Obamiana
The Michigan Speech
After listening to Obama’s well-delivered Detroit speech tonight, I was struck by some reoccurring themes. He warned against those who would sow divisiveness, racial and the like, but not a word about his erstwhile pastor and purveyor of racial hatred, Rev. Wright.
He talked about old and new politics, but tore into John McCain in the old style, wrongly characterizing for the nth time McCain’s explanation that it is American casualties, not our troops’ foreign presence per se, that mostly bothers the public about Iraq—a war which Obama yet again wrote off, regardless of the amazing success of Gen. Petraeus and the Iraqi government.
In addition, he suggested that once rare natural disasters like the recent Iowa flooding are now reoccurring at 1 year and more intervals due to climate change.
Two other things struck me. Once again there was the initial warning from him about fainting during his speech, and a sort of messianic riff on why he chose to run at such a young age (e.g., because we all can’t wait any longer for his needed change). At times, he seems almost unaware of the image he conveys of self-absorption–also evident from the other night: when asked to comment on the late Tim Russert, he naturally referred to the time he, that is, Obama, interviewed Russert, rather than vice versa.
Second, at times in emphasizing a point, he will for a moment or two depart from a set speech and begin talking in his accustomed conversational style–a manner strikingly different from his usual preaching mode in which his cadence, accent, and intonation are in obvious imitation of the tradition of the African-American sermonizer.
Critics faulted Hillary for her occasional clumsy falsetto voices that were geared to particular racial and ethnic audiences. But Obama, albeit with far more elegance and panache, nevertheless switches into a delivery that is obviously patterned after a Rev. Wright, and not the natural expression, intonation, and idiom of someone who grew up in private school in Honolulu. And the nature of the audience seems to help determine the degree to which Obama delivers a speech in the style of the African-American church. So far no one has noted this, or felt it of any importance. But it is novel, if not disturbing at times to see a presidential candidate talk in conversation in one fashion, only to speak publicly in quite another–a jarring dichotomy that far exceeds the normal informal/formal pattern of private and public speech and thus borders on artifice and contrivance.
While listening to the speech, despite Obama’s praise of Hillary, I thought I heard the crowd boo at the mention of her name, especially when the Michigan governor evoked it. I think there is a tension there that is neither discussed publicly nor will abate.
A modest prediction…
Should Obama win in November, I think we will see—and should hope for— a new call for “bipartisanship” — no more filibustering, no more stalling presidential appointments in committee, no more creepy Alfred Knopf novels like Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint, no more Michael Moore’s hit-piece documentaries about a sitting president, no more vile award-winning docu-dramas like Death of a President, no more New Republic articles with titles like, “The Case for Bush Hatred.”
No matter how controversial the Obama tenure, an ex-president Cheney (a la Gore) will not give speeches about Obama’s “brown shirts.” A conservative counterpart to Garrison Keeler should not be talking about Obama’s “brown shirts in pinstripes” and retired Senators like John Glenn surely should not be suggesting about the Obama team — “It’s the old Hitler business.” And there won’t be a black conservative who adopts the ethics of Julian Bond talking of Obama and “the Confederate swastika.”
There also won’t be a Guardian columnist like Charles Booker writing filth like the following: “The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?”
Instead, any such vituperative movie, novel, column, or essay in the Western public domain will rightly be dubbed a “smear” and worse, and we will hear–again, as we should– calls for collective, bipartisan condemnation.
In other words, the Left will suddenly wake up and realize that over the last eight years the country and indeed the English-speaking liberal world have done enormous damage to public discourse in reprehensibly and shamefully promulgating films, books, and essays about hating and, indeed, killing a President.
After destroying the protocols of good taste and decorum, an infantile 60s generation in their age and sobriety will now understand that they themselves (see Thucydides on Corcyra) are likewise in need of some shared standards of public expression, rightly fathoming that such easy venom weakens a free society.
Yes, the Left will suddenly adopt a new maturity about a President Obama, and responsibly demand of us all to excise from our vocabulary over the top hate speech, such as comparing an elected administration to Nazis or fantasies about killing American presidents.
And this, once again, will be as it should be–albeit eight years too late.
Another modest prediction…
I think Iraq will continue to stabilize, the Europeans will continue to sober up—about the paralysis of the EU, the dangers of Iran, the problems with immigration and demography, and post facto appreciate the US role in the world over the last 8 years in destroying thousands in al Qaeda and discrediting it in Muslim eyes. And when this is all over, at some future date, many here and abroad will say of the now despised Bush “He kept us safe.”—especially should we see an Obama presidency that abruptly leaves Iraq, calls off the war on terror in favor of writs, indictments, and subpoenas, and waits on European and UN prompts about world crises.
Dr Hanson is correct on historys vision of Bush. See the most recent editorial from the Gaurdian in London for proof that Europe is now seeing Bush differently: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/17/georgebush.terrorism
As far as the oratory style of Sen. Obama: I also have noticed the “expansive projection” of his speaking. It almost begs for a Saturday Night Live parody but perhaps I wish for too much…….
I was raised in a family of Democrats –old-fashioned FDR, Truman, Kennedy Democrats– and, while I myself registered Republican, it’s been disheartening to me to see how far the post-Vietnam Democrats have come from the party that once understood the essential US role in the world. While it started way back with the character assassination of Robert Bork in the 80s, since 9/11 I’ve watched as the Democrats time and again have reverted to their Copperhead ancestors, putting blind partisanship and the own short-term electoral chances ahead of the interests of their nation.
It’s sad, really.
What is really ironic, pathetic, lame, pick-your-adjective-of-exasperation is that the people who most need to examine their own behavior are the members of the “theraputic generation.” It was for this generation that Star Trek: The Next Generation put a shrink on the command staff of their starships.
It seems difficult for many people to remember that we are electing a president, not a rock-star-in-chief; a good friend of mine who is an Obama fan has great difficulty explaining the specifics of his devotion, other than to say, a la Chris Matthews, that he gets chills listening to Obama speak. Since very little details are offered in such speeches, I suspect that he has bought into the notion that the appearance is more important than the substance – a condition which seems to have spread like a particularly virulent virus.
As for the hard left with its open fantasies of assassinating George Bush, it will be at once depressing and amusing to hear the cognoscenti vituperatively denouncing any who dare question Obama’s wisdom, much less openly declaring the type of hostility that has been so common and acceptable as that directed against Bush over the last eight years.
It would be interesting to ask one of Obama’s swooners what he or she thought of the highly generous funds Bush deployed to fight AIDS in Africa; the contortions such a person would go through to somehow praise the action while damning the man would be most entertaining.
Here’s the question that someone should ask Sen Obama in public:
No one doubts you are a smart guy, but the President needs more than intelligence and education. Everyone can agree that both judgment and discipline are two vital qualities needed in a President. You have touted your own judgment, but you were wrong about the surge. Horribly wrong. Why won’t you admit your mistake?
And in your answer, you can’t move into the fantasy world of the US not being in Iraq. We are there now.
On the discpline question, it was recently leaked that you have gone back to smoking. You apparently graduated from Columbia and Harvard and went against the anti-smoking change, quit for some time, but then relapsed in the midst in a heated campaign.
What the American people want to know, Senator, is if you are elected President will you exercise bad judgment in an undisciplined fashion?
But the media will *never* ask these two critical questions; important as they are.
jim flenniken: I have my doubts the Oliver Kamm editorial qualifies as a bellweather. Read the commentary that follows. The mob seethes like sans culottes ready to tear an aristocrat limb from limb. I suspect the residual and irrational hatred of Bush will have a strontium- length half-life.
I think you have it exactly right.
I was interested to read Amir Taheri’s article on the Italian election which indicates that the turnout was over eighty percent of elligible voters to elect a conservative, Bush-friendly Prime Minister. As Bush exits, the western world is left with plenty of residual reminders of the barbaric mind-set he has confronted, but the west has formed no better response. George W. Bush’s inarticulate representation of his brash policy grated on the European ear, but I agree, that history will see him as clear-eyed and stalwart.
If, in fact, Bush does accomplish his promise to get Osama Bin Laden during his term in office, it may be instructive to see how unimportant this capture might be in the overall scheme of things; which would, ironically, endorse his Iraq invasion as the more effective area of focus.
The question, recently reiterrated through the recent supreme court ruling, is whether the problem we are confronted with is ideological or merely the acts of a criminal and his cohort. Bush is one of the few who has responded to this issue as endemic to a group of extremists that are not limited to a particular organization or nationality.
Bit off topic, but I wanted to ask Dr. Hanson if he is seeing, or speculates, on how the housing/credit collapse that has hit California so very hard will effect illegal immigration in the state, if at all?
I know you do anecdotal observations around Fresno and wondered what you thought.
It seems to me, it is bound to have some effect as illegal immigration is almost entirely economics-driven.
Wait a minute…what about the electorate treating Obama like George McGovern and abandoning him in the end. That was the prediction just a few months ago. Keep the dream alive!
We can still hope most of the people will see through the Obama edifice. After all…who can picture Obama sitting with the Secretaries of the Navy, Army, Air Force,and Marines and have anything intelligent to say.
“When I was a community organizer on the south side of Chicago, we…”
I was a Clinton supporter once. Let’s hope they recognize who is and who is not qualified to be president.
I hope that Americans who have voted against Hollywood’s anti-Americanism by not seeing movies…the same people will vote against the bias of NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, and all the others who have nothing but praise for Obama.
McCain is the tortoise and Obama is the hare. McCain’s won a lot in his time. I hope the fighter in him can do it one more time.
A few comments about Obama’s speech:
The African American religious cadence and style of his speeches seems to derive from black (and white) sermonizing traditional in the South, which was transplanted to Chicago and elsewhere. Obviously for Obama this is affectation. It reminds me of Soul Food Day at Occidental College. You consume a bit of Southern culture thinking it is something else, like solidarity or whatever. Obama uses this “talk” as his generic American-speak. Regardless of the diction he employs, it never evokes Harvard Yard which might raise the spectre of foreignness. However he developed his style, it is pure genius. Obama out-Reagans Reagan in the feel-good department.
With this speech and the one on Father’s Day, Obama offers a prescription for correcting what ails youth in this country. I hope his Energizer Bunny acolytes were listening. He has plans for them, similar to those McCain has voiced in the past: y’all need to give something back to your country. Peace Corps, military service, community activism. Forget about post-college employment lounging in a cubicle with a PC generating worthless “content” for the internet. Think more like maybe five years in Southside Chicago teaching disaffected inner city gangsta-wanna-be’s to read. And no slack for them either.
As with his AIPAC speech, Obama tacked to the middle. A little something for everyone, a chicken in every pot, a shotgun in every gun rack. Jerusalem for the Jews. It all rolls off the tongue so easily. Bill Clinton should thank his lucky stars that Obama wasn’t old enough to run against him in 1992. Hillary gave him a fight, but Obama would’ve beaten Bill easily. He’s the new improved Slick Willy without the negative connotations.
Before you talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk. Maybe not. If you talk the talk better than anyone else, it appears, you may be excused from this requirement. Ironic that he faces, and will likely defeat the one Republican who surely has walked the walk for his country.
Greetings:
Even more important to me than Senator Obama’s Muslim background is his psychological background. And yet, in this land of punditry, no one seems interested in exploring this aspect of his personality or should I say his persona.
It seems to me that he has been abandoned by both his birth parents, first his Kenyan father and subsequently his American mother, then separated from his male Indonesian parent. I cannot imagine that these experiences have not caused some level of psychological infirmity.
When I watch his public poses, chin elevated and staring off into the far distance, I see a little bit of Castro and/or Hitler. When I listen to his snappish responses, I sense a reservoir of anger that someday will bubble up to the surface. When I see him without his tele-prompter, I see a man who knows he is in deep water not knowing how to swim. When I think about someone who has participated in the Saul Alinsky “community organizing,” or manipulation if you will, I wonder what is really in the back of his mind.
Surely Obama will not fool the majority of American voters. If he does, then we deserve the resulting economic decline and the rise of violence around the world.
A lot of people are starting to notice Obama’s strange speaking style. When he strays from his text, when he improvises away from a teleprompter, he stumbles. Without words before him, Obama stammers, speaks haltingly and often says something abrupt and stupid.
I’m also starting to see a physical strangeness to Obama. Despite his height and “handsomeness,” there is an effete quality. Photographers and videographers try to protect him, but there’s something about the way he uses his hands. It will be interesting to see what happens when the slight Obama meets a more substantial McCain. Will it be age before beauty?
A little off topic, but I’m tired of people saying Obama is so young and that we shouldn’t expect him to have many accomplishments at the young age of 44.
In my world – all the men and women I know – have certainly made their mark by the age of 44. Whether they are investment bankers, doctors, teachers, professors,lawyers, accountants anyone …. they are at the top of their game by 44.
Any 44 year old waiting to make his or her place in the world is a little late. In fact in the real world if you haven’t made it by 44 – the younger crowd is usually passing you by.
Why is McCain running such a horrible campaign? It’s driving me bonkers! Fer Chrissakes, the guy already looks vanquished.
Liberalism defines itself as a compassionate and caring philosophy yet its daily behavior is crude and bellicose. The MSM’s complete capitulation to supporting and promoting the liberal line reinforces the notion that our media is hopeless.
Any reasonable examination of Sen. Obama’s policies and his legislative history would show a complete opportunist devoid of principal. His narcissistic tendencies play into the popular Messiah mime and instead of pushing that analogy away as toxic to his campaign he seems to embrace it as his due.
Come November, assuming Obama wins, we will see a new attack from the liberals in the media – that any criticism of the Chosen One is rank racism or un-American. What’s scary is that Obama himself seems to believe it too.
Four years down the road Obama could presumably do the one thing I’ve always felt was impossible – make Jimmy Carter look good.
Obama may very well fool a majority of Americans this election. They seemingly wish to be fooled. McCain is teleprompter challenged and not nearly as telegenic. He’s a known entity who fools no one. Don’t expect Obama to go one-on-one with McCain in those townhall debates where Mac’s most comfortable. Obama will stay scripted by his handlers, recycling and refining his speeches with ever more brazen comments designed to captured the political middle ground.
Obama’s hand movements during his speeches are interesting. He gestures with both hands, the left and right sides of his body perfect mirror images in form and function. I doubt this is accidental. Biracial, metrosexual look and, with the nomination in hand, politically ambidextrous. All things to all people. He once referred to himself as a blank slate that voters write their own dreams on. That may be the truest thing he ever said.
Rosie,
True. There are prodigies around. There are accomplished investment bankers, doctors, teachers, professors,lawyers, and accountants…but not anyone and not any job.
Commander and Chief of the greatest military in the world? I’d like someone who knows at least a little something about that beforehand.
Israel won the 6 day war because Gamal Nasser broadcast his plans for invasion on the TV. Obama with his 16 month exit commitment is doing the same.
Obama really doesn’t have much on his resume.
Oh you can bet they’ll call for a more “civil discourse.”
They won’t get it. What they have done to our president doesn’t border on treason, is it treason.
If Obama wins, and the country really does deserve his incompetent reign, he and the libs will be despised in geometric proportions.
Payback is a bitch my liberal friends.
It’s sad to see someone like Prof. VDH descending to a talk show level of ticking off comments and articles by various leftists that have little context since just about everyone but some elephants have long forgotten , then telling us how they are all going to become sober and solemn if Obama is elected. Of course, we know that the right behaves in an utterly sane, sober, polite manner with little or no hype and of course, never personal attacks. Add, of course, no leftist ever once attacked a Democrat.
I expect more out of VDH.
Well said BRussell. What you miss however is that liberals can not be paid back. The vast majority of them are failures so they arent worse off if we elect Obama. The liberal leadership that promotes failure to line their own wallets will continue to do so no matter who is President. It is the conservative hard working american that is hurt by liberal policies and Presidents. Unfortunately we are becoming more and more of a minority in this country. Obama is the tip of the iceberg of what kind of Presidents we will have in the future. Once he is in, we will see some even more openly radical socialist race baiters think his tenure is a license for them to run and become President.
Javelin,
‘we know that the right behaves in an utterly sane, sober, polite manner with little or no hype and of course, never personal attacks.’
Sarcasm understood. We’re all human and at times we express ourselves in a manner we might regret.
But I believe no one matches the left for its bellicosity. The consummate leftist ideal is Communism of which violent overthrow is a tenet.
Demonstrations of leftist ideology are in San Francisco where true wierdness is on display or like in Chicago in the late 60′s with broken windows and tear gas.
You never see right wing people protesting that violently or crazy.
The Right isn’t ‘in your face’ like the left is. The Right seems more in control of their impulses.
Hatred for Bush/Cheney is not reserved for American “liberals’. Most people all over the world despise them. And no, we’re not jealous.
I’m tired of these silly attacks on Barack Obama that are driven by falsehoods and fear. Obama represents hope for the people of Africa and I think nothing scares the white power structure more than a son of Africa taking his rightful place.
Truth First:
Be advised – you’ll need to come up with another derogatory term for our government should Obama become president. “White power “structure” may become passe.
“Son of Africa”? Perhaps genetically speaking. We don’t normally attach a moniker such as this to an American president. His African American identity, by the way, is by choice as he points out in his memoir. While his life story is somewhat unusual for an American politician, it is certainly not an African story.
It is neither silly nor unusual to “attack” a populist candidate’s lack of experience or question his ever changing campaign rhetoric. That is the norm in American politics.
We do not select our presidents based on the hopes of the peoples of Africa, Europe or Asia.
“…taking his rightful place”? Well, only if he wins the general election. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, or come home to roost.
David Brooks’ article in the NYT today sums up what is by now abundantly clear about Barack Obama. He is the epitome of pure unadulterated political ambition. That is the simple truth underlying the audacity inherent in Obama challenging Hillary Clinton for the presidency. That is the reason he discards his past attachments (Pfleger, TUCC, his grandmother etc) with such ease, along with any policy positions (eg. campaign finance reform) that hamper his quest for the White House. His memoir is a fiction, a construct written by a man who decided at a Jesse Jackson speech at Columbia in 1984 to orient his life around becoming the first black president. He was never dreaming of his father. He was planning to become the first Black Father of this nation. His African American identity itself is a politically expedient affectation, honed to advantage in Southside Chicago politics. Reverend Wright knew this when he called Obama a politician who “says what politicians say”. So the man who brought Barack to Jesus, who was his mentor for 20 years, goes under the bus with the rest of Obama’s past. That blank slate, on which we can all write our hopes and dreams, may already be filled in with over weaning pride. Red State… Blue State… Purple state? What a hopelessly insincere nursery rhyme that one is. The only color purple he’s sees lies on the purple robes of power he dreams of soon wearing. How remarkable. America’s first Machiavellian Leftist. And if he wins the election, don’t be surprised if we catch some Obama troll on November 5th measuring off a plot of ground on the Washington Mall for his memorial. L’audace, l’audace. Toujours l’audace.
I would very much like to understand what a Conservative Democrat stands for, as opposed to a Conservative Republican (besides the obvious party affiliations).
From your writings, I cannot see a large difference in outlook, yet you maintain the position.