At the memorial, Obama compared Mandela to Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln.

"In the arc of his life, we see a man who earned his place in history through struggle and shrewdness, persistence and faith. He tells us what's possible not just in the pages of dusty history books, but in our own lives as well."

This is the post where I try to understand what Andrew Sullivan means by "Meep Meep Watch."

This Sullivan post is some kind of defense of Obama that deploys a Roadrunner analogy. I know Road Runner is the source of the "meep meep," as the illustration of Roadrunner makes clear, and adding "watch" is a way Sullivan has of indicating that he's collecting things in a category.

So I understand that he's on the alert for Road-Runner-like activity. My working theory is that he's saying that Obama is like Road Runner, which would mean that he's got an enemy trying to destroy him and he keeps escaping destruction — by speed and/or extreme good luck. The enemy's efforts always backfire, and Obama/Road Runner, escaping one more time, emits a cry of glee — meep meep.

Sullivan begins:

It’s worth recalling the glee with which many hacks determined that the Obama presidency was over before the second term had really kicked in, well, only a month ago. 

So the cry of glee comes from Obama's enemies — The Hacks. Is it also worth recalling the other hacks who — a month before that — gleefully announced that the GOP had committed suicide? Sullivan notes the various troubles Obama has encountered — which were not traps set by his American political rivals at all: Healthcare.gov, Syria, Iran, the economy. He continues:

But it’s worth digesting how all these alleged disasters have settled down. 

We seem to be inside a digestive tract. It seems we've managed not to vomit. Sullivan proceeds to say things are looking better. And he ends like this:

The GOP remains utterly devoid of any constructive alternative to Obamacare, whose winners have been far less vocal – so far – than the winners. 

Is that "winners... winners" some kind of humor that escapes me — like a bird outrunning a falling rock — or just a thudding mistake?

The president is on the offensive – on economic inequality and healthcare. 

On the offensive... so he's the Coyote?

It’s far too soon to project anything certain. But what we sure can say is that a huge amount is still to play for.

What I can sure say is I'm pretty sure Obama must be the Road Runner in this analogy but... why? A huge amount is still to play for.... suggests we're at a gambling table. Road Runner, the cartoon character, doesn't even realize he's got a relentless enemy trying to destroy him. He's oblivious and lucky. You can't picture Road Runner transferring his kind of luck to, say, poker, where one squarely faces the opponent and must make decisive moves based on a known set of rules.

Sullivan's analogies and metaphors are a crazy quilt of a mixed bag of bouillabaise.

Only now will I do a "meep meep" search on Sullivan. I tried tracing the hits back to the beginning and — having opened 20+ tabs — encountered a demand to subscribe to the website. I'll stick to the tabs I've got. From September 15th, there's "Meep Meep, Motherfuckers," which has a photo of Obama looking very smug, a quote about Syria from Obama, Sullivan's exclamation "Oh, snap!" and then:

It’s been awesome to watch today as all the jerking knees quieted a little...

Do jerking knees make a noise like cracking knuckles? Can we watch quiet the way we listen to the color of our dreams?

... and all the instant judgments of the past month ceded to a deeper acknowledgment (even among Republicans) of what had actually been substantively achieved: something that, if it pans out, might be truly called a breakthrough – not just in terms of Syria, but also in terms of a better international system, and in terms of Iran.

The post ends:

So it was another treat to hear the president say, in tones that are unmistakable:

“I welcome him being involved. I welcome him saying, ‘I will take responsibility for pushing my client, the Assad regime, to deal with these chemical weapons.’ ”

Meep meep.

A treat? Sullivan feels he received a treat in hearing Obama say something that he paraphrases as the Road Runner's cry of glee at escaping another Coyote trap. But what is Road-Runneresque about Obama welcoming Putin's involvement, as if Obama is inviting Putin into an elaborate game in which we can't tell who will ultimately get played?

Here's a "Meep Meep Watch" from September 2012:

Has Obama now done to the entire GOP what he did to the Clintons, McCain and Romney? Make them somehow self-destruct? Know hope – and I haven’t said that in a while.

This one gives some clarity to what Sullivan seems to think he's seeing: a magical ability to luck into the self-destruction of one's enemies. It's like Bill Clinton's "He's Luckier Than A Dog With Two Dicks."

ADDED: Let's look at the official rules that Chuck Jones had for Road Runner, as explained in "Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist."

1. The Road Runner cannot harm the coyote except by going "Beep-beep!" 

So, it's not "meep meep" at all, which just goes to show how wrong you can be.

2. No outside force can harm the coyote—only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products.
3. The coyote can stop any time—if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: "A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim."–George Santayana; this quote appears on a promotional poster featuring the duo; with the quote appearing in Burma Shave-style clips on signs amid the roadrunner's air wake)
4. There may be no dialogue ever, except "beep-beep!" The coyote may, however, speak to the audience through wooden signs that he holds up.
5. The Road Runner must stay on the road —otherwise, logically, he would not be called "Road Runner".
6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters—the southwest American desert.
7. All materials, tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
8. Whenever possible, gravity should be made the coyote's greatest enemy.
9. The coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
There was also a tenth and more unofficial rule: The sympathy of the audience must lie with the coyote.

The sympathy of the audience must lie with the coyote!

It's the Obamacare website deadline.

What's up?

"November 30th does not represent a relaunch of HealthCare.gov," said Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which operates the site. "It is not a magical date. There will be times after November 30th when the site, like any website, does not perform optimally."

Oh, right. It was a deadline, but it wasn't a deadline deadline. You must have misunderstood, but the Obama administration would like to thank you for accepting the 2-month quieting they procured by making you somehow feel there was a deadline. It's quite similar to the way they quelled opposition with the promise that if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance. You are to be praised for your respectful submission to the management of expectations.

University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor "Rebecca M. Blank was a top candidate in 2011 to lead President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, but" she said a bad word.

Redistribution!

“A commitment to economic justice necessarily implies a commitment to the redistribution of economic resources, so that the poor and the dispossessed are more fully included in the economic system,” Ms. Blank, a noted poverty researcher, wrote in 1992....

“Redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people’s minds,” said William M. Daley, who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff at the time. Republicans wield it “as a hammer” against Democrats, he said, adding, “It’s a word that, in the political world, you just don’t use.”

These days the word is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans, who have long accused Democrats of seeking “socialized medicine.” But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall.

Boldface added.

The linked article is in the NYT, which does not omit the old story of Obama campaigning in 2008, running into "Joe the Plumber," and blabbing jovially about how he wanted to "spread the wealth around."

I love this sentence:

In the end, America’s political culture may have made it unrealistic to expect a smooth public reception for the law, no matter how cleverly the White House modulated Mr. Obama’s language or shaped his policy to minimize the number of losers.

Let me paraphrase that for you: Obama had to lie to get the law passed.

When we the people don't want something, in a democracy that should work to stop it. We're voters, not some agglomerated "culture" to be softened and shaped. If we didn't want it, you shouldn't have done it. It's good that cleverness and manipulation did not overcome that reality. Of course, the law got passed, because people had voted in representatives who had the grandiosity to believe they didn't need to represent us, that trickily crafted policies and rhetoric would be enough. Fortunately, those representatives were wrong, and they richly deserve all the political pain they've got to go through now.

"Republicans, wounded and eager to show they have not been stripped of all power, are far more likely to unify against the Democrats who humiliated them in such dramatic fashion."

In the NYT, Jonathan Weisman assesses post-filibuster politics, under the headline "Partisan Fever in Senate Likely to Rise."

Republican senators who were willing to team with Democrats on legislation like an immigration overhaul, farm policy and a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act will probably think twice in the future....

Please, Republicans, please be obstructionist. I hear the secret thoughts of the NYT. Go big-time obstructionistic on things that will leverage Democrats next year to say that you hate the Hispanic people and you're at war against women. 

It's the Democrats who are beaten up right now, who need a boost in the midst of the Obamacare debacle. But the NYT is here to tell you that yesterday Democrats "humiliated" Republicans in "such dramatic fashion." The Democrats are desperate to change the subject back to how terrible Republicans are, and the NYT is here to help. The Democrats go "nuclear" on the old Senate tradition, and the NYT stresses the dramatic humiliation of the Republicans.

David Axelrod, a former top adviser to Mr. Obama, said retaliation by Republicans against the president’s broader agenda would end up hurting them more than Democrats. 

Well, of course, it's his assignment to say why whatever happens is good for Democrats and bad for Republicans. You can try to make up the argument for yourself before reading it.

“If their answer is, ‘Oh yeah, we can make it even worse,’ I think they do that at great risk,” Mr. Axelrod said. “They have to make a decision about whether they want to be a shrinking, shrieking, blocking party, or if they are going to be a national party.”

Did you guess right? A good strategy for guessing right would have been to look at what the NYT had in the paragraphs at the top of the article and presume they'd already used the talking point Axelrod had fed them.

From the moment Mr. Obama took office, the president who proclaimed that there was no red America and blue America, only the United States of America, has strained to maintain some pretense of bipartisanship — through protracted and fruitless efforts to woo Republicans on his economic stimulus plan and health care law....

What?! The health-care law is a monument to throwing out bipartisanship. Everyone plays the bipartisanship game until they decide not to. It means nothing that any politician ever "strained to maintain some pretense of bipartisanship." All that matters is: When did they give up the pretense? We saw the Democrats jam Obamacare through without a single Republican vote, and now they've got 100% responsibility for the biggest, craziest government overreach in American history. And they've muscled Republicans even further to the sidelines, because they want what they want. How on earth can this be an occasion for dinging Republicans for a failure of bipartisanship? Ludicrous!

Then on Thursday, before a solemn, almost funereal gathering on the Senate floor, the pretense came to an end....

Mr. Obama expressed hope that a bipartisan spirit “will have a little more space now.” 

On this "funereal" occasion, bipartisanship was in the casket, so I'm going to read Obama's remark as a creepy quip. What a commodious coffin!

"Is he a fool or is he lying? I'm leaning toward lying..."

Here's an old post of mine, from July 21, 2009:

"You know, I have to say that I am not familiar with the provision you are talking about."

Obama answering the question: "Will people be able to keep their insurance and will insurers be able to write new policies even though H.R. 3200 is passed?"

Is he a fool or is he lying?

I'm leaning toward lying because of the way his answer emphasizes keeping insurance — which (I think) the bill permits — and avoids talking about writing new policies — which (I think) it forbids.

AND: Remember Obama's program to collect information on "fishy" things people were saying about Obamacare?

ALSO: From August 2009, a discussion of how the health-care debate would have gone if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency:

She wouldn't have blithely assumed Americans would quietly accept the vast, complex restructuring of health care that the congressional Democrats dumped on us. Obama naively thought that he was enough, and the more-liberal-than-America Democrats imagined they could get by on the magic of our admiration for the charming new President, who would look even lovelier as he amassed glittering accomplishments. Wouldn't he be wonderful? Wouldn't America be wonderful to have elected such a fine man President?

MORE: Now, this is what I was really looking for when I went back into my old posts under the Obamacare tag. I took a "cold look" at a speech Obama gave on September 9, 2009. I quoted him:

[I]f you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.

And I said:

I get it. Nothing will require anything of me if I have what I like (and I do). But if you change the structure of the insurance market, my insurance company may not survive or it may be forced to change. Then how do I keep what I have? What I have now may not exist in the future. This is why I do not feel secure.  

I quoted him again: "What this plan will do is to make the insurance you have work better for you." And I said: "But I like my plan now. You admit you're going to change it."

I quoted him: "Under this plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition." And I said:

Not just me, but anybody. The health insurance business will have to change.  I understand the good of helping people with medical conditions, but I wonder what it will do to the private business to suddenly change this.  

I can see very clearly that I never believed the lies he's apologizing for now. Much more at that link.

"Obama plans to 'make government cool again.'"

"Barack Obama addressed the wide distaste for government... 'Our campaign from the beginning has been about changing government,' he said, recalling some great accomplishments of American government: Civil rights legislation, the interstate highway system, and the National Park system. Obama would, he said, 'transform Washington' and 'make government cool again.'"

Ben Smith, writing in Politico, September 11, 2008.

"For Many Iranians, 'Death To America' Are Just Words."

NPR assures.

Just words?! Hey, don't tell me words don't matter!



It's just by chance that the old Obama "just words" speech came to mind there. Pure coincidence that it comes the day after all that talk about Rand Paul and plagiarism. But this was the speech where he lifted his best lines from Deval Patrick.

Just words!

Obama's newest famous quote is "I'm really good at killing people" — but what was the context?

The Daily Mail cherry-picked the quote out of the new book "Double Down: Game Change 2012." The book's not out for normal people until tomorrow. (Buy it here.) So I'm stuck wondering. DM says:

A Washington Post report makes passing reference to the anecdote, saying that while speaking with his aides about the drone program Obama bragged that he was 'really good at killing people.' The Obama Administration has not responded specifically to reports of the alleged boast from the President.

The Daily Mail is punctilious enough to say "alleged" but can't resist characterizing the words as a "boast." We're told he "bragged." The headline says "President Obama joked...." Let's assume for the purposes of discussion that Obama really did say those words in that order. But let's try to imagine why he might have said that.

Perhaps you're imagining a childish man, exclaiming "I'm really good at killing people" like a numbskull teenager playing a first-person-shooter video game. Or maybe you're picturing someone more like a movie super-villain in his vast underground lair, cackling to his fawning minions as he creepily caresses his "kill" button.

But it's possible to think of a context in which Obama would be sympathetic. I could imagine a serious discussion of the lack of genuine accomplishment in his administration.

O: What will history say we have done? Nothing! I was the embodiment of hope, and everything I have touched has turned to ashes.

AIDE: But, sir....

O: What are the accomplishments? Name the accomplish of the Obama administration! What will people say?!

AIDE: He killed bin Laden.

O: A pathetic, isolated idiot sitting in his hovel, watching bad porn. The SEALs blew him away. That was really amazing of me.

AIDE: [Names several significant terrorists who have been killed through the drone program.]

O [sadly, sarcastically]: I'm really good at killing people.

Intent on writing this little dialogue, I searched for a list of 4 or 5 good names for the aide to tick off in an effort to bolster the President's spirits. See if you can do that. I couldn't do it. I kept running into "A List Of Children Killed By Drone Strikes In Pakistan and Yemen." Go there. Scroll through those names (and ages) and think about that context and why Obama might have said I'm really good at killing people.

On the occasion of the accusations of plagiarism against Rand Paul...

Let's go to the blog archives. It's nice to have a "plagiarism" tag that lets me pull out so many old conversations about plagiarism that were prompted by various things over the years. (The links are on the numbers.)

1. "The internet is changing the way students think about plagiarism... or — I would add — they way they lie about it."

2. "Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength; if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information."

3. "The real fault is not making it a point always to write sharp, distinctive prose. Prose like the stuff [Maureen] Dowd lifted called out for rewriting. She might not have known to think I can't use that because I didn't write it. But she should at least have thought I can't use that because it's dull."

4. "'[T]here is a big difference between being a plagiarist — at bottom, lazy or sloppy — and being a fabulist.' It's tougher to make things up than to copy, and yet it's Lehrer who's screwed himself more deeply."

5. "'To coin a phrase, in the spirit of the vice president-elect, you can't always get what you want, but you get what you need,' Alito said, an imperfect rendering of a Rolling Stones lyric. Then, he added, 'Did someone say that before?'"

6."My dear, it's called an allusion. The error isn't stealing, it's assuming people get it."

7. "Jerry Seinfeld's late-night rant about his wife's cookbook rival was no joke to the author's family."

8. "When you are discovered, I want you to claim — really sincerely — that you actually mistakenly believed that you remembered the incident as if it had happened to you. You can be all: 'I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me.'"

9. "How is it possible for someone in [Fareed Zakaria's] position to make a mistake of that kind? The risk far outweighs any convenience in copying material like this. It can't be deliberate."

10. "Once you’ve been busted for making stuff up, you need to be sure that what you publish is reasonably accurate... though I suppose that passing on other people’s fabrications is arguably a modest improvement over creating his own."

11. "Should Coldplay be able to force Hoepfner to take down his accusatory video and apologize, or do we think it's a nice resolution of the controversy for Coldplay to escape unsued and for Hoepfner to have his viral video to leverage his band to whatever degree of fame it can get out of this amusing little artistic squabble?"

12. "'I think that’s the way Bob Dylan has always written songs.... It’s part of the folk process, even if you look from his first album until now.' Well, theft itself is a traditional 'process,' but it would still piss me off if someone robbed me, either with a six gun or a fountain pen. At least Dylan called an album 'Love and Theft,' and he's repeatedly presented himself as a thief in various lyrics. To have Bob Dylan steal some of your phrases and the Dylan fanatics ferret out the connection he declined to tell us about is to get publicity you never would have gotten otherwise."

13. "When you accuse a 6-year-old of plagiarism in an art contest, you'd better be ready to make a decision to disqualify her and stick to it. You've besmirched her, and you can't unbesmirch her. Oh, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service! You idiots!"

14. Rush Limbaugh appropriates my question, without attribution.

15. "And if our good opinion of him is based mainly on his speeches, then we have reason to examine why we're supporting him. But politics is full of stock phrases, contagious memes, and brainstormed messages."

16. "Obama defends his use of a couple lines given him by his associate Duval Patrick. 'This is where we start getting into the silly season in politics.'"

17. Ch-ch-ch-changes:

"In December 2007, candidate Obama was asked: "If you could... enact one piece of legislation — one thing, that’s all you’re going to get through in your presidency — what would it be?"

It was a question asked by one of 6 New Hampshire independents meeting with Senator Obama at the Loaf and Ladle restaurant, and "it seemed to stump him for a moment." What was the answer?

“I would enact a bold energy policy because I think that we could save so much money, engineer such a resurgence in our economy and solve climate change all at one time. And it would improve our national security posture. So you get a three-fer. It helps our environment, our economy and our national security and it would free up resources over time to deal with what I think is the most important domestic issue which is health care, and I think it would help us strategically on the international stage.”

Health care is in there, but only after the economy booms, freeing up money over time to make it workable to deal with health care.

Were we warned that leading from behind his party's majority in Congress, he would push through a massive health-care reform — without persuading the majority of Americans, without gaining support from the minority party, without prior economic recovery, and while plummeting hopelessly and incomprehensibly deeply into debt?

Was he stumped by that Loaf-and-Ladle question, or did he pause to carefully frame a bizarre lie? Notice that he claims his energy policy will be a "three-fer" and health care isn't one of the 3 things. The 3 things are a resurgent economy, the solution to climate change, and stronger national security. Health care is tossed in as an afterthought, and he's calling it an "important issue," not saying how he will solve it, only implying that money needs to be amassed before the issue can be approached.

As an independent who voted for Obama in 2008, looking back at that crafty answer, I feel defrauded. Maybe back then those thoughtful, elaborate answers inflated us with hope, but pulling that one apart this morning, I feel anger and disgust. What a horrible squandering of 2 terms of presidency!

"Nobody's madder than me," Obama says now. That can't be true.

"I haven’t had a cigarette in probably 6 years. That’s because I’m scared of my wife.”

Said Barack Obama, caught in a seemingly candid moment.

I don't believe in the truth of either statement — that he hasn't had a cigarette in about 6 years and that he's scared of his wife — but I don't hear an intent that these remarks be taken as true. I hear an off-the-record interaction with one individual that's about making a friendly connection. There's camaraderie in displaying that he knows something personal about the other man and — since what he knows is that the man has a substance addiction problem — referring to his own parallel weakness.

He doesn't scold or put down the other man, but expresses hope — hope! — that the man has quit smoking and makes the possibly untrue assertion that he hasn't smoked one cigarette in "probably 6 years." This is an encouraging remark, and I think that it was offered in the spirit of encouragement but that Obama also realized that it might sound braggadocious, so he toned it down with the self-deprecating humor about being scared of his wife.

That gives an explanation for not smoking and works as posing that he's an ordinary guy tending to the demands of his wife, even though he is the most powerful man in the world. This is humanizing and a bit silly, and it's a male-bonding moment, containing the implication that wives are demanding and require appeasement.

If you want to mock or criticize Obama here, I think the more sophisticated speculation not that he's revealed he's subservient and pusillanimous, but that this is misogyny or male chauvinism. Obama is using his wife — both as a stereotypical woman and as the caricature of her that we see in the media — to make points with another man. Michelle Obama is not there. It's a remark about her behind her back. She's not named, but called "my wife." And she's scary. He's not actually scared, just tapping an old sexist mindset that makes it possible to laugh at stupid cartoons like this:



And Obama is simultaneously appropriating the anti-Michelle propaganda of his political opponents. He's casually gesturing at the huge pile of mean-spirited scribblings about how she's always nagging everybody about health, all the miscellaneous things scribbled on web pages and illustrated with photos like this:



Feminists and traditionalists alike can chide the man who engages in loose, humorous talk about his wife behind her back.

***

"Honor your marriage; keep it pure by remaining true to your wife in every way."

"It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation."

Writes Vladimir Putin... in a NYT op-ed.

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

What a fine time Putin is having, repurposing American pieties and slapping our President around!

That's the very end of the op-ed, and here's a line from the top of the column: "But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together." Putin is sly enough not to be explicit, but the inference is there: Remember when the Nazis encouraged the Germans to see themselves as exceptional?

Poor Obama! Righties have been pummeling him for years for failing to manifest a belief in American exceptionalism. He throws them a sop and Putin hits him over the head.

"That was perfunctory."

If you want to know what I said after listening to Obama's speech last night, that's it.

I wasn't so much talking about the text, but the way he said it — the choppy, listless delivery, especially as he came to the end:

With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth.

Thank you. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

I found myself immediately retreating to the cliché of imagining how Ronald Reagan said those words "God bless the United States of America."

Like he meant them.

And I'm not saying I don't think Obama means them. I'm only saying that he said them as if they meant: Okay, now I gotta get outta here.

"Obama's strategic languidness has put lawmakers in a position such that many of them will be unable to vote either 'yes' or 'no' in good conscience."

"And with his failure to develop even a political strategy for approaching Congress on this matter, he has managed the dubious achievement of leading the U.S. into a foreign-policy quagmire without firing a shot."

ADDED: When we look back at Barack Obama, what will we say? I think it will have to do with the way we wanted to believe that the old parental "use words" admonition was the best advice and we conned ourselves into seeing him as the embodiment of that fantasy, and he tried to be our dream.

But the world isn't that pretty, and the dream doesn't make much sense unless enough people to play along. Giving him the Nobel Peace Prize in advance was part of the shared dream: Come on, everyone into the delusion.

But the "use words" approach gave way to using bombs, which were supposed to be enough like words that we wouldn't wake from the dream. Bombs express our disapproval of the worse things done on the ground, the ground which our "boots" never touch.

The speech by the speechmaker about The Speech by The Speechmaker.

The 50-year anniversary of Martin Luther King's "Dream" speech isn't about Obama except to the extent it is.

We'll see what happens in the speeches today, speeches about a speech, but MLK was much more than that speech, though over the years MLK has been reframed as That Speech, which works to align Obama with MLK, since Obama is, above all, the speechmaker, even though he too is so much more. He's the President of the United States, and we need him to do so much more than give another speech — my God, we are going to war, war over weapons of mass destruction, war without the United Nations, without the coalition of the willing, without the authorization of Congress — but today he'll be giving another speech, a speech about The Speech, the speech by the speechmaker about The Speech by The Speechmaker.

"[I]t’s time to move beyond the political style of the baby boom generation."

"This is a style... that is highly moralistic and personal, dividing people between who is good and who is bad."

That's David Brooks on October 19, 2006, paraphrasing Obama and encouraging him to run for President. It's a paraphrase of what Obama wrote in the then-just-out "Audacity of Hope" and something he'd said to Brooks in an interview.

Look at the contradiction even in those 2 sentences that Brooks put together to promote Obama. Obama would like to "move beyond" the politics that divides people into good and bad, even as he draws a line of division and portrays the Baby Boomers as bad.

I'm searching the text of "The Audacity of Hope" to see what Obama wrote about Baby Boomers. There are 2 mentions. First, at page 50:

Despite a forty-year remove, the tumult of the sixties and the subsequent backlash continues to drive our political discourse. Partly it underscores how deeply felt the conflicts of the sixties must have been for the men and women who came of age at that time, and the degree to which the arguments of the era were understood not simply as political disputes but as individual choices that defined personal identity and moral standing.

The fury of the counterculture may have dissipated into consumerism, lifestyle choices, and musical preferences rather than political commitments, but the problems of race, war, poverty, and relations between the sexes did not go away.

And maybe it just has to do with the sheer size of the Baby Boom generation, a demographic force that exerts the same gravitational pull in politics that it exerts on everything else, from the market for Viagra to the number of cup holders automakers put in their cars.

Whatever the explanation, after Reagan the lines between Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, would be drawn in more sharply ideological terms. This was true, of course, for the hot-button issues of affirmative action, crime, welfare, abortion, and school prayer, all of which were extensions of earlier battles. But it was also now true for every other issue, large or small, domestic or foreign, all of which were reduced to a menu of either-or, for-or-against, sound-bite-ready choices. No longer was economic policy a matter of weighing trade-offs between competing goals of productivity and distributional justice, of growing the pie and slicing the pie. You were for either tax cuts or tax hikes, small government or big government.  No longer was environmental policy a matter of balancing sound stewardship of our natural resources with the demands of a modern economy; you either supported unchecked development, drilling, strip-mining, and the like, or you supported stifling bureaucracy and red tape that choked off growth. In politics, if not in policy, simplicity was a virtue.

Sometimes I suspect that even the Republican leaders who immediately followed Reagan weren’t entirely comfortable with the direction politics had taken. In the mouths of men like George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole, the polarizing rhetoric and the politics of resentment always seemed forced, a way of peeling off voters from the Democratic base and not necessarily a recipe for governing.

But for a younger generation of conservative But for a younger generation of conservative operatives who would soon rise to power, for Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, the fiery rhetoric was more than a matter of campaign strategy. They were true believers who meant what they said, whether it was “No new taxes” or “We are a Christian nation.” In fact, with their rigid doctrines, slash-and-burn style, and exaggerated sense of having been aggrieved, this new conservative leadership was eerily reminiscent of some of the New Left’s leaders during the sixties. As with their left-wing counterparts, this new vanguard of the right viewed politics as a contest not just between competing policy visions, but between good and evil. Activists in both parties began developing litmus tests, checklists of orthodoxy, leaving a Democrat who questioned abortion increasingly lonely, any Republican who championed gun control effectively marooned. In this Manichean struggle, compromise came to look like weakness, to be punished or purged. You were with us or against us. You had to choose sides.

It was Bill Clinton’s singular contribution that he tried to transcend this ideological deadlock...

And a few pages later:

In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation—a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago—played out on the national stage. The victories that the sixties generation brought about—the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority—have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions—that quality of trust and fellow feeling—that bring us together as Americans. 

So that's what we were supposed to be saved from by the next generation, unburdened by the 60s psychodrama. Brooks said Obama should run not in spite of his young age but  "because of his age." Brooks seemed to worry that Obama was too indecisive, with his "compulsive tendency to see both sides of any issue." ("He seems like the guy who spends his first 15 minutes at a restaurant debating the relative merits of fish versus meat.") But he liked "this style" as "surely the antidote to the politics of the past several years."And "the times will never again so completely require the gifts that he possesses."

"Speak English" rhetoric that you'd better not try unless you're a Democrat.

1. NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg: "I’ve said this a thousand times, if you don’t speak good grammar – English with good grammar – you’re not going to get the kinds of jobs that you want.... If there’s a lot of jargon, double negatives, and things like that, they hurt your career prospects... People think its cute to jive, and it may be for entertainment, but ya just still have to have great command of the english language."

2. U.S. President Barack Obama: "This bill would provide a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million individuals who are already in this country illegally--a pathway that includes passing a background check, learning English, paying taxes and a penalty, and then going to the back of the line behind everyone who's playing by the rules and trying to come here legally."

3. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich: "We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and so they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto... Second … we should establish that citizenship requires passing a test on American history in English."

4. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney: "And Reagan would have never offended Hispanics as Gingrich did when he said Spanish is the language of the ghetto."

"'My remarks are not sitting here,' the President declared awkwardly."

"I’m uhhh….people….oh goodness….uhhhh...folks are sweating back there right now."

Oh, no. I hope he's not trying to make us feel sorry for him.

Here's how Drudge graphically depicts the story (using a photo from some other event (video of the actual event at the first link, complete with stumbling aide)):

"The U.S. needs a leader, not a law professor."

Says the Washington Post in line 2 of a front-page teaser. The first line is: "Barack Obama, Agonizer in Chief" — which implicates a stereotype about law professors.  

(Do we agonize? Maybe the law school class is some sort of theater of agonizing over whatever it is we're talking about as we do what we can't do — or we'd be lying/putting ourselves out of work — just tell the students what the answer is.)

But when I click on the link I get to this Ruth Marcus column which begins: "No doubt: Barack Obama has what it takes to be a terrific law student. It’s less clear those are the ingredients of a successful president." So... not even a law professor. A law student. I guess the WaPo couldn't bring itself to tease us with "The U.S. needs a leader, not a law student."

Marcus tells us that a "terrific law student" analyzes everything "in a dispassionate, balanced way" without necessarily really taking much of a position, which is what, she says, Obama did in his speech last week at the National Defense University. "Barack Obama... the Agonizer" is at least way better than "George W. Bush... the Decider," because Obama must be better than Bush, because Bush was terrible. Bush was so not terrific. Bush, Marcus tells us, "decided too precipitously and agonized too little." But Obama is just too thoughtful.

Marcus compares Obama's speech to "scribbling exam answers in a blue book." She calls him "ever the A-plus student," even as she looks ready to give him a C- as he calls Guantanamo "this legacy problem" that ought to be "resolved, consistent with our commitment to the rule of law."

This answer doesn’t even pass the law student test. How, exactly? That the solution is elusive does not justify this blatant dodge.

The lawprof in me wants to say that if Obama's speech is the text to be understood, Marcus is the one who's not a terrific student. Her writing rests on the presumption that the words of his speech are the same words that run through his head as he thinks about the various problems and the words that he speaks in private. I say "her writing" because I'm not deluded enough to think that the words in the Washington Post are the words inside Marcus's head. She's arguing to him and his advisers that he needs to do something different and he's not getting away with the seemingly dispassionate, balanced analysis. She'd like to manipulate his mind.

And Obama, in his speech, was attempting to manipulate our minds. The performance in the Theater of Agonizing is for a purpose. We can try to discern his purpose — perhaps to get us to trust in his caretaking and to be patient while he continues to do the things that need to be done and not to look too closely at the incoherencies and possible illegalities. This is what leaders do.