Bitter Clingers in the Mist
Mark Finkelstein of Newsbusters spots Chuck Todd of MSNBC (who had worked for the 1992 campaign of phony Vietnam vet Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) before becoming a journalist) defending President Obama's infamous "bitter clingers" speech from 2008 in a recent interview with Andrea Mitchell:
CHUCK TODD: I would say the real danger for the president on issues like this, is less about this, and more about -- Paul Begala one time said this to me -- he said, you know, the guy really is his mother's son sometimes when it comes to studying society. He's anthropoligcal about it. Remember that time when he was studying people in Pennsylvania, and he said to that fundraiser in Pennsylvania, you know they cling to their guns. He wasn't meaning it as demeaning in his mind, but it came across that way.
ANDREA MITCHELL: It's intellectualized.TODD: He's the son of an anthropologist, and I think sometimes he goes about religion that way, almost in this, as I said because he's very well studied on, not just Christianity but on a lot of religions, but in that, frankly, anthropological way, and that can come across as distant.
As the gang here at Ricochet noted in their podcast Thursday, funny how a candidate sold to the public as "Spock-like" in 2008 turns out to be a president who's cool, distant, aloof, and views half of the country as some sort of weird alien group to make First Contact with -- when he isn't insulting them of course. (For a guy sold as being "post-partisan," he's arguably the most openly partisan president since Harry Truman and FDR were explicitly comparing their ideological opponents to Nazis.)
But then, the far left viewing Middle America from a distant anthropological perspective is nothing new. Back in 2002, Jonah Goldberg described this anthropological mindset as an ongoing media theme of "Conservatives in the Mist." As he wrote, "whenever I read liberals reporting about the goings-on of conservatives I always get the nature-documentary vibe:"
A liberal reporter puts on his or her Dian Fossey hat in order to attempt to write another installment of Conservatives in the Mist. I've followed this particular brand of reporting for years, it's almost a fetish of mine. Most attempts fail. Of these lesser varieties, there's fear ("Troglodytes!"), mockery ("Irrelevant troglodytes!"), condescension ("I had to explain to them they're troglodytes."), bewilderment ("Why don't they understand they're troglodytes?"), astonishment (Dear God, they're not all troglodytes!"), and a few combinations of all the above. But sometimes they even succeed, to a point. Thus, like the real Dian Fossey, they manage to saunter into the leafy thickets of conservatism, and are welcomed into a band of gorillas. They hold out the equivalent of a banana or maybe a fistful of grubs for long enough and eventually we come sniffing around. We're intrigued by the creature lavishing attention on us. And the reporter eventually begins to feel as though he has been accepted into the band. Eventually, we conservatives grow comfortable enough around them to return to our old patterns. We scratch and fight and do our gorilla things and the chronicler dutifully takes notes. The notes eventually make their way into an article for the New York Times or The New Yorker or Vanity Fair.
"Who knew?" the readers will say over their morning bagels and coffee in Southampton or Fire Island, "I had no idea conservatives were such intelligent creatures. Why they even have the capacity for emotion and even some rudimentary forms of kindness."
Okay, this metaphor has gone on too long already. But there are a couple of points worth making before we abandon it. No matter how hard Dian Fossey tried, she was never actually a gorilla. Second, no matter how much attention she paid, it's doubtful she understood what the gorillas were doing the way the gorillas themselves did. She may have gotten it right that BoBo was trying to woo Sally (or whatever the apes names were). But she probably could never understand the quality of the affection BoBo felt for Sally, in much the same way that an anthropologist or biologist can assert that you got married out of a natural human instinct to procreate but can't tell you how you feel about your wife.
Oh, and one last thing: Conservatives aren't gorillas, damnit!
Is it any wonder that wide swatches of the American public have tuned out on the president, and why the New York Times, which previously, had never met a religion it didn't want to bash (well, until it found a religion that bashes back hard, of course) is forced to write damage control material such this:
The White House says Mr. Obama prays daily, sometimes in person or over the telephone with a small circle of Christian pastors. One of them, the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, who was also a spiritual adviser to former President George W. Bush, telephoned a reporter on Wednesday, at the White House’s behest. He said he was surprised that the number of Americans who say Mr. Obama is Muslim is growing.
“I must say,” Mr. Caldwell said, “never in the history of modern-day presidential politics has a president confessed his faith in the Lord, and folks basically call him a liar.”
(As Frank Ross of Big Journalism quips, "Now where would anybody get that idea?")
Whatever else their flaws, I can't think of any other president, from either party, who viewed the American public not from the perspective of a fellow citizen, but as Chuck Todd of MSNBC noted at the start of this post, a research anthropologist. Am I wrong? And if so, which earlier president(s) would qualify?
There's also another possible drawback to Obama's seeming anthropological distance with the American public.
Canadian Blogger Kathy Shaidle once quipped that "Conspiracy theories are History for stupid people." All American presidents eventually become the victims of wacky theories of one sort or another. There are those who think FDR deliberately caused Pearl Harbor, and/or that Dubya caused 9/11. Dubya and Bill Clinton have at times witnessed masses of conspiracy theorists spontaneously pop up that nearly rival the perpetual JFK assassination conspiracy machine. (See also: Stone, Oliver, of course.) But does that distance from the American people that Obama seems to displays also make him particularly susceptible to the most recent formation of a conspiracy theory cottage industry?
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Comments :
Jul '10
Re: Bitter Clingers in the Mist
Dead on, Ed! That "aloofness" is driving people nuts! The American people have no freakin' clue who this guy is. He is an enigma. Say what you want about W, within ten minutes of watching him you knew who the guy was.
We have been watching Obama for 1 1/2 years, and most Americams have no idea who he is. And the part they think they get is not very reassuring (smug, elitist, lecturing pedant).
Given a vacuum like that, people will invent their own "histories", most of which are farcical at best.
Jun '10
Re: Bitter Clingers in the Mist
This is so illuminating. You can say anything about anyone (no matter how mean-spirited or innaccurate) so long as one is speaking in an intellectual anthropological manner. And, of course, only intellectuals whose mother has a doctorate in anthropology can do so. How convenient and how consistent with the leftist love affair with the idea of a ruling elite.
I suppose those of us in the "great unwashed" category should be grateful for all this enlightenment. In my case, I have a law degree from a good law school (but certainly not an Ivy League one) and I know next to nothing about anthropology.
I also had a father who was little educated, but very wise. He had a term for the type of leftist intellectual described in Ed's post: "educated nitwits." Degrees, but no common sense.
Frankly, I have greater confidence in the results we achieved from the last president who was a graduate from Eureka College than from all the intellectuals who have followed in his wake.
The hubris of Obama and his Ivy League eggheads is appalling.
Edited on Aug 21, 2010 at 4:06pmRe: Bitter Clingers in the Mist
Ed, I may be off course on this, but I think the anthropological angle gives Obama credit for a degree of humility and understanding he doesn’t deserve.
First, the anthropologist is engaged in act of learning about his subject. Obama doesn’t give any indication of trying to learn anything about regular Americans. On the contrary, he seems to believe he already knows and understands us, and THAT is the source of his “bitter clinger” comments. He wasn’t “studying” the people in Pennsylvania. He was voicing a conclusion.
The President comes off not so much as an anthropologist, but more like a seasoned member of the professoriate, patiently lecturing benighted undergrads, heroically saving them from the fever swamps of individualism, constitutionalism, capitalism, and yes, exceptionalism.
He isn’t trying to understand us. He merely deigns to rule us.
Jul '10
Re: Bitter Clingers in the Mist
Again, the premise of this article here on Ricochet is arguing in Leftist terms: Can the stupid American people figure out this enigma that is President Obama? Are we casting him in an ill light because of his aloofness?
Yes and No.
He's just like every other detached leftist I've almost ever encountered in my life. People know a phony when they meet them. Unfortunately some voters do not; these are called "life lessons."
Some of the American people cast him as a nefarious thug because he's from Chicago and acts like his excrement smells of roses. As my father from Brooklyn would say "we didn't just fall off the turnip truck."
Aug '10
Re: Bitter Clingers in the Mist
Dave,
I think you're very much right, although I'm not sure if Obama sounds more like "a seasoned member of the professoriate" or as Michael Ledeen memorably wrote in April, if he sounds more like a perpetual Ivy League undergrad, viewing America through a sophomoric post-Marxist, postmodern politically correct filter.
But there's also something unintentionally insulting to Obama by Todd. Presumably, by the time someone decides to run for the presidency, he has, down to his marrow, internalized what it is that makes this country great. Woodrow Wilson may have been an exception to this, in wanting to remake Congress into a more parliamentary system, but all of his successors on the left from FDR to LBJ were thoroughly Americanized men. Whatever Carter and Clinton's punitive flaws, their southern gold old boy twang likely hid a multitude of sins, though something tells me we would have seen similar anthropological-type stories from the MSM had Al Gore been president.
But to declare the president as studying Americans -- particularly Americans on the right -- from an "anthropological" perspective, means that he didn't understand them very well at all when he decided he wanted to govern them.
Re: Bitter Clingers in the Mist
Ed Driscoll, Guest Contributor: Dave,
I think you're very much right, although I'm not sure if Obama sounds more like "a seasoned member of the professoriate" or as Michael Ledeen memorably wrote in April, if he sounds more like a perpetual Ivy League undergrad, viewing America through a sophomoric post-Marxist, postmodern politically correct filter. Aug 21 at 5:03pm
Ed, I happily yield to Michael Ledeen's analysis, which is a much more focused description than my euphemism for an insufferable gas bag.
But he has internalized what makes this country great, in his estimation at least. He found it in the mirror looking back at him. That may be harsh, but that's the impression I get.
May '10
Re: Bitter Clingers in the Mist
Got the nail on the head, Dave. What the President's apologists fail to see is how spectacularly wrong are the results of his "anthropological" analysis. Contrast a fellow like FDR, who never lived as one of the "common people", but seemed to grasp what they were about and was able to connect. And we're expected to believe that Barack Obama is a deep thinker on religious subjects? I wish I could believe it. I'd sleep better.
As others have said, he sounds like an academic speaking outside his field. He is not an expert, but very good at "faking it". Apparently someone is fooled.
Aug '10
Re: Bitter Clingers in the Mist
Michael,
Yes, that's me: Ed Driscoll, Crypto-Marxist.
Now that you've caught me, I gotta run--Mission to Moscow is on TCM tonight!
Jul '10
Re: Bitter Clingers in the Mist
I think the very astute people who post here have already anticipated history's harsh verdict on Obama, and have describe the personal qualities that made the tragedy unavoidable. He has two years left to prove himself not only the worse modern president but the worst ever. Take his competitors -- Fillmore, perhaps, Harding -- nothing they did came close to the systemic damage Obama has inflicted. Nor has the nation ever been so swift to reject a leader. It looks like the political immune system at least is in good shape.
Aug '10
Re: Bitter Clingers in the Mist
Your Grace: I think the very astute people who post here have already anticipated history's harsh verdict on Obama, and have describe the personal qualities that made the tragedy unavoidable. He has two years left to prove himself not only the worse modern president but the worst ever. Take his competitors -- Fillmore, perhaps, Harding -- nothing they did came close to the systemic damage Obama has inflicted. Nor has the nation ever been so swift to reject a leader. It looks like the political immune system at least is in good shape. · Aug 22 at 6:02am
I wouldn't be so optimistic. Wilson, FDR and possibly TR all did things that "came close to the systemic damage Obama has inflicted" or even exceeded it, yet history (at least as taught in public schools, etc) remembers these presidents as heroes.
We are not now taught how much FDR's New Deal was hated -- and not just by the rich -- at the time. We are only taught today how mild, sincere and schoolteacherish Wilson was, not about his fascistic bent.
Presidents can be unusually successful at dismantling our institutions and later be loved for it, it seems.
May '10
Re: Bitter Clingers in the Mist
What I'm most struck by is the similarity to the attitude that many progressives have toward the poor and minorities. There is the same sense of detachment and benign condescension. The community organizer pitching government programs to the people... but on a vastly different scale today.