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February 04, 2010

President On the Couch

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

For many of us, Barack Obama remains an International Man of Mystery even though he has been President for more than a year.

Blame for our ignorance can largely be dumped on the news media Establishment (The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.) who sent platoons of reporters chasing after every detail of Sarah Palin's existence while accepting Obama's autobiographies and press releases as gospel.

This Cone of Spin has been in place since before the start of 2008 presidential campaigning. As a result, the average citizen probably knows less about Obama and how he ticks than any president in recent times.

Another result is that political writers -- mostly on the Right -- have been on a What's Obama Really Like kick for some time. This is nice for the writers because it's a topic that shows no sign of going away. But it might not be in Obama's best interest because, if pundits are uncertain, then so must be broad swaths of the voting public.

At any rate, as the title to this post hints, a number of commentators have been putting Obama on the proverbial psychiatrist's couch and using his words and deeds in an attempt to discern what might lie deeper. To illustrate my point, here are some recent items in that vein from the Internet. I make no claim for their accuracy or profundity; I chose them simply because they were recent and easy to spot.

Harvey Mansfield, for example, delves into political philosophy. Matthew Continetti looks at the "man behind the 'postpartisan' curtain." Peter Wehner doubts Obama's claim that he (Obama) is non-ideological. Finally, two Washington Post reporters point out that Obama has been to church only four times in the past year, yet go on the claim he is actually privately a religious or spiritual man.

I think Obama and his public relations crew consider it politically wise to keep an invisibility cloak wrapped around the inner Obama. As to why, well that ought to be grist for yet another analytical column by one of those pundits.

Later,

Donald

posted by Donald at February 4, 2010

Comments

I'm delighted to hear that Obama infrequently attends church. I wish he'd stop going altogether. Unfortunately, he just presided over a national prayer breakfast. As ex-president Art Hochsteder says in the film "The Best Man," "In my day, a politician had to pour God over everything like ketchup." Sadly, he still has to.

Obama's biography was gone over and through by the media enough for my satisfaction. Frontline does a dual campaign biography of the presidential candidates before every election. I didn't watch 2008's because I didn' care about McCain or Obama, but I've watched their shows in past elections and the're eminently fair.

The major media love a narrative. That's their bias, not left/right. Even in 2008, the msm kept regurgitating McCain's war hero-maverick myth. The only revealing piece I read about him was a long article in Rolling Stone magazine.

The only people who think here are all kinds of secrets about Obama are paranoid kooks. There are even some on the left, like Webster Tarpley, who has a book claiming Obama is some kind of Manchurian candidate mentored by Zbigniew Brezinski.

Bush and Obama are two sides of the same corporatist coin. Bush professed to be a small government conservative and Obama spouts liberal rhetoric, but their policies are nearly indistinguishable.

Posted by: Peter L. Winkler on February 5, 2010 12:43 PM

Steve Sailer wrote a book based, I think, on the proposition that he may have been the only person to have read the whole of Obama's two autobiographies, and then reflected on them. Anyway, it's my impression that Obama was absurdly underscrutinised before he was elected. The MSM is bleedin' useless.

Posted by: dearieme on February 6, 2010 2:44 PM

"Peter Wehner doubts Obama's claim that he (Obama) is non-ideological."

After Mr Wehner conflates in his first paragraph, Nixon's "I am not a crook" declaration with Mr Obama's rejection of ideology, I, as a reader, have to question the ideological leanings of the author.

Posted by: Bemused on February 6, 2010 5:30 PM

His autobiography shows that he did not identify with European culture; it wasn't "his" culture. Unlike his physicist half-brother, Europe was beautiful but not "his". He wanted to be black and to help black folks despite the fact that his mother was European and that he was raised by her parents and was raised surrounded by Asians and Europeans. So he went on pilgrimages to Africa, sought his father, became a community organizer in black Chicago, married an "authentically black" woman.

It was clear in the autobiography that he joined the black church in order to be authentically black, and to help blacks, and not because he believed in Christian teachings or identified with traditional Christian culture.

Naturally he, and his staff want to hide these facts; it's very difficult to do if there are any "real" discussions"

Posted by: Robert Hume on February 6, 2010 7:28 PM

"The MSM is bleedin' useless."

I'd go further than that and say that the MSM is not remotely independent, it's allowed itself to become a shill for The Left. How else explain so called news organizations' willful blindness to the strange circumstances of Obama's birth, his rearing, those who immersed him in the socialist world view, the mystery of his acceptance by Harvard, the way the path has been cleared for him every step of the way of his career and who was doing the clearing, and on and on.

Without talk radio. the internet and Fox our fate would already be sealed.

Posted by: ricpic on February 6, 2010 11:40 PM

I would say it's almost always in a candidate's best interest to leave as much as possible hidden. The Obama hater will hate him regardless, so they're basically irrelevant (as our the Bush-haters for the previous presidency).

What truly matters are the people who don't pay much attention, and what influences them. The more you learn about a candidate, the less you can project upon them. You find details that don't mesh with the vision of them you've built in your head.

In real life, as you learn more of a person, you also have more personal exposure to the person. But for politicians, that won't ever happen.

In politics, you want a base position or two (not too sharply defined - something like "change" or "security" or "morality") and no more. After that, the more details you have, the less attractive you are.

Posted by: Tom West on February 7, 2010 12:27 PM

ricpic's comment borders on the laughable, if only it was not so sad. Anyone who thinks the MSM is a "shill for the left" and credits talk radio, the internet, and Fox as antidotes should consider wearing an aluminum foil hat so we can keep track of who has slipped so far into right wing paranoia as to be beyond rational conversation.

This does NOT, let me hasten to say, make me a fan of the MSM, quite the contrary. My problem with the MSM is not its supposed leftist orientation, but rather my caution about blindly accepting whatever the MSM is presenting as unbiased truth is based on the fact that the MSM is, by definition, the creature of large global corporations and thus biased in favor of the status quo. The MSM is beholden to other enormous corporations for their continued existence due the cash flow generated by advertising that again wants the status quo to remain intact.

Here is a link (from the thousands available when one searches for "media ownership concentration") http://www.globalissues.org/article/159/media-conglomerates-mergers-concentration-of-ownership

Among the facts it offers is that ... "by the end of 2006, there are only 8 giant media companies dominating the US media from which most people get their news and information:

* Disney (market value: $72.8 billion)
* AOL-Time Warner (market value: $90.7 billion)
* Viacom (market value: $53.9 billion)
* General Electric (owner of NBC, market value: $390.6 billion)
* News Corporation (market value: $56.7 billion)
* Yahoo! (market value: $40.1 billion)
* Microsoft (market value: $306.8 billion)
* Google (market value: $154.6 billion)

Disney, GE and the other corporations on this list are the antithesis of hotbeds of socialism; they are defenders of the status quo, of the elite, and of oligarchy.

There is a whole hell of a lot to dislike about the MSM. However, the notion that the MSM is somehow a leftist cabal engaged in a campaign to hide the "real" BHO [according to the tin hat brigade, not an American citizen and pragmatic politician positioned ever so slightly left of center, but actually a radical black socialist/communist Manchurian candidate with ties to Islam from his elementary school days in Indonesia] to help bring about the destruction of the US and of capitalism.

Hey, if we're going to take up politics, how about a round of comments about "activist judges" overturning a century of precedent by knocking down the thin membrane that has kept corporations from not being legally considered identical to actual human citizens?

Posted by: Chris White on February 7, 2010 3:55 PM