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.
