Joe Klein Takes a Road Trip, and Partially Gets It!
Joe Klein is taking a road trip. Getting out of his usual digs in tony Pelham, New York, downtown Manhattan and the media establishment, and finally the Beltway, has been good for him. Time gave him the assignment to depart from his usual type articles to drive through America, meet and talk with regular folk, and see what is on their minds.
This week, Klein found himself in Texarkana, Arkansas—a small town in which the Texas-Arkansas border runs through the middle of the small area—giving it two of everything; two city halls, two mayors, two police and fire departments. (You may not have heard of it before, unless in the ’60s folk boom era, you sang the song “Cotton Fields,” whose verse begins “Just a mile from Terxarkana….)
Anyway, what Klein finds is what concerns most people he met are not the contested social issues like abortion, evolution or immigration. Instead, he writes, the talk was “all about too much government: too much governing regulation, too many people dependent on government.” One of the mayors complains to Klein about Social Security disability payment, which he says is giving drug addicts and drunks “three times the amount my father-in-law does on Social Security retirement.” And another person tells him that children with ADD can get Social Security disability payments also. Says the woman: “I don’t believe we have any legal or moral obligation to pay any money to people too drunk to work or lazy to work.”
Another gripe was the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which one builder explained prevented him from receiving bank loans he always used to be able to get, known as “character loans,” since he had a good repayment record. Now, a deal fell through because he needed a quick loan, and Dodd-Frank prohibited him from moving on the process for a six week period. By then it was too late. Similarly, another businessman told Klein how for similar reasons, he could not expand his nursing home business. He even heard the same complaint from a banker who is the mayor of Hope, Bill Clinton’s home town. Not a Tea Party supporter like the people in Texarkana, this banker explained how impossible it was to give anyone home loans anymore.
Surprisingly, Klein writes- and one must say you do not expect to find this from Klein:
It seemed to me that the closer the Tea Party folks got to home, the more legitimate their beefs were. On the most basic, local level, their concern about waste and corruption seemed a good thing, a valuable revival of citizen concern after a long period of apathy. And the federal government does tend to impose layer upon layer of new regulations without keeping track of how they’re working.
Anything President Obama has done to address these problems, Klein adds, “hasn’t reached Texarkana. I found myself in sympathy with much that the Miller County Patriots were saying,” referring to the name of the local Tea Party group. Until, that is, “one man called the President a socialist who wanted government to run everything,” and that since he went around the world apologizing for the United States, he didn’t think Obama was a patriot.
So Klein concludes: “When they’re talking about character loans, I’m all ears. Whey they’re fantasizing about socialism, I’m not.”
So, here, I highly recommend that Joe Klein take a look at Charles Krauthammer’s latest column. Klein has taken half a leap; unusual for a MSM liberal, he has listened to regular Tea Party folks, and has not condemned them as racist, fascist and as a bunch of extremist nuts. But he stops short at taking their view of Obama as anything but crazed.
“Like most of the neighborhood, she was a fighting liberal, fighting to have her money taken from her.”
I’d like to suggest a compromise: let Obama take everything from THESE people and leave the rest of us the f*ck alone.
The whole “Obama is a hardcore radical activist” idea gets him completely wrong, in my opinion. Obama is actually a moderate at heart and by temperament, but his narrow, cloistered life experience–in an academic milieu where politics ranges from Larry Summers on the extreme right to Bill Ayers on the extreme left–has turned him into a firm liberal who imagines himself carefully adhering to the sensible center.
All of his maddeningly incongruous behaviors–his portrayal of his own heavy-handed partisanship as conciliatory bipartisanship; his frequent, profound underestimation of the weight and power of the conservative political forces aligned against him; his bizarre faith in the supposed effectiveness of trite liberal rhetoric in rallying the masses to his side–can be traced back to this basic failing. He’s not pledged to undermine the prevailing social order, but rather, dedicated to preserving the one that he imagines to exist–and that does exist, but only in the faculty lounges and Chicago Democratic Party offices where he has spent his entire adult life.
I regard such speculation concerning his heart as pointless. We can’t possibly know what he’s really like inside, and it doesn’t matter anyway.
What matters are outcomes. His outcomes are those one would expect from a person who leans very far to the left. Therefore, the most plausible explanation is that he leans very far to the left in his philosophy and world view.
No matter how he became how he is, *he* isn’t going to change. So our mission is to deal with him as he is, and stop further initiatives that increase the size of government, decrease freedom, and attain leftist goals.
Dan, I would add that, regardless of how we see him or how he sees himself, it is what he DOES that defines him. And what he does is destroying the country. I think the exercise of labeling him moderate or socialist or what have you is giving him too much credit for having a coherent world view. When he has spoken candidly, he has revealed himself to be a sort of meeting-place for a variety of grudges and malices and ramblings about white folks and Europeans and so forth. It is those who surround him that worry me. Obama is just not that smart and not that mentally organized. But he is the figurehead for all these radical, dedicated Communist types who are pulling away on the levers of power as fast and as forcefully as they can.
If you bother to actually look into Obama’s history and read his two books you will see that there is nothing moderate in his heart or his temperament.
He is a red diaper baby, raised as a communist by a mother and grandparents who, while probably not actual Communist Party members, were definitely fellow travelers. Both of his mother’s husbands were Communist Party activists and his grandfather introduced him to Frank Marshall Davis for mentoring. His rhetoric and his policies are unfailingly Marxist and Alinskyite. There is nothing to support any perception of him as anything other than a far left, radical, communist ideologue.
You called Larry Summers “extreme right”. You have to be pretty far left to think of him as even moderate, much less extreme right.
“You called Larry Summers “extreme right”. You have to be pretty far left to think of him as even moderate, much less extreme right.”
That was his point. In that world, Larry Summers is considered extreme right.
“(You may not have heard of it before, unless in the 60’s folk boom era, you sang the song “Cotton Fields,” whose verse begins “Just a mile from Terxarkana….)”
or saw Smokey and the Bandit or heard the title track “East Bound and Down”.
That line caught my eye too. Texarkana might be small, but it is hardly obscure.
Actually, Leadbelly’s song began:
“When I was a little bitty baby
My mama done rock me in the cradle
In them old cotton fields back home
It was back in Louisiana
Just about a mile from Texarkana …”
Geographers will object that Texarkana is much more than a mile from Louisiana.
I believe in equal opportunity but I do not believe in equal outcomes.
Were Klein honest about his own political beliefs and those of the Democratic base, his reaction to people acusing Obama of socialist leanings would be to say, “Sure, but why do they they think that’s a problem?”
Maybe, just maybe, Klein will reconsider, and come to see that regular people like those he has found on the road hold more wisdom that a representative of the leftist New York media such as himself.
I wouldn’t bet on it.
Hey, Joe
Don’t it make ya wanna go
To war
Once more
So Klein concludes: “When they’re talking about character loans, I’m all ears. Whey they’re fantasizing about socialism, I’m not.”
Too bad Joe Klein doesn’t seem to have heard of a thin, obscure, low-circulation magazine called Newsweek, which proclaimed on its cover a couple of years ago that “We Are All Socialists Now” …
So which of you smug, navel-gazing Manhattan pundits are we supposed to believe, Joe?
“Maybe, just maybe, Klein will reconsider, and come to see that regular people like those he has found on the road hold more wisdom that a representative of the leftist New York media such as himself.”
HAHAHAHHAHahahahahahhaahhhhahahahaha
Not gonna happen.
What you write here, Dan, may be true. But I do not believe either you or I have the power to see into the President’s mind and heart to verify your belief about his motivations. His actions are somewhat consistent with what you say, but even more consistent with Krauthammer’s claims.
It often happens when individuals are frustrated with what life hands them that they revert to childhood behavior. And there is no doubt that ALL of the President’s childhood influences were extremely far left. This proves nothing but favors those claims over yours.
Dan Simon writes “The whole “Obama is a hardcore radical activist” idea gets him completely wrong, in my opinion. Obama is actually a moderate at heart and by temperament….”
Read “Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story…” by Stanley Kurtz. He pieces together Obama’s life as a scholar-socialist during the 1980s. I worked with these Marxists-types – opposing President Carter’s draft registration law – and watched them mutate into democratic Marxists, ie, Marxists by other means.
STILL radical and unreconstructed, only undergoing the long-march through the institutions like academe, labor unions, and community organizers. In other words, Obama.
The correct term to describe Obama’s ideology is not fairness but EGALITARIANISM.
“So returning to Joe Klein…”
Must we?
Pathological nitwits are so declasse.
People of Texarkana: Just folks trying to get on with life. People with a bedrock sense of justice. Americans.
Barack Hussein Obama: Demagogue and ideologue. Skilled at rabble-rousing, otherwise inept and slow to learn. At heart a “citizen of the world.”
Klein, a typical Legacy Media representative, can see the first more or less clearly; his own ideology blinds him to the second. And there we have the schematic for the presidential contest of 2012.
The problem with Mr. Krauthammer’s view that President Obama is returning to his “social democrat” roots is that it is not accompanied with supporting evidence Obama’s early writings. It would be helpful to his thesis, for example, if he could point to passages in DREAMS FROM MY FATHER where these “convictions” are on display.
Actually, the verse goes “It was down in Louisiana, just about a mile from Texarkana”, a bit of poetic license. Texarkana is dozens of miles from Louisiana.
It figures the only mention of Texarkana that would tickle Joe Klein’s fancy would be some folk tune.
For the rest of us, it was where Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed went to get a truckload of Coors beer for a party in Atlanta(and met Sally Field, and Buford T. Justice, etc)
“They’re thirsty in Atlanta, and there’s beer in Texarkana, we’ll bring it back no matter what it takes.”
The real problem isn’t that Mr. Klein believes what he writes…or that Mr. Obama is in fact a Social Democrat..it’s that the political elites in Washington…of BOTHT parties have utterly lost touch with what flyover country wants. They, collectively, just don’t care, as long as they enrich themselves and their supporters at the public trough. It doesn’t matter what the rest of us want, believe, desire out of government. It only matters that the elites get richer, and the rest of us get poorer for it.
It’s past time to toss them all out. Sweep clean Congress, and 1/3rd of the Senate in 2012…and continue to toss out corrupt politicians of all stripes. I’ve come to the belief that pretty much ALL of the politicians in Washington are corrupt…they are all getting wealthy from the public fisc…
Rich Vail
Pikesville, Maryland
The Vail Spot dot Blogspot dot Com
“The authentic Obama is a leveler, a committed social democrat, a staunch believer in the redistributionist state, a tribune, above all, of “fairness” — understood as government-imposed and government-enforced equality.” Ron Radosh quoting Charles Krauthammer
Obama is a leveler, a committed Social Democrat: he believes fervently in “social justice”, which is another codeword for radically changing the traditional relationship (Constitutional relationship) between American citizens and their government. In the final analysis, it will be the whim of Man, not the Law, that will determine the relationship between citizens, government and each other. And the empowered whim of Man is toward coerciveness, toward an authoritarianism unecumbered by Law.
Obama not a radical? In his own mind, no. In the context of American society at large, yes. And defeating Obama in 2012 is not enough. These ideas have taken seed in large swaths of the American public.
Let’s see: According to Klein, when the Texarkana people talk about effects of policy on themselves, they could be right; when they identify Obama as having different political principles from theirs, they are way off base. I think he wants to believe that while they have insight into conditions of their own tiny lives, their insight is unrelated to any political principle. Klein believes they aren’t articulating one themselves, in their complaints that government is interfering aggressively in their lives, and he believes that Obama isn’t expressing a political principle when he leads the charge for a government that interferes more. Klein knows that people unite politically around principles; can’t have the Tea Party doing that.
There’s a word for someone who will write that they understand and agree with all of the evidence and then reject the logical evaluation of that evidence. “Liberal.”
Did Joe Klein really need to drive all the way to Texarkana to find people who are burdened by poorly designed and implemented government regulations? Surely there are ‘regular’ people in NYC who could tell him all about this. I guess it wouldn’t have had the African safari feel to it, though, just walking around NYC talking to small business owners and other people struggling to make ends meet and worried about the future. This way it’s an exotic trip to a strange foreign place called The Heartland, that wide blank space on the map beyond his known world, identified only by the warning “There be Dragons”. Or, in this case, Tea Party Patriots.
Obama is a left handed, half breed, Marxist orphan bastard. If you think any one, or only one, thing drives him you underestimate him and the menace that he is.
Klein instinctively recoils from a label, never stopping to evaluate if the shoe fit. that is a defense tactic someone uses when some investment made in the object of the label would be more costly to lose than to gain the truth. I suppose for Klein it’s either his job or his social position or both.
I always thought that Texarkana was most famous for it’s role as the starting point for the chase in the original “Smokey and the Bandit” movie, as well as the mention in Jerry Reed’s “Eastbound and Down” song from the same movie.
I gagged at the thought that Barack Obama is actually a “moderate at heart and by temperament”. His actions don’t show that.
But I can see the argument–at least in part. Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, is a man who lacks what the Brits call “bottom”. “Bottom” means that you possess first principles that you will act on and not be swayed from. You can predict how a man with bottom will face and respond to a particular challenge.
Barack doesn’t have that. He votes “present”, he “leads from behind”. But he’s got some energy and drive, or else he wouldn’t be where he is today.
As for his politics? There’s a line from a country music song that recites a father’s advice to his son “You’ve got to stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything.”
Barack never got that advice, or if he did, he didn’t understand it. As a result, he fell hard for the claptrap in the faculty lounge and in Bill Ayer’s circle.
Mr. Klein reflexiveLy recoils from the label, socialist, never bothering to evaluate the fit. He is invested in some manner is preserving the status quo. Either his job or social status would be in jeopardy were he to make an objective evaluation.
Even Krauthammer is so embedded in MSM talking points that he is not able to get it. There is no fairness in taxing the rich more if they got their wealth by legitimate means. Flat rate is fairness. And low taxes to everyone. Big taxes means big corruption.
“Fairness trumps growth. Fairness trumps revenue. Fairness trumps economic logic.”
Words and the twisting of them. There is nothing “Fair” about taking money from someone that works and produces, and giving it to someone that does not, under threat of violence. Try not paying your taxes and see how long it takes for men with guns to show up and throw you out of your house, and take all your assets.
RR has heard the voice of the Real America in the town of Texarkana, which has two city halls, two mayors, two police and fire departments and where the major complaint is — guess what? — too much government!
Would that every Democrat would say what is in his heart while campaigning.
They’d never win another election in the vast majority of our nation’s precincts.
“Like most of the neighborhood, she was a fighting liberal, fighting to have her money taken from her.”
This is giving liberals way too much credit. I have never noticed that a single one of their nostrums ever requires so much as a tittle of sacrifice from themselves – it’s always “the rich” (i.e., anyone whose net worth is a dollar higher than theirs) or the horrid white working and middle classes, upon whom any decent person would naturally insist upon imposing affirmative action, busing, mass immigration, higher payroll taxes, Kelo decisions, etc., etc., etc. Liberalism may even be interpreted as the apologetics of a ruthless class aggression, to some extent against the thin strata above, but chiefly of the classes directly below.
I thought Texarkana was made famous by A Canticle for Leibowitz. ;^)
Id like Joe Klein to visit Beirut. He would feel at home with the cuddly Nasrallah
As I have said before -and will continue to say- Obama is a Progressive, not a socialist (or a communist). Go back and review late 19th/early-20th century political movements, including the policies advocated by Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt.
I have heard of Texarkana, Arkansas. About ten years ago I used to chat with a Christian girl by the name of Sharon or Shay who lived there. Unfortunately I lost contact with her and can’t remember her full name.