Hardly an earth-shattering revelation, but then again, some people who aren't too bright need to be reminded of it. But the tea-partiers and Galt's Gulch goers (or, rather, the Beckettian Randians: "I can't go Galt, I'll go Galt") are not the only ones feeling out of sorts lately. Andrew Malcolm was bored, Adam Nagourney was all sad rainy days and Morrisey songs and ponies with the sniffles:
This was Mr. Obama as more enervating than energizing.
What the wingnut tribes and the pundit clans have in common is that Obama is just smarter and more likeable than they are. It would be kind of revealing (which is why you won't see it) to have those little audience-meter thingies up for press conferences like they had for the debates. Obama got some sharp questions last night -- or adversarial, anyway; most of them were pretty stupid. When Ed Henry got his nose whapped with the rolled-up newspaper, the dials would have shot up applauding the president. Which is to say, I'm betting that most people who saw the press conference saw the guy they liked during the debates, namely, the only guy on the teevee screen who looked like an adult who knew what he was talking about and was not obsessed with trivia.
Which is a novel sight, and the key to Obama's appeal. As is obvious, and as I've said before, Obama is quite lucky in his enemies, a class that includes most of the opinionating media elite. He just has to go on the teevee and look rational, and he's solid. That thing where Bush tried to explain and sell his policies, with the Social Security reform and the file cabinet, and the Series of Major Speeches about Iraq, remember that? Well, Obama is actually good at it.
There is certainly room to legitimately criticize Obama, but, again, as I've said before but am saying again because it's my blog, dammit, is that this criticism comes from the left. Which means, ultimately, that if not for Paul Krugman's rather flukish and anomalous presence on the otherwise mostly silly NYT op-ed page, we wouldn't be hearing any of this sort of criticism whatsoever outside of Blogland. And this sort of criticism is usually framed as "Obama has his critics on the right, and on the other side, there's Paul Krugman, so it's entirely balanced and equal!" Which is pretty much exactly how I heard it on Morning Edition the other day on the Socialist NPR.
This is a lot like the 1990s, unsurprisingly, where Clinton also could be legitmately criticized from the left, but where such criticism I don't think ended up having most positive effect, unfortunately, for a lot of reasons I won't go into right now, and which could of course be debated. The one thing to take from the 1990s now, I think, is that whatever happens we don't want to end up with a popular president on the one hand but on the other a party that wasn't really able to compete very well in the next three election cycles. Which means if you're going to spend money donating or energy volunteering, it would be a good idea to do this for decent primary challengers to conservative wanker Democrats in 2010. More and better Democrats, that's still the desiderata.
And there should also be a lot of pointing and laughing at wingnuts and pundits. Obama is not as far left as he could or should be, but no more Whitewaters, dammit.