercises, demanding "credible progress" toward a "democratically elected civilian government."  John Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, and Kerry

declared a few weeks after the coup that Egypt’s generals were “restoring democracy” to the country and quickly worked to reverse the aid freeze. Kerry had an ally in Hagel, who had developed a relationship with Egypt’s top general. Both men believed they could moderate Sisi’s behavior. “Kerry thinks he can get guys to do things because they trust him, even if it’s not necessarily in their interest,” says one former State Department official. Hagel sent Sisi Ron Chernow’s 904-page biography of George Washington, urging him to read a chapter about Washington peacefully relinquishing the presidency.

(I love that last bit - it reminds me of Ronald Reagan sending a copy of the Christian Bible to Iranian leaders in 1986.)

As it turned out, Kerry was wrong: he couldn't get Sisi to "do things."  He announced after a 2014 meeting that Sisi  'gave me a very strong sense of his commitment' to human rights issues."  The very next day, Sisi cracked down violently on dissent, but it all turned out okay: he "was officially 'elected' Egypt’s president with a reported 96.1 percent of the vote."  So Egypt was officially a "purported democracy" again.  In 2015 Obama restored military aid to Sisi's regime, personally calling the General to pledge his fealty.  As Glenn Greenwald wrote at the time,

Obama’s move is as unsurprising as it is noxious, as American political elites — from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright — along with the Israeli Right have been heaping praise on Sisi the way they did for decades on Mubarak. (“I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family,” said Hillary Clinton in 2009. “So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.”)

Two things to notice here.  One is that the wise adults running US foreign policy, who sneer at youthful idealism, have a vastly overrated estimation of their competence.  That's familiar from more than a century of American imperialism and support for repressive dictators, aka "the Free World."  There's something about swarthy men in uniform forcibly holding down the primitive brown-skinned masses, who just don't know what's good for them, that makes our leaders go all moist.

The other is that the word "coup" isn't just a word: using it has legal consequences.  If a coup overthrows a government you dislike, for whatever reasons, then you simply don't call it a coup, because then you'd have to take action against it.  And that wouldn't do.  Maybe the remedy is to stop pretending that the US cares about human rights; our historical practice down to the present proves otherwise.  The law clearly doesn't place any constraint on our government, let alone others.

It's pointless to fret about how the US media, intelligence agencies, and government officials would react to Trump's current efforts to overturn the 2020 election, because we know how they feel about coups.  If it were happening in a different country, there might be some division in their ranks -- some unrealistic idealists -- but the sensible, responsible, realistic ones would hail Trump for "restoring democracy," and Trump as the savior of freedom.  Hillary Clinton would remind us that she considers Mr. and Mrs. Trump to be friends of her family, as indeed they are.  John Kerry would send Trump a copy of Barack Obama's new thousand-page memoir.  Obama himself would order idealistic young people to stop complaining and learn to work within the system.  We wouldn't want to alienate our good allies by stirring up trouble.

Is Your Hate Pure?

Samuel Moyn was referring, I thought, to Democratic loyalists' obsession with Trump and their evident belief that all criticism of Democratic politicians comes from the Right, and is therefore motivated by love of Donald Trump.  People on the left who vote Democratic but still criticize Democratic candidates must therefore love Trump and want him to win in November.

On reflection, though, I had to admit that I don't hate Trump all that much.  I want him out of office, I want him in prison, and he seems to be a completely loathsome person.  Is there anyone who likes him as a human being, let alone loves him?  He seems to have plenty of toadies, hangers-on, people who cling to him in hopes of scoring some money, prestige, or power: but asking whether they like him is like asking whether remora fish like sharks.  That's what a powerful man is supposed to be like, isn't it?

Perhaps since I'm at a safe distance from Trump, I don't feel a personal hatred or loathing for him.  I'd feel a profound satisfaction if he was convicted for his many crimes and spent the rest of his life in prison.  If he caught COVID-19 and died strangling in mucus, I'd feel a detached sympathy for him, but I would still say "Good riddance," and I wouldn't indulge in the eulogies that most people can't seem to resist about the worst human beings on the planet: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John McCain, etc.  I figure there's a good chance I'll outlive him, and after the terrible damage he's done to this country and the world, I'm curious to see if the usual suspects try to paint him as a good man despite everything.  How low will they sink? ... But the point is, I don't hate him the way so many of liberals do, he's not an itch I have to scratch 24/7 until I bleed.  As my mother always said, if you pick at it, it won't get well.

I used to feel the same way about Barack Obama, as evil as he is.  I admit, when I learned he'd been lying about the Affordable Care Act, claiming falsely that "if you like the policy you have, you can keep it," I felt great anger and disgust; but that was about me, because I'd been defending the ACA based on that claim.  In the end I was even angrier at liberal ACA apologists who defended Obama's lies.  But I didn't hate him; to me that would be as absurd as loving him, thinking he's my father and and that he loves and cares for me. 

Until lately, that is.  His interventions and comments on the political scene this past year have been progressively more obnoxious, and last week he gave us this:

Quite a few people quoted Obama's by-now notorious boast:

“You wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas that was me, people.”

This is funny, really: I thought that Obama couldn't do anything, he was totally helpless because the wicked Republicans obstructed him at every turn?  So apparently he could do some things: subsidize fossil fuel companies, open the Arctic to drilling, waffle on the Dakota Access PipeLine, okay other oil pipelines.  Ironically, though, according to the AP article which quotes Obama's boast, many don't agree that he can take the credit for America's increased oil production.

People threw Obama's terrible environmental record back in his face.  One of the pleasant things about Twitter is that you often can get up in a politician's face, or at least his account, and tell him or her off.  You'll almost never get a reply, but it's better than shaking your fist and yelling at the TV. 

I've said before that Obama unknowingly did serious damage to the claim that voting can bring about change.  That ultimately helped to give us Donald Trump, as large numbers of people lost faith in the promises candidates make.  It didn't help that Obama was openly contemptuous of the voters, especially poor black voters, once he was in office, and just as contemptuous of activists who organized to pressure him outside the electoral process.  His wife, friend to war criminals, seconded that contempt this year. 

So now Obama claims that "Protecting our planet is on the ballot."  Is it?  Biden's website (recently and miraculously updated after the actress and activist Susan Sarandon pointed out it had been neglected) promises lofty goals, even alludes glancingly to the Green New Deal.  Will he deliver, assuming he wins the election?  Who knows?  Given his past, I sure don't.  One would have thought protecting the planet was on the ballot in 2008 and 2012, but it didn't quite work out that way.  Like it or not, you're not voting for issues, you're voting for a candidate, and then you're expected to shut up and get out of the way -- until your candidate needs more money.

Now, though, when I see that Obama has tweeted something, I feel a twinge of hatred.  Hatred isn't something I give lightly.  Like a vote, it has to be earned.  And I'm finally recognizing that Obama has earned it.  Which, I admit, with a dollar, will get him on the bus.  But it's a milestone for me.

Three War Criminals, All in a Row

It's been entertaining to watch the various vultures squabbling over the remains of the late John Lewis. At the memorial service, Bill Clinton praised Lewis for being moderate in not Going Too Far as Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) did.  This set off predictable fury in the left Twittersphere, but really, did anyone really believe the overall spectacle was going to be anything but embarrassing?  Clinton doesn't know or doesn't care (you decide) that Lewis was pretty extreme; his address at the 1963 March on Washington had to be pared back by Movement censors / PR people to avoid troublesome excess.  And of course, Martin Luther King was always Going Too Far for the comfort of white moderates, and Rosa Parks continued Going Too Far for the rest of her long life.

Then the Right threw tantrums over Barack Obama's eulogy of Lewis, which they claimed "politicized" the sacred event.  Leftists and liberals derided them, pointing out that politicians' funerals are always political, except when Bill Clinton is there. The fun part is that when Clinton and Obama croak, right-wingers will forget everything they said about keeping the memorials apolitical, and liberals will be furious that the Rethugs are dragging politics into it. I hope I live to see it. 

But Obama ... I heard a couple of clips from his performance, and I don't know if I have the strength to watch the whole forty-minute thing, so this will have to do for now.  The first one included a denunciation of the use of tear gas and clubs against peaceful demonstrators, which Obama was perfectly comfortable with while he was President.  (The crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street looked very much like the ones we've seen the past several weeks.)  In the second clip I heard, he did a very poor impersonation of a fiery black preacher, evidently under the impression that such low comedy was appropriate for the occasion - and I guess it was, because liberals have been wetting their pants over his inspiring and articulate oratory.  Some of what he said was unexceptionable, such as restoring protection of voting rights; but his support won't help it happen, and I would hope that no one needs his advice to see it as important.

Ah Yes! I Remember It Well..

Liberals: I miss President Obama SO much! I wish we could be back in those wonderful days, when we had a real President!

Leftists: He was a war criminal, killed children, deported millions, stomped on civil liberties, toadied to Wall Street... 

Liberals: WHY DO YOU KEEP DWELLING IN THE PAST?! LET IT GO!!!

Surely, Comrades, You Want Obama Back?

I didn't mean to return to this topic, but over the weekend some new light was shed on it.  Mehdi Hasan, a writer for the Intercept, stuck his foot into the Democratic rehabilitation of Bush a week or two ago, and now he answered a tweet by Glenn Greenwald on a related matter.

Greenwald posted a couple of video clips from 2013, in which Barack Obama debunked "the long-standing but central DC myth that the two parties are radically opposed on ideology & policy. Instead, he correctly explained, they're far more similar than different, & the US entails far less ideological dispute than most democracies."

Hasan replied: "Agree with this. But also agree with Noam Chomsky’s rider, to me, in 2016: 'Small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences.'"  And added: "I’m not disputing at all that he’s sadly right about the similarities, over the differences, just that the differences - while not enough for my liking! - can also result in millions of people getting healthcare or not, living or dying, getting asylum, not getting poisoned, etc."

As a matter of principle I agree with Chomsky's dictum, which is why I've mostly gritted my teeth, held my nose and voted for Democrats for the past few decades, though I did vote for Ralph Nader in 1996 and 2000.  But Hasan inadvertently undermined the recommendation. Before he took office, Obama had spoken positively about single-payer, but once he was president he blocked discussion of single-payer, even a "public option," in favor of continuing America's harmful private-insurance-based healthcare system, with some significant but minor reforms; it's reasonable to suppose that he changed his stance in collaboration with his donors and supporters in the insurance and healthcare industry.  But by the time he left office, premiums were soaring again, and even if Trump hadn't become president, even if a devastating pandemic hadn't come along, it's arguable that the whole unwieldy edifice of "Obamacare" would have crumbled under its own weight by now.  The choices Obama made improved many people's condition, but they were always at best a stopgap.  John McCain and Mitt Romney would probably have done no better, though it's important not to forget that the Affordable Care Act was based on Romney's own program for Massachusetts.  Obama made a small difference, but I can't agree that it constituted "enormous consequences."

From there, Hasan is in even worse trouble.  Most Americans' health declined during the Obama years, as their income stagnated and the stress under which they lived and worked increased. Life expectancy in the US began to decline in 2014.  Economic inequality increased, in large part because of policies Obama chose to enact.  Meanwhile, corporate profits soared.  Obama sought ways to justify cuts in Social Security and Medicare, with the long view toward destroying them.  "Living or dying"?  I cannot see any enormous positive consequences in that area resulting from Obama's election, and we don't know what his opponents would have done.  Probably worse, but who knows?

Overseas, Obama made sure that vast numbers of people died: he tried to prolong the US occupation of Iraq, he did escalate the US war in Afghanistan, he continued or started little wars that got less attention, he turned Libya into a slave market, he supported the Saudi invasion of Yemen, he droned wedding parties and bombed hospitals, and he joked about it.  He supported dictatorships and military coups, he materially supported the right-wing opposition in Venezuela, he tut-tutted over Israeli atrocities but continued to support them -- need I go on?

"Not getting poisoned"?  Obama supported fossil fuels, turning the US into a major oil exporter; supported nuclear power; equivocated on destructive oil pipelines, and undermined world action against climate change.

"Getting asylum"?  Obama deported a record number of immigrants, scolded them that they had to "earn" American citizenship (as he had?), and sent thousands of young Central American refugees back to danger and death in their home countries, knowingly.  Again, it's quite possible that McCain and Romney would have been worse, but we don't know, and electing Barack Obama had terrible consequences for millions of people in the US and around the world.  The strange thing is that Mehdi Hasan knows Obama's record at least as well as I do, and probably criticized him for it while he was in office: he writes for the Intercept, which published a lot of Obama-critical material.  Noam Chomsky, of course, was harshly critical of Obama throughout his tenure, and I don't think his tactical-voting recommendation means that he has changed his mind, or that he's nostalgic for the George W. Bush era.

Obama began his presidency with with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, and it wasn't unrealistic to be optimistic about his administration then.  He promptly showed that he had no intention of fulfilling the hopes he'd raised in his campaign.  For me the most telling example is his offering tax cuts for the rich as part of his inadequate stimulus package even before the Republicans demanded them.  That can't be blamed on Republican obstructionism: it was his own initiative, and it was all too typical of his style.  The Democrats lost control of Congress in the midterms, and after that his cult could blame everything he failed to do on the evil Republicans.  Not only Congress but most state governorships and many Federal judgeships fell into the hands of the far right, partly because Obama and the Democratic National Committee didn't bother to support down-ticket candidates, saving their money and resources to re-elect him in 2012.  I think it's fair to say that this outcome was not what Democratic voters had voted for.  These and more are the "enormous consequences" the country (and the world) got from Barack Obama.  I rather wish someone would ask Chomsky about this point.

I have to temper this somewhat, because I don't get the impression that most voters are even aware of most of the consequences that bother me.  They did feel the sluggish economic recovery he engineered, the stagnant economy (except for the very richest) he presided over, and that was more than enough to sap their enthusiasm for him.  That Obama squandered his mandate is unquestionable, however much he and his apologists blame the voters.  (Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti of The Hill are erratic commentators, but this clip is an accurate analysis.)

Suppose, as a thought experiment, that in a parallel universe Obama had run for the presidency as a Republican instead of a Democrat, defeated parallel Hillary Clinton, and once in office governed exactly as he did in our universe - the same policies, the same consequences.  Would Mehdi Hasan, and others like him, defend Obama in the same terms he did last weekend?  Would he say that Republican Obama was a disappointment, but other Republicans would have been worse, so we shouldn't come down on him too hard, because Trump is so awful?  I doubt it, but maybe they would, just as Hasan and others have defended George W. Bush as a lesser evil compared to Donald Trump: by determinedly forgetting and misrepresenting his record.  Obama is the Republican we were warned about.

If Joe Biden manages to defeat Trump in November, I expect Chomsky will attack him as he has attacked his predecessors, and I also expect Democratic loyalists will attack Chomsky for undermining President Biden and giving aid and comfort to the Rethugs.  I wonder where Mehdi Hasan will take his stand.  The function of their argument - probably not intentionally, they're not clever enough to think tactically - is to divert criticism of Democratic politicians by playing the ranking game.

The Twitterverse of Hysteria

On Friday Donald Trump delivered himself of another rambling word salad to CNBC's fawning Joe Kernen.  As usual, there was little substance in his remarks, but the closing upset a lot of people, particularly people who hadn't read it.  Or people who can't read; take your pick.

Kernen approached his quarry cautiously:

JOE KERNEN: Do I dare-- one last question.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Go ahead.

JOE KERNEN: Entitlements ever be on your plate?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: At some point they will be. We have tremendous growth. We’re going to have tremendous growth. This next year I-- it’ll be toward the end of the year. The growth is going to be incredible. And at the right time, we will take a look at that. You know, that’s actually the easiest of all things, if you look, cause it’s such a--

JOE KERNEN: If you’re willing--

PRESIDENT TRUMP: --big percentage.

JOE KERNEN: --to do some of the things that you said you wouldn’t do in the past, though, in terms of Medicare--

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, we’re going-- we’re going[,] look. We also have-- assets that we’ve never had. I mean we’ve never had growth like this. We never had a consumer that was taking in, through-- different means, over $10,000 a family. We never had the kind of-- the kind of things that we have. Look, our country is the hottest in the world. We have the hottest economy in the world....

Some people on Twitter have suggested that Trump doesn't know what "entitlements" are.  That's plausible, but it seems more likely to me that he just wasn't listening, and he didn't let himself be diverted by Kernen's attempt to drive him the way he wanted him to go.  Trump didn't take up the subject of entitlements, and Kernen gave up on it.

However, some on Twitter panicked; I'm not sure why.  One business journalist, Pedro Nicolasi da Costa, said flatly "Trump told CNBC he wants to cut Social Security."  I imagine he does want to, but he didn't say so to Kernen.  For backup he retweeted a tweet from something called The Bridge Project: "realDonaldTrump admitted he’s coming for your Medicare and SocialSecurity at the 'end of the year.'"  No, he didn't, but who cares?  We've got an endless election campaign going on here, and there can be no lily-livered white-feather conscientious objectors.

Two main themes emerged in replies.  One was that Trump and the GOP want to get rid of Social Security and Medicare, and his base of old white people are stupid to support him because he's taking away their money and OMFG we have to vote Democrat in November!  It's true that the GOP wants to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, and your little Medicaid too, but so do elite Democrats.  The current Democratic favorite among older voters, Joe Biden, has been trying to cut these programs for forty years.  How will voting for Biden benefit me on this issue?  I spent some time pointing this out, and the few people who answered me said that Trump must go and they will Vote Blue No Matter Who so don't bother me with this trivia.  

They simply ignored the little problem of Biden, though I liked the person who wrote: "Interesting some claim Joe Biden is for cutting Social Security but ignore that Trump AND [McConnell]have been saying it for months and ARE CUTTING SSDI & EBT now. They openly say they will cut SS if they win the 2020 election. It should be a major scandal but is ignored!"  "Some claim" - that's funny, because Biden's record on cutting Social Security is well-documented, but his campaign claims that the videos have been misleadingly edited and are Fake News.  Even such Trumpian tactics are acceptable when Democrats use them.

Not only that, but Barack Obama wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare, blaming them for the deficit.  He failed because the Congressional GOP was so determined to block him that they wouldn't accept a gift they'd long wanted.  (One person answered me, claiming that yes, Obama wanted to, but he failed and he realized he was wrong, so it doesn't count.  First, it's not true, Obama never changed his position; and second, this is exactly the argument Trump's defenders have made: that yes, he wanted to withhold military aid from Ukraine, but he didn't get the investigation he asked for, and he released the aid in the end, so it doesn't count.  Again, it's okay to use such a worthless defense for Obama, but not for Trump.)  Trump's willfully blind base have nothing on these people.

The other theme was the familiar one about how Social Security and Medicare are not "entitlements," they're "earned benefits," and anyway, it's our money that we worked for and paid, so they are entitlements and we are entitled, so there, too!  If you don't like it, I want my money back!  You'll remember the suggestion that Trump doesn't know what "entitlement" means?  Well, neither do Democrats.  (To be quite honest, I'm not sure it's only Democrats who say this; pro-Trump Republicans do too, if they think a Democrat wants to put his government hands on their Medicare and Social Security.)

But really, the worst part -- both hilarious and terrifying -- is the claim that Democrats will protect our Social Security and Medicare so Vote Blue No Matter Who.  What Obama tried to do is down the memory hole, if they ever noticed it -- and it's not as if Obama weren't open about it and it weren't covered in the mainstream media.  Bill Clinton also tried, but was blocked by his impeachment.  But what must not be cannot be. 

A Thousand Milliseconds of Peace

I'm actually kind of glad that Pete Buttigieg is running for President, because it gives me an answer to a question I didn't really expect to see answered.

A number of black friends have complained since 2008 that I just don't understand how much it means to them to have a black President, and that my lack of enthusiasm for Barack Obama is at least partly because I'm white.  During the 2016 campaign, a number of women I knew had the same complaint: because I'm male, I just didn't understand how important Hillary's candidacy was to them.  In both cases they regarded the candidates' policies and record as minor distractions compared to the historic significance of a black or female president: they found it irritating, even upsetting, to be pressured to think about them. 

I still think they were wrong, and that I did understand very well what it meant.  I just thought that their candidates' policies were more important than his race or her sex, and that the boost to the self-esteem of their fans was, while not completely unimportant, much less important than the lives of the many people (including women and people of color) their policies would materially harm.

Just in the past few days, a woman argued angrily on Twitter that white male contenders (Sanders, Biden, O'Rourke, Buttigieg) were once again getting all the attention, and that it was time women of color had a chance to show what they could do.  I didn't think this was entirely unfair until I remembered that similar claims were made for Obama and Clinton.  Obama did not, as far as I can tell, govern differently than a white male of his class.  Clinton was not elected, but her record of warmongering and her glee over other people's deaths does not inspire confidence in me that she'd have brought woman-wisdom and Earth-based grandmother-compassion to the Oval Office.  (See her gloating over the death of Qadafy in the clip linked here, for example.)  That doesn't mean that we shouldn't elect another black man or a woman of any color to the presidency, only that sex and race are not qualifications for the office.  I think that the examples of Obama and Clinton confirm this.

Still, I admit to some qualms about my position.  If an openly gay person became a viable candidate, would I cut him or her more slack than I have to Obama or Clinton?  Would the world-historical significance of a homosexual presidential candidate, and what that would mean to young gay kids in America and around the world, sweep away my concerns about such a person's policies and record?  I couldn't deny that until it happened, I wouldn't know for sure, and I didn't really expect to see it happen in my lifetime.  So it's mildly gratifying, for selfish reasons, to find that my faculties remain intact in the face of Pete Buttigieg's campaign.  And what I saw during the Obama and Clinton campaigns is happening again: Buttigieg's fans don't care about his policies, they care about irrelevancies (often charming ones, but irrelevancies nonetheless) and their fantasies about him.

Jacob Bacharach wrote an entertaining essay on the gayness of Mayor Pete, and while it's not his best work, nor is it as good as Nathan J. Robinson's close reading of Buttigieg's autobiography, it's worth reading.  It reminds me of Sarah Schulman's discussion of American commodification of homosexuality in her 1998 book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Duke), which was brilliant then and feels prescient now.  I may return to that some other time, but for now I want to mention one other thing about Buttigieg that concerns me.

One of his selling points, one he stresses in public statements and that is echoed by many of his fans, is that people are tired of divisiveness, and that he can bring us together.  That's how Barack Obama marketed himself, and it's how many of his fans see him to this day.  And if that's what Pete Buttigieg wants to be, he should not be president, because while he wants to play nice, his Republican opponents do not.  Obama and his crew claimed to be, and maybe were, taken totally by surprise at how mean the Republicans were: You guyzzzzz!!!  This is so unfair!  Why won't you work with me instead of against me?  Obama threw staff they targeted to the wolves, rather than fight for them.  If the Republicans can't keep Pete Buttigieg out of office, they'll set out to block him from the get-go, as they did with Obama.  It'll be comforting to blame the Rethugs for the next Democratic President's failures, but it's a comfort we can't afford.  We need a president who can fight back, and it doesn't appear that Buttigieg has had to deal with that kind of total war yet, so there's no way to know how he'll cope if he's elected in 2020.  Of course, he'll also need good advisors and a Supreme Court and Democratic-controlled Congress that will work with him.  Playing board games, having a husband who's followed on Twitter by Lin-Manuel Miranda, liking Joyce's Ulysses, performing with Ben Folds -- all these are cute, but if we get a third Obama term, we are truly doomed.

Who Wants to Be the Last to Go Bankrupt Before Medicare for All Kicks In?

Pete Buttigieg (it's not actually that hard to pronounce) has been getting attention from a number of people I respect, and from some I don't.  Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a city I lived near for the first twenty or so years of my life and lived in for two of those years, so I'd heard of him before he decided to run for the American Presidency.  He came to my attention first because he's gay; getting elected to a traditionally Republican*, Roman Catholic city like South Bend is an impressive achievement for a gay man, even a married one, even a veteran.  It recently occurred to me that none of the right-wing Christian frothers I'm friends with on Facebook freaked out when he was first elected, even though some of them live in South Bend.  How'd he do it?

Recently a lefty tree-hugger friend of mine, an IU alumnus but now resident in the Bay Area, linked to Buttigieg's recent appearance on Stephen Colbert's Late Show.  My friend was highly impressed by Buttigieg's performance; I was more concerned that a homophobic "centrist" Obama toady like Colbert found Buttigieg acceptable.  Then Glenn Greenwald began praising him, which I take more seriously.  Greenwald is temperate in his praise:

There are specific policy views expressed by @PeteButtigieg I disagree with, but have been very impressed by him from the moment I began paying attention. I couldn't put my finger on why. Part of it was his heterodox thinking. But now I see the crux: he only speaks authentically...

As he links to Buttigieg's statement to South Bend's Muslims in the wake of the Christchuch massacre.  Fair enough, I guess, but this really just strengthened my doubts.  First, while he doesn't use the word, it seems that Greenwald is impressed by Buttigieg's charisma -- and he should know as well as I do the dangers of charismatic politicians.  There's an uncharacteristic lack of focus on Buttigieg's actual positions here ("I couldn't put my finger on why"), focusing on the claim that he "only speaks authentically".

To speak as authentically as I can, I'm not sure what that means.  Buttigieg's statement is fine, the kind of thing that any halfway experienced politician should be able to produce in his or her sleep.  That many such can't do so wide awake, with their staffs working on it at white heat, only means that the bar is pretty low.  (Compare this appalling screed by an Australian Senator to see how low the bar can go.)  Mayor Pete clears that bar, but it's not a sterling achievement.

Greenwald also wrote of Buttigieg's "heterodox thinking."  Heterodoxy is relative only to a respective orthodoxy, and I wonder which one Greenwald has in mind.  So I began looking for some of Buttigieg's specific policy positions, and found this interesting summary of his performance at a recent CNN town hall, reprinted in the Chicago Tribune from the Washington Post.  Notice that it's the work of Jennifer Rubin, a far right-wing writer, which makes her positive take on Buttigieg all the more disturbing.

He was asked about Venezuela. "Well, the situation in Venezuela is highly disturbing. And I think that the Maduro regime has lost its legitimacy," he explained. "That's why it's not just the U.S. but 50 countries that have declined to recognize the legitimacy of that regime."

He continued, "That being said, that doesn't mean we just carelessly threaten the use of military force, which is what it appeared the national security adviser was doing at one point, kind of hinting that troops might be sent to South America."

... "I don't mean to disagree that we need to support democratic outcomes in that country. And so to the extent that sanctions can be targeted and can be focused on trying to bring about new free and fair elections so that there can be self-determination by the Venezuelan people, that puts in a government that I think has that legitimacy, then we should do our part not through force but through the diplomatic tool kit in order to try to bring that outcome about."

Rubin gushes, "That might be the best answer on Venezuela I've heard from any Democratic candidate — maybe the best foreign policy answer, period."  Really?  It looks to me like the standard "centrist" answer to questions about US interference in Venezuela, and it's anything but "heterodox."  Buttigieg disavowed "carelessly threaten[ing] the use of military force" (maybe careful threats are okay?), which the other Dems would agree with, while endorsing the use of sanctions to starve the mass of Venezuelans into submission.  The kinds of sanctions that might target only government elites would probably also affect the wealthy, right-wing creoles of the opposition, and that would not go down well.

As far as "free and fair elections," Venezuela already has them, and that's why the US wants to overturn them: they produce outcomes we don't like.  Buttigieg says that "the Maduro regime has lost its legitimacy."  First, it never had any in the eyes of the US government, its lackey states, and its tame media; nor did Chavez' "regime," which the US began trying to replace with more corporate-friendly authoritarians from the time Chavez took office.  Second, the most recent election Maduro won was certified fair by international observers; presumably Buttigieg, like the rest of the US mainstream, chooses to forget that.  Finally, the US' designated hitter Juan Guaidó has no legitimacy whatsoever: he has won no election, has no mass base, and only has a platform because of US support.  He also says he's "not afraid of civil war" and hoped to incite US military intervention by staging provocations at the border with Colombia.  Whether Buttigieg likes it or not, that's the "self-determination" he's calling for and supporting.  This is not a minor issue either, because it indicates what Buttigieg's approach to other official enemies (such as North Korea, Iran, or Syria) would look like.

Next Rubin quotes Buttigieg's position on Medicare for all.  He praised the Affordable Care Act, which he said "made a great difference."

"That's why I believe we do need to move in the direction of a Medicare-for-all system. Now, I think anyone in politics who lets the words ‘Medicare-for-all’ escape their lips also has a responsibility to explain how we could actually get there, because as you know, from working on this day in and day out, it's not something you can just flip a switch and do.

"In my view, the best way to do that is through what you might call a Medicare-for-all-who-want-it setup. In other words, you take some flavor of Medicare, you make it available on the exchange as a kind of public option, and you invite people to buy into it. So if people like me are right that that's ultimately going to be more efficient over time and more cost-effective, then you will see that very naturally become a glide path ..."

Ah, the "public option."  Again, that's hardly a "heterodox" position, any more than his gradualist "move in the direction."  Medicare itself was "something you can just flip a switch and do," both in the US and Canada.  Yes, it will take planning, but my impression is that the politicians who are spearheading the drive to Medicare for All are working on the planning and the details.  But it's not really hard to explain "how we could actually get there," since we could learn a great deal from Canada's implementation, not to mention the fact that we already have Medicare in this country for people 65 and older.  It's extremely popular with voters, as is the idea of a national single-payer system.  The basic infrastructure is already in place; it would not be a radical move to expand it.  I'd have a bit more respect for Buttigieg's gradualism if he balanced it by noting how much money and energy we waste on, say, the military.  Instead he went on to say:

"You know, we as a country pay out of our health care dollar less on patient care and more on bureaucracy than almost any other country in the developed world. And so it's very clear that we've got to do some unglamorous technical work. Actually, some of the benefits of automation could come in this sense. You think about how many hands have to touch a prior authorization sometimes. And the right answer to that should be zero, but we're not there yet. So we've got to do that, that kind of unfashionable technical work within (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) to make the system more efficient."

This is extremely misleading.  He may not have meant it that way, but in context Buttigieg gave the impression that the "bureaucracy" that runs up the costs of healthcare in the US is located within "the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services," so we need "to make the system more efficient."  I have no doubt that the Medicare administration has room for improvement, but it's hardly obscure that the wasteful bureaucracy that runs up costs so that too "many hands have to touch a prior authorization sometimes" belongs to the private insurance companies that Buttigieg wants to preserve until the Messiah comes.  A smart technocrat, as he presents himself to be, must know that. Again, there's nothing heterodox here, it's just centrist boilerplate.

I'm going to skip his remarks on impeachment, which are more safe on-one-hand/on-the-other hand stuff, perfectly compatible with the Democratic establishment.  Speaking of Buttigieg as smart technocrat, though:

"As to what Gov. (Mitt) Romney was talking about, look, we do need to work to make government more efficient. One of the things we did when I came in, in South Bend as mayor was — kind of a banned phrase around the county city building was 'We do it this way because we've always done it this way.'"

"We subjected everything we do to rigorous analysis, because at the city level, I don't get to print money. We legally have to balance the general fund budget. And if I want to do more, we just have to figure out a way to do what we're doing more efficiently or else we'll have to do less of something else. And sometimes that's the right answer, too.

"So I think that on-the-ground knowledge of how to get something done that I maybe began to get in the business community, but really put to work in public service at the local level, will be useful at a time when, frankly, in federal budgeting we're being told we can get something for nothing. And things that are completely unaffordable, like the tax cuts for the wealthiest, are being passed off as though they're worth just as much as things that if we ever do deficit spending would be a better use of it, like investing in infrastructure and education and the things that we know have a payback and will pay for themselves in the long run."

"We've always done it this way" is of course a stumbling block in private enterprise too, regularly attacked in books on management.  Wherever Buttigieg got his "on-the-ground knowledge of how to get something done," it wasn't "in the business community."  Beyond that, these remarks are standard centrist prattle about running government like a business, you can't get something for nothing, we have to balance the budget.  Many arguments can be made against these slogans, but the key point is that they are not heterodox, not bold path-breaking authentic proposals that no one has had the guts or imagination or passion to advance before.  Far from it: they're routine parts of every election cycle as far back as I can remember.

Maybe Buttigieg is better than these remarks indicate, but again, he made them on his own, in a showcase where he evidently felt free to say what he thinks.  Contrary to Glenn Greenwald, I don't see a lot of exciting authentic substance here.  When my Bay-Area friend was upset by my skepticism toward this shiny new guy, I made it clear that I don't think he's totally evil, he might amount to something someday, but I really think he should at least run for a legislative office, state or federal, before aiming at the Oval Office. Much of the excitement I see over Buttigieg, like the excitement I see over Robert "Beto" O'Rourke, whom he resembles, is based on his presentation, his aging-elfin cuteness, his undeniable intelligence rather than his positions, which I think are ground for concern rather than celebration.  O'Rourke has been compared to Obama in his vacuousness, but thanks to his political history O'Rourke's unsavory record is there for scrutiny for those who care.  But many don't care: they'd rather daydream at their desks, practicing writing their married name in their notebooks (guys, Mayor Pete already has a husband).

Which brings up what is by now a familiar paradox: smart liberals who denounce Joe and Jane Sixpack for focusing on personalities rather than issues, generally have very little interest in issues but swoon over personalities.  If a candidate has no personality or a repellent one, no problem -- they'll work very hard to persuade themselves that he's really the most charismatic candidate ever!  Pete Buttigieg doesn't have that problem, he's evidently an engaging person.  Speaking seven languages, I admit, is a refreshing change from the monolingual Trump and Obama.  If you like a candidate, invite him to dinner, ask her out for coffee, paper your room with posters, but that is no reason to overlook his policies, let alone a reason to vote for him.  It bothers me, because it's so reminiscent of the rise of Barack Obama over a decade ago, to see this pattern repeating itself among people who really are smart enough to know better.

*CORRECTION: I've learned since I wrote this that South Bend's mayors have been Democrats for decades.

Stand By Your Man

I saw this last night:

So true! If Obama had embraced dictators ... no, wait, he did that. If he'd killed US citizens with predator drones... no, wait, he did that too.  If he'd joked about killing US citizens with predator drones... damn... If he'd supported coups against elected governments ... no, wait... If he'd cozied up to Wall Street... no ... If he'd, uh, packed his cabinet with corporatist neoliberals... if he'd deported record numbers of immigrants... if he'd given massive tax cuts to the rich when the economy was staggering after a major crash... if he'd sought to cut Social Security and other vital services in order to "lower the deficit" ... if he'd escalated and started wars of choice based on lies... if he'd suppressed whistleblowers... give me a minute...

Oh, I know, Rev. Dr. Barber isn't thinking of such trivia, nor are his followers on Twitter.  They're more interested in Trump's payoff to a porn star with whom he'd had an affair.  Which is not insignificant and I suppose it's true that if Barack Obama had done such things he'd have been attacked by the Right pretending to care about sexual morality even as they embraced Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and eventually Donald Trump.  But his fans would not have stumbled; they'd have stood by him, as Dem loyalists stood by Bill Clinton, and still idolize the serial adulterer John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  Let's not forget Martin Luther King Jr., a major cockhound, or Jesse Jackson Sr.  White privilege should always be borne in mind, but I think it's a distraction here.

I think party loyalty and the personality cult that surrounds successful politicians are much more relevant.  In Obama's case, it's so effective that even George W. Bush gets to bask in his glory, his crimes forgotten and forgiven by centrist Democrats.  If we're going to talk about "Teflon," Obama's crimes and right-wing policies just don't exist for his devotees. They were largely ignored by the same elite political culture and corporate media that made Donald Trump a star. There is a double standard here, but it cuts both ways according to party affiliation or other commitments. And despite it, Trump has encountered much more effective principled opposition, in the streets and in Congress, than Obama did, even though the media especially are doing their best to accentuate the positive.  (I almost posted a link to the article there, but the title may have been changed.)  If Obama were a white Republican, I doubt William Barber would be as amnesiac about his record.

Barber expresses some good opinions elsewhere in his feed, including strong support for Representative Ilhan Omar, currently under attack by Democrats and Republicans alike for her criticism of the Israel lobby.  Obama, by contrast, was wholly subservient to AIPAC and cozy with Israeli strongman Benjamin Netanyahu.  (Netanyahu spurned him, though. Oh, the humanity!) It would be interesting if Obama were to defend Representative Omar, but it'll never happen; he prefers to boast (inaccurately, as it turns out) about his service to producers of fossil fuel.

Faith Is the Substance of Things Hoped For

There's a good new article at Politico on how people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who voted for Trump feel about him now.  The headline pretty much says it all: "Johnstown Never Believed Trump Would Help. They Love Him Anyway."

There's nothing surprising in the piece, but it's worth reviewing anyway.  The first thing I noticed was that the defenses his fans offer for Trump are exactly, word for word, the defenses Obama voters made for him.

“I think he’s doing a great job, and I just wish the hell they’d leave him alone and let him do it,” Schilling said. “He shouldn’t have to take any shit from anybody.”

And:

“Everybody I talk to,” [Del Signore] said, “realizes it’s not Trump who’s dragging his feet. Trump’s probably the most diligent, hardest-working president we’ve ever had in our lifetimes. It’s not like he sleeps in till noon and goes golfing every weekend, like the last president did.”

Reporter Michael Kruse speaks up:

I stopped him, informing him that, yes, Barack Obama liked to golf, but Trump in fact does golf a lot, too—more, in fact.

Del Signore was surprised to hear this.
“Does he?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
He did not linger on this topic, smiling and changing the subject with a quip. “If I was married to his wife,” Del Signore said, “I don’t think I’d go anywhere.”

He added: “Some of these things are like that thing he said to Billy, Billy Bob, Billy Bud”—searching, unsuccessfully, for the name Billy Bush—“on the bus, that comment he made.” Del Signore shrugged. “He’s a human male. I’m glad he wasn’t saying, ‘Hey, I like little boys.’ You know? So he’s not perfect.”

That's how you do it: when you're confronted with an inconvenient fact, make a joke, change the subject.  (Barack ended the wars!  No, he didn't.  He fixed the economy!  No, he didn't.  Well, those Republicans keep picking on his wife and kids.  And he got Bin Laden.  Sure, he's not perfect; sure, he's a bit of a disappointment.  But at least he's not Bush.)

“They always say they want to bring the steel mills back,” Frear said, “but they’re going to have to do a lot of work to bring the steel mills back.”

He hasn’t built the wall yet, either. “I don’t care about his wall,” said Frear, 76. “I mean, if he gets his wall—I don’t give a shit, you know? But he has a good idea: Keep ’em out.”

He also hasn’t repealed Obamacare. “That’s Congress,” she said.
And the drug scourge here continues unabated. “And it’s not going to improve for a long time,” she said, “until people learn, which they won’t.

“But I like him,” Frear reiterated. “Because he does what he says.”

As she has already admitted, Trump doesn't do what he says.  But she likes him, just as Obama's fans like him, and that's what matters.

Next to Bala was a gray-haired man who told me he voted for Trump and was happy so far because “he’s kept his promises.”

I asked which ones.

“Border security.” But there’s no wall yet. “No fault of his,” the man said.

What else? “Getting rid of Obamacare.” But he hasn’t. “Well, he’s tried to.”

What else? “Defunding Planned Parenthood.” But he didn’t. “Not his fault again,” the man said.

I asked for his name. “Bill K.,” he said. He wouldn’t give me his last name. “I don’t trust you,” he said.

As Kruse says, "They don’t mind his intemperate tweets. They don’t mind the specter of scandal, which they dismiss as trifling nonsense. They don’t mind his nuclear saber-rattling with North Korea, saying they feel safer under Trump than they did under Obama."

Of course they don't mind those scandals, if they were real -- which they claim not to believe, because of the Fake News, but I think they believe them and like them just fine.  The sexy stuff is okay because it proves he's what they consider a normal man, a real man, but the scandals are mostly about money, and a rich guy who cheats and lies and gouges to get ahead is fine with them, as long as they can believe he's on their side -- and they'll believe it no matter what.  Even his failure to come through on his promises is not so bad, because they have plenty of bad guys to blame, and their sense of grievance is stoked some more.  (We've seen the same pattern with Clinton apologists for the past year: it's not her fault, it's the Russians, it's the she-devil Sarandon, it's Bernie Sanders the rootless cosmopolitan, it's the sexist Bernie Bros, it's traitors stabbing her in the back just to make a buck.)

So many people in so many other areas of the country watch with dismay and existential alarm Trump’s Twitter hijinks, his petty feuds, his penchant for butting into areas where the president has no explicit, policy-relevant role. All of that only animates his supporters here. For them, Trump is their megaphone. He is the scriptwriter. He is a singularly effective, intuitive creator of a limitless loop of grievance and discontent that keeps them in absolute lockstep.

That counts for even more.  Trump speaks for them, especially at his most obnoxious.  When liberals are outraged by his antics, his fans are delighted, not just because he said what he said, but because he made the Politically Correct liberal snowflakes mad.  Just as liberals got all excited when Obama did a little strutting and posturing on the campaign trail, or when some Democratic pol or pundit says something that shuts down the GOP, eviscerates them, schools them; when the Stupid Rethugs are angered and offended by hearing The Truth.  It's why they crow with joy over homophobic anti-Trump jokes; jokes about the size of his hands and the supposedly corresponding tiny wee-wee; jokes about cheese and orange and bad hair and how mentally ill he is.  If Obama was mostly more subdued, his fans put that down to how classy he was, but secretly they wish he had gone on Twitter and put the Rethugs in their place.  If he had, they'd be as thrilled as Trump fans are when Trump says something naughty, something provocative, something a schoolteacher would paddle him for saying in fourth grade.

I know that feeling too, and I'm not immune to it.  What disturbs me, as I've said before, is not so much the transgressive "humor" as that neither side has anything better to offer after they've let off steam.  And that won't help anyone or fix anything.  So, for example, it was educational -- I was totally schooled -- to read the comments under one of Marcy Wheeler's tweets yesterday.

Observation: A year ago most Dems swore all massive leaks from unknown sourcing were bad.

Care to reconsider in light of Paradise Papers?

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) November 6, 2017

Though she went on to clarify, "Do think there is difference bt ICIJ & WL. Not clear there is between ICIJ & Intercept. But people should have some basis for distinguishing", many of her commenters ignored it and attacked Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, confused the Paradise Papers with the Panama Papers, and generally dodged her request for a workable distinction between good leaks and bad leaks.  They also quibbled over how many Democrats had objected to Snowden, often claiming that Wheeler had said "all" instead of "most" Democrats.  (I don't know about even "most" Democrats, but I do know that both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton condemned Snowden, mostly dishonestly.)  And so on: these steely-eyed, reality-based types, probably well-educated and well-informed compared to the average American, could not grasp a simple question because it might have required them to engage in some self-examination.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose tweet led me to Kruse's article, remarked "Re: Trump and economic insecurity..."  I admit, I'm not sure what he meant by that.  It's true that Kruse found a fair amount of open racism among the Jonestown Trump voters he talked to.

Schilling looked at her husband, Dave McCabe, who’s 67 and a retired high school basketball coach. She nodded at me. “Tell him,” she said to McCabe, “what you said the NFL is …”

McCabe looked momentarily wary. He laughed a little. “I don’t remember saying that,” he said unconvincingly.

Schilling was having none of it. “You’re the one that told me, liar,” she said.

She looked at me.

The NFL?

“Niggers for life,” Schilling said.

“For life,” McCabe added.

That's just about exactly as funny as a joke about Mike Pence "taking a knee" for Donald Trump.  (What's funnier is Maggie Frear, who told Kruse, "if I was the boss of these teams, I would tell ’em, ‘You get your asses out there and you play, or you’re not here anymore.’ They’re paying their salaries, for God’s sake."  Those NFL players are not supposed to be playing when they're taking a knee, nor does Frear want them to: she wants them to genuflect properly to the holy flag, which has nothing I can see to do with playing the game.  Del Signore, whose remarks follow Frears', has equally irrelevant complaints.)

But here's the thing: Kruse also details the extent of "economic insecurity" around Jonestown, which is felt by the Trump voters he talked to.  Unemployment, for example, is relatively low, but still higher than the national average.  The heroin crisis is in full swing too, with 94 overdose deaths last year in the county.  Significantly, given many whites' complaints about entitled, lazy blacks,

Some of the later-in-life blue-collar workers who are still here can be loath to learn new trades. “We’ve heard when working with some of the miners that they are reluctant because they’re very accustomed to the mining industry,” said Linda Thomson, the president of JARI, a nonprofit economic development agency in Johnstown that provides precisely the kind of retraining, supported by a combination of private, state and federal funding, that could prepare somebody for a job in [Bill] Polacek’s [manufacturing] plant. “They really do want to go back into the mines. So we’ve seen resistance to some retraining.”

Bill Polacek, the manufacturer mentioned in that paragraph, told Kruse,

“Right now, if I could find 150 people, I’d put them to work,” ... He needs machinists. He needs welders. “But it’s hard to find people,” he said—people with the requisite skills, people who can pass a drug test.

“We just don’t have the workforce,” said Liston, the city manager. “If they are employable, and have a skill set, basically they already moved out of the area.”

I don't think I quite believe Polacek here: his complaints are typical for employers trying to excuse their failure to provide jobs, but in context his excuses seem reasonable enough.  So yes, racism and economic insecurity are in the mix.  I'm not sure how liberal/left homophobia relates to economic insecurity; maybe its apologists would like to make a case.  I don't think it's that hard to condemn the racism while trying to do something about the economy, but as Polacek indicates, it's not as simple as one could wish to fix the economy.  Trump has no interest in doing it, but neither did Obama or Clinton, except for themselves and their wealthy donors and cronies.  Just like the Trump voters, Democratic apologists were full of excuses and distractions, not to mention mere misrepresentation of Obama's record -- when they didn't just shoot themselves in the foot by touting record corporate profits and stock prices as evidence of Obama's economic greatness.  So it's not exactly surprising that even many working- and middle-class whites who'd voted for Obama decided they wanted a change; their self-deception is not greater than that of Democrats.