Obamastemic Closure

During his commencement address at the University Michigan the other day, President Obama said:

Still, if you’re somebody who only reads the editorial page of the New York Times, try glancing at the page of the Wall Street Journal once in a while. If you’re a fan of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, try reading a few columns on the Huffington Post website. It may make your blood boil; your mind may not be changed. But the practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship.

Who’s writing Obama’s speeches these days? That’s pretty rich, coming from a guy who specialized last year in demonizing the aforementioned Beck and Limbaugh right from the start of his administration, particularly through his subordinates.  As Jennifer Rubin noted yesterday at Commentary:

A nice sentiment — but one that reflects Obama’s assumptions and condescension toward his audience — and Americans more generally. As we know, a high percentage of Internet readers do precisely what Obama is advising. Pete, drawing on David Brooks’s column, noted, “It’s fashionable these days for many in the political class to complain about the Internet for, among other reasons, allowing people to ideologically self-segregate. But like much of conventional wisdom, this widespread view appears to be wrong.” But Obama feels compelled to instruct us to be more open-minded.

Frankly, this gets back to a lack of self-awareness. This is a president who derides political opponents, fails to engage them on the merits, and has perfected the straw-man and ad hominem attacks. It was his White House that declared war on Fox News. So it is the height of hypocrisy for him to now tell the rest of us to up the tolerance and intellectual diversity quotient in our lives. It’s sort of like Tom Friedman telling us to consume less and reduce our carbon footprint.

And hot on the heels of Obama’s previous moment of epistemic closure this weekend, John Kartch of Americans for Tax Reform notes this incident:

President Barack Obama, known for his lectures to others on civility, saw fit to use the obscene and derogatory term “tea-baggers” in a book interview with author Jonathan Alter.

Below is an excerpt from Alter’s new book The Promise: President Obama, Year One, to be released May 18:

Obama said that the unanimous House vote against the Recovery Act ‘set the tenor for the whole year’: ‘That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.’  For Obama this was the greatest surprise of 2009.

“It is insulting to have him lecture on civility while being the least civil participant,”said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.  “Obama, get out of the gutter, wash your mouth out with soap and grow up.  Obama is acting like a teenager — trying to be funny by using foul language and sexual innuendo.  Pre-teens think that is funny.  Adults do not.”

The revelation of Obama’s use of the term “tea-baggers” comes within a few days of his oft-cited May 1 commencement speech at the University of Michigan.

Since “the practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship,” you go first, Barry.

Meanwhile, in an item written published in late March, Virginia Postrel notes how damaging getting into the mud has been for the onetime candidate’s carefully crafted — with plenty of help from his media enablers — aura of cool detachment:

After C-SPAN reran a 1999 BookNotes interview about my first book, I received an email from a disappointed viewer. He was chagrined to hear that I was editing a website called DeepGlamour instead of writing “more serious nonfiction.” Glamour, he implied, is a trivial subject, unworthy of consideration by people who watch, much less appear on, C-SPAN.

To which I have two words of response: Barack Obama. In an era of tell-all memoirs, ubiquitous paparazzi, and reality-show exhibitionism, glamour may seem absent from Hollywood. But Obama demonstrates that its magic still exists. What a glamorous candidate he was—less a person than a persona, an idealized, self-contained figure onto whom audiences projected their own dreams, a Garbo-like “impassive receptacle of passionate hopes and impossible expectations,” in the words of Time’s Joe Klein. The campaign’s iconography employed classically glamorous themes, with its stylized portraits of the candidate gazing into the distance and its logo of a road stretching toward the horizon. Now, of course, Obama is experiencing glamour’s downside: the disillusionment that sets in when imagination meets reality. Hence James Lileks’s recent quip about another contemporary object of glamour, “The Apple tablet is the Barack Obama of technology. It’s whatever you want it to be, until you actually get it.”

And now that we’ve got him, at least until January of 2013, Paul Mirengoff of Power Line writes, “Barack Obama was never the enigma some thought him to be:”

His radical associations, his status as the Senate’s most liberal member, and the relentless ambition he had exhibited at every turn told us most of what we needed to know about what the substance of his presidency would look like.

* * *

If Obama is an enigma today, it’s because of the contrast between his remarkably open disdain for his domestic rivals and opponents on the one hand and his obsequious approach to the nation’s foreign adversaries on the other. As enigmas go, however, this one is more troubling than puzzling.

And while it must be fun for the president to play wannabe Media Matters blogger at a weekend commencement addresses, he’s got bigger issues to worry about as a result of this weekend’s failed bombing attempt in the media capital of the world.