No Oscar for Obama
I’m with Pat on this – as sorry as I am to have missed the fun last night, I just couldn’t watch the speech. But it’s not just the SOTU -- at this point I simply cannot watch Obama speak on anything. It is almost physically painful. Some of this has to do, no doubt, with the by-now annoying mannerisms, the grandiose clichés, and the condescending tone. But mostly, I think, it’s just the obvious inauthenticity of the post-November Obama.
I think I liked the guy better when I though he was a genuinely committed leftist, willing to go down fighting if need be. I still think he’s thoroughly leftist in orientation, but I’m beginning to suspect that this derives less from inner conviction, from learned experience, than from having spent almost his entire life soaking in the left-wing juices of Morningside Heights, Cambridge, and Hyde Park – he’s absorbed the flavor of his surroundings, and does not, even now, seem to impart any unique flavor of his own to the Washington stew.
The contrast with Bill Clinton – the original (and originally, by Obama, trivialized) triangulator – is interesting. Whatever his inner convictions, Clinton was a great actor. He was convincing as a liberal, but he was also convincing as a centrist. He was convincing because he knew that playing a role meant more than just reading the lines. It meant having, or adopting – and then drawing on – at least a few genuinely centrist convictions.
Obama, by contrast, has no centrist convictions to draw on; in fact, it’s not clear how many really deep convictions he has of any stripe. I think Peter got it almost exactly right when he noted that what Obama cares deeply about is – Obamacare. That’s it. That’s what he’ll fight for. (That, and re-election.)
His beliefs and orientation remain predictably leftist. He’ll allow himself to be pulled to the right just as much as – and no more than – he absolutely needs in order to keep his approval ratings up. This will likely fool 5-10% of the electorate into thinking he’s “really a moderate after all,” but I find the performance utterly unconvincing, and have no more interest in watching it than I would in watching a film filled with Really Bad Actors.
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Comments :
May '10
Re: No Oscar for Obama
When I first learned the details of Barrack Obama's bio, I was amazed at his seeming insularity. Which brings me to this: Almost any American conservative with any higher education has passed through at least one liberal institution. But it very possible -- indeed increasingly likely -- that a middle-aged liberal will not have had serious engagement with conservative ideas his whole life.
Barack Obama engaging with nonLeftist ideas is literally like a fish meditating upon cycling. He doesn't posess the schema, as the educrats say.
Sep '10
Re: No Oscar for Obama
He lives in a completely a priori world (how fitting that a guy with this type of present tense historical knowledge can't get his hands on his own birth certificate) and really doesn't, for the life of him, understand other people who didn't inhabit his rarefied world. They may have joked about Bill being a trailer park boy, but at least he developed some intuitive emotional understanding of other people, however bent his upbringing made his carnal desire.
I think he's turning Dorian Grey.
May '10
Re: No Oscar for Obama
Amen.
May '10
Re: No Oscar for Obama
This is an intriguing point, Steve. I wonder if Obama can be said to have an ideology at all, in the sense that he understands and believes deeply in the ideas he espouses. From that line in his autobiography where he talks about seeking out the Marxist professors and students, I get the sense that he doesn't know or care much about Marxism; he just thinks it makes him cool, like wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.
Maybe for Obama leftism is not so much an ideology as it is a mannerism. Argument may change the ideas of someone who has given them serious thought, but it is impotent against a tic. Worse, I get the sense that his identity is formed almost entirely from such tics, a tissue so thin that it would shred irreparably if he foreswore a single one.
Oct '10
Re: No Oscar for Obama
A Discovery channel show about Sasquatch is more believable than any Obama speech.
Oct '10
Re: No Oscar for Obama
Nice idea, Sasquatch for President, with Palin as V.P.
Any truth out of Obama is about a fictional as beleiving in Sasquatch.
No comment on Palin..
Nov '10
Re: No Oscar for Obama
You are not alone.
Oct '10
Re: No Oscar for Obama
I think many people are imputing more depth than exists into this mylar-thin politician. There is no deep conviction of any ideology in Obama: he is intellectually lazy. He has absorbed the vocabulary and prejudices of the milieu in which he matured, but has never seriously studied either the sources of the ideology he professes or its alternatives.
Trying to engage this fellow at an intellectual level is like putting Hayek up to debate Huey Long.
What is depressing is that in such a debate Huey Long would probably win.
What is encouraging is that more and more people perceive just how content-free Obama's rhetoric is and how often it seems to repeat from speech to speech.
Nov '10
Re: No Oscar for Obama
I'd rather watch morbidly obese people sweat than sit through an Obama speech. If there is one thing I am grateful for the SOTU speech is that it forced the producers of The Biggest Loser to trim their offering this week by an hour. It's normal two hour run time is maddening. It's so much more paletable at one hour, and so much less psycho babble to fast forward through on the DVR. I guess for this one small thing, I have Obama to thank