Thursday, November 1, 2012

Fifty: Pudding and Bow Tie


George Will’s op-ed piece from The Washington Post (11/1/12) was quoted at length today on Morning Joe. It is a nasty piece.  Will describes President Obama as “indolent in mind,” and suggests that his campaign has a “bilious tone,” with its “scurrilities about Mitt Romney as a monster of, at best, callous indifference.” He continues, “Obama’s oceanic self-esteem — no deficit there — may explain why he seems to smolder with resentment that he must actually ask for a second term.”

Will then goes on to insult Joe Biden in what couldn't possibly be a bilious tone, and then everything else about the Democratic candidates’ reelection campaign. It is like the George Will of old, when he was on the right of his party and he could be truly nasty in ways that made one sit up and take note, simply because he was way beyond the realm of Republican and Democratic consensus. Indeed, it wasn’t that one used to believe in the 80s and 90s that he was the only one who would use a word like “bilious”; one actually believed in those good old days that he had invented the word himself to describe his own behavior (with approval, of course – as he has no self-esteem deficit either). But for many years now he has seemed a shade of his former self. The Republicans have moved so far to the right, so that no compromise with any Democrat is acceptable. They began this move (led by Gingrich) against the other great democratic moderate – Clinton – whom, like Obama, they painted as a borderline socialist. And, in the process, they left George Will trying to tie his bow tie a little tighter so that he would be welcomed to their tea party. Since then Will has just seemed confused as to whether he should be going along with the radical right, or trying to claim (as he did today) that his brand of nastiness is actually the middle.

And should a President seeking reelection with Obama's record not “smolder with resentment”? If any other President had achieved what Obama has done – saving the auto industry, establishing health care, completing the withdrawal from Iraq, killing Osama bin Laden, and a host of other things – he or she would not be having the kind of difficulty getting reelected Obama has had, against someone who clearly has the same kind of oceanic self-esteem that any candidate for President must have, and who clearly has made considerable gaffs and blunders (not to mention all his outright falsehoods and flip-flopping) that would have killed off any other candidacy. And certainly no one would be charging that President, as Will is doing, with being “indolent in mind.” The fact that Barack Obama is black goes a long way to explaining why he is having such difficulty, why he is not considered fundamentally moderate in his policies, and why this has-been journalist is describing him as indolent.