"Obama’s go-slow 'don't ask, don't tell' plan backfires."

The headline in Politico.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton nearly derailed his presidency with an early move to end the military’s ban on gay service members. Aides scrambled to craft the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy as a compromise to get the politically radioactive issue off the new administration’s back.

President Barack Obama’s aides were intent, above all else, on not repeating that experience when it came to carrying out their campaign promise to open up the military to gays, so they moved cautiously.

Give them credit: They found a new way to screw things up.

The result: Obama now faces his own political crisis over the issue that threatens his support from key Democratic constituencies, undermines his relationship with the Pentagon and puts him in the odd position of defending a practice he has denounced as discriminatory and harmful to national security.

“It’s crazy that all this is happening 2½ weeks before a national election,” said Richard Socarides, an adviser to Clinton on gay issues during the ’93 fiasco. “The timing could not be worse for them, but it was fairly predictable that their strategy of postponing and delaying getting into this stuff was, at some point, going to come back to haunt them.”

So, this technique of going slow resulted in the troublesome matter heating up at exactly the point when they least wanted us to notice. Poetic justice.

The article has a lot of detail on the way the lawsuits progressed in court, including the decision not to appeal the 9th Circuit case (Witt) that would have brought the question of the constitutionality of DADT to the Supreme Court — with Elena Kagan, then Solicitor General, defending the statute.

Meanwhile, there was the Log Cabin Republicans' lawsuit, which was filed in 2004 and proceeded terribly slowly under Judge George Schiavelli (a Bush appointee). Schiavelli resigned in 2008, and the new judge, Virginia Phillips, a Clinton appointee, got things going, and she hit Obama with her decision that DADT is unconstitutional on September 9th of this year. Ironically, her decision was based on the heightened scrutiny standard announced in the Witt case that the Obama administration chose not to appeal. Funny, the way a President can't control the courts.

Phillips said it was hard to accept the Justice Department’s arguments that the law was constitutionally sound when Obama was telling audiences that “reversing this policy ... is essential for national security.”

“Obama’s made a lot of statements that we’ve been using as evidence against the government,” said Log Cabin attorney Dan Woods. “They’re in a very awkward position.”

Tangled in their own web.

"We have had stylish presidents, none more so than JFK. But Kennedy was an ironist and never fell for his own mystique."

"Mr. Obama's self-regard comes without irony—he himself now owns up to the 'remoteness and detachment' of his governing style. We don't have in this republic the technocratic model of the European states, where a bureaucratic elite disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will. Mr. Obama was smitten with his own specialness."

Fouad Ajami analyzes the rise and fall of Obama. Are we ready to say the Obama has fallen? Is lack of irony the problem? Was it our unEuropeanness that defeated him?

Is it time for a "national conversation" about class?

"Perhaps, as we view this confrontation between an Harvard Prof who’s a friend of the President and a Cambridge cop, we can also have a national conversation about class."

Yes, a great and unprecedented conversation....

Obamamanman.

This T-shirt is being worn unironically by my sons' cousin, James Sasso. It is a T-shirt that, I feel sure, has irony in its future.

"Is It Too Soon to Start Talking About the Failed Obama Presidency Just Because He Isn’t President Yet?"

Reputed title of a Weekly Standard piece by P. J. O’Rourke, according to this NYT article called "Irony Is Dead. Again. Yeah, Right."

What's the connection between the death of irony and Barack Obama? Joan Didion made the connection, saying people these days were into "naïveté, translated into 'hope.'"

The Times -- struggling mightily to develop its theme -- tried to get Didion to explain herself:

“Basically,” she said on the phone Tuesday, “I don’t like to talk about anything I’ve written or that I’m writing. What you write down, there it is and you’ve done it.”

Which means: Fuck you, I'm a wordsmith.

Joan Didion felt "unexpressable uneasiness" about the election.

"We were getting what we wanted..."

... a smart, qualified, decent candidate the Eastern elite could get behind. And yet the frenzy surrounding Obama made her uneasy — both the sense that he was a young person's candidate, "a generational thing we couldn't understand" and the unthinking embrace of "naivete transformed to hope, partisanism as consumerism." Didion bridled at the wanton use of "transformational" and said she couldn't count the number of times she heard the 60's evoked "by people who apparently had no memory that the 60s" didn't involve decking babies out in political onesies.

Didion was at pains to say that she did not think any of this was Obama's doing, nor to his tastes. He would, she speculated "welcome healthy realism" and achievable expectations. In our frenzy, we are doing him a disservice, expecting miracles "at a time when the nation can least afford easy answers." She recalled, the day after the election, an overexcited newscaster declaring that we now possess "the congratulations of all the nations." She likened this to the naivete of thinking we'd be regarded as beloved saviors in Iraq. But, she ended, "in the irony-free zone that our country has become, this is not what people wanted to hear."

I love the way a breath of stale air is a breath of fresh air.

What Berlusconi and Ahmadinejad said about the Obama victory.

The L.A. Times reports:

Berlusconi, who has a history of controversial remarks, said the relative youth of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, 43, and Obama, 47, should make it easier for Moscow and Washington to work together.

Then, smiling, he said through an interpreter, "I told the president that [Obama] has everything needed in order to reach deals with him: He's young, handsome and even tanned."...

Berlusconi, 72, later defended the remark, calling it "a great compliment. . . . If they have the vice of not having a sense of humor, worse for them"....

Berlusconi said the remark was meant to be "cute" and he lashed out at those who disagreed, calling them "imbeciles, of which there are too many."

Berlusconi is getting a lot of criticism in Italy. He's embarrassing. In America, do we care about "tan" jokes? I note that the WaPo fashion columnist Robin Givhan wrote, about Michelle Obama: "[T]he implied message is unmistakable: I am neither subversive nor threatening. I am not some scary 'other.' I am Camelot with a tan." Givhan is herself African American, which gives her more leeway, and she's imagining someone else's implied statement.

Stepping back from the focus on calling a black person "tanned," we should see that Berlusconi was making a sexual joke. To say Obama can make deals because "He's young, handsome and even tanned" is to say that he can be seductive, and Berlusconi was picturing a "deal" between Obama and Medvedev. Medvedev, who was standing right there -- and not reacting -- looks like this:



So, you get the picture of what Berlusconi thinks is "cute." (How do you say "cute" in Italian?)

As for Ahmadinejad, who is decidedly not cute:

“I congratulate you for attracting the majority of votes in the election,” Mr. Ahmadinejad wrote in his message, an Iranian news agency, ISNA, reported. “As you know, opportunities that are bestowed upon humans are short lived,” he wrote, adding that he hoped Mr. Obama would make the most of the opportunity....

“People in the world expect war-oriented policies, occupation, bullying, deception and intimidation of nations and imposing discriminatory policies on them and international affairs, which have evoked hatred toward American leaders, to be replaced by ones advocating justice, respect for human rights, friendship and noninterference in other countries’ affairs"...

Short lived, eh?

ADDED: Italy is in a tizzy:

Many Italian newspapers gave the comment nearly as much front-page attention as Mr. Obama’s victory itself. The journalist Curzio Maltese wrote in the center-left La Repubblica that “bookmakers wouldn’t even take bets” on how long it would take for Mr. Berlusconi to let slip another of his famous gaffes. “Mr. Berlusconi never fails to live up to our worst expectations.”

Mr. Maltese added that just when Mr. Obama’s victory was “inspiring billions of people” to consider “democracy, the most extraordinary triumph of humanity after centuries of bloodshed and intolerance,” Mr. Berlusconi instead contributed “a miserable, vulgar and racist remark, for which he didn’t even have the courage to take responsibility or the dignity to apologize.”

A billionaire populist, Mr. Berlusconi excels at deflating such lofty talk. He said that his remark had been “a compliment” and that his critics lacked irony. “If you want to get a degree in idiocy, I won’t stop you,” La Repubblica quoted him as saying. “I say whatever I think.”

"An Obama presidency would be great for comedy, as it signals a rise in the intelligence level of America..."

ADDED INTRO: Welcome, Village Voice readers. Roy Edroso sends you here with the lines "The news in the final days of the campaign offers scant hope for rightbloggers... In the final hours before their presumed electoral Armageddon, the rightbloggers' last, desperate assaults have sprayed fire at all kinds of collateral targets." But you ought to know that Edroso's characterization of me is entirely wrong. I took a vow of "cruel neutrality" on March 4th -- intended to last until at least October -- and "spread the attacks around and [gave] credit where credit is due." On October 7th, I revealed my emerging support for Obama. Over the past month, my posts have still been balanced, but my support for Obama has crystalized. I'm no "rightblogger," though Roy is clearly a leftblogger, and a pretty dumb or dishonest one. With that correction, please read the original post, which follows.

***

"... which makes for better, more ironic and layered jokes."

From an article about how an Obama presidency will change comedy, that's a quote from a famous American comedian. Try to guess which one before you look. I guarantee you'll be wrong.

So, anyway, there's the issue whether it will be too hard to joke about Obama. There are really 2 problems:

1. He so wonderful and well-liked -- at least by the usual comedians! -- that there's no basis for edginess, anger, and sarcasm. We're not going to laugh at jokes about how there's nothing to joke about. So what can be funny?

2. He's black, and white comedians feel they can't go all-out exploiting that characteristic for jokes. If McCain wins, comedians can make jokes about his age and his rage, the way they mocked Bush's speech and stupidity and Clinton's gluttony and lechery. But wait, I had 2 conventional characteristics for the others, so comedians could get past Obama's race and pick... something funny. Not that he's so articulate. Maybe that he's pretentiously professorial and consequently boring.

From the article:

"Comedians haven't been hitting Obama that hard because he hasn't made a lot of missteps - yet," says [Carol Kolb, head writer of the Onion News Network]. "If he actually becomes President, there's no way he will please everyone. The left-leaning comedians are supporting him in opposition to John McCain, but they're probably not going to agree with all of his policies. He'll be working in government and dealing with bureaucracy and pleasing voters, so he'll start making mistakes.

"I have no fear that there will be something to make fun of. It may take awhile for that to emerge, but when it does, the humor will be more nuanced and informed. We will pounce when the time is right. Now we're just biding our time."

Blah! I despise all the comic writers who have held their fire because they so want Obama to win. Comedy first, you traitors to your craft. And, by the way, Onion News Network is unwatchably dull. The Onion has been fun to read for years, but the translation to video sucks, perhaps because the writers have been so keen on helping a politician win. (But it's not just that.)

"No particular aspect of Obama's life will be off limits for us," says the Onion's Kolb. "That's just not how we do things at the Onion. I'm sure there's some joke to be made about race. Just give us time."

Something tells me Kolb will never be funny... about anything.

African-American comics, though, may not have to wait. From Chris Rock to D. L. Hughley to "30 Rock" star Tracy Morgan, this may be a watershed moment for comedy as in politics.

"Here's the thing," says Larry Wilmore, the "Senior Black Correspondent" on "The Daily Show."

"If you're in power, you become The Man. If Barack Obama becomes The Man, you've got to make fun of The Man. Those are the rules.

"But you know, McCain may win. And then you have to work on an 'angry Obama' impression. That might be much more fun than his being President, really."

Here's Carlos Mencia:

"If Obama becomes the first black President ... to make fun of his blackness is going to be great. Like, he's not black enough, or maybe he's too black. If we find Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan and he drops a bomb in Pakistan, that's thug, man. You're going to be like, 'I didn't realize he was that black! I thought he was just Huxtable black!'"

Obama has not won yet, so what these folks are saying is still what they say before he's elected. Mencia reflects the current situation, in which non-white comedians get to make jokes the white comedians avoid. Will that change? Or will the shows rely on the use of black comedians to tell racial jokes?

I think the best solution is to observe Obama closely and find specific things about him instead of giving yourself permission to fall back on racial stereotypes for humor. (I know, I'm being transracial, which is still in the pre-Obama admininstration mode, and is also not at all edgy or funny.)

The artistic qualities of this McCain ad completely distracted me from whatever words were spoken or shown.

Watching this ad was a strange experience for me. I clicked on the teaser at Politico, so I knew "'Temple' ad mocks Obama's stage," and I'd already decided I was going to watch it, so.... Well, you try to watch it:



Was your experience like mine? I was fascinated by the photographic effects in the beginning, the changing of the image to remove the crowd, and the way the "camera" pulled back from the stage. Then, before other images took over, I fell into a deep contemplation of the music: Was it from (one of my favorite movies) "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" or some other Errol Morris movie or was it simply music in the style of a sountrack in an Errol Morris movie? Could Errol Morris be making commercials for John McCain? If so, is he only in it for the money, does he actually support John McCain, or does he support Obama and somehow know how to hypnotize us so we cannot concentrate on the overt message, which is what happened to me?

In the end of the ad we are snapped out of it by the cheesy electronic music -- da da da da da da da da -- that ends most McCain commercials. So now that I've come to my senses, let me watch a second time. Okay, I've read the on-screen words and heard the concerned voiceover lady tell me Obama is "not ready to lead." But once again, I was struck by the artistry of the images and the music.

Oh, suddenly the irony of it all hits me. What I think about the ad is what the ad is trying to say about Obama! The style is fabulous, but what, really, is the content?

Obama's rally in Berlin.

How strange is it for an American presidential candidate to have a big rally in a foreign country? Why is Obama doing this in Berlin?

This may be a cheap shot, but since it's also thoroughly predictable, why did Obama set it up? The main point of a rally is to generate optics. Why would it seem like a good idea for an American candidate to be seen amid thousands of cheering Germans?

Of course, some American voters long for European love and will warm to these images of German enthusiasm, but presumably these people already support Obama.

ADDED: The German perspective:

So what is motivating Berliners and Germans in general to treat a Democratic presidential hopeful to such a royal welcome?...

In comparison to US elections, German political campaigns are short, stolid and sober affairs that focus as much on party platforms as personalities. In the wake of World War II, many Germans view charismatic leadership with mistrust.

Good call!

That, however, doesn't mean that ordinary Germans or the media are immune to the aura of a politician who knows how to work a crowd.

The current edition of Germany's most serious news weekly, Der Spiegel, features Obama on its cover with the only vaguely ironic headline "Germany Meets the Superstar" -- a play on the title of the German version of the TV show "American Idol."

And many German bloggers do seem to idolize the Illinois senator.

"For me he already is the American president," wrote one user of a Website about Obama's Berlin visit. "He may not be have been elected, but he's the president in people's hearts."

Ick. But it reminds me of the famous interview with Princess Diana:

MARTIN BASHIR: Do you think you will ever be Queen?

DIANA: No, I don't, no.

BASHIR: Why do you think that?

DIANA: I'd like to be a queen of people's hearts, in people's hearts, but I don't see myself being Queen of this country. I don't think many people will want me to be Queen.

Actually, when I say many people I mean the establishment that I married into, because they have decided that I'm a non-starter.

BASHIR: Why do you think they've decided that?

DIANA: Because I do things differently, because I don't go by a rule book, because I lead from the heart, not the head, and albeit that's got me into trouble in my work, I understand that. But someone's got to go out there and love people and show it.

Ah, so there's an angle if somehow Obama doesn't make it in the end. He can always be President of our hearts.

Slate's anti-Obama ad.

A joke, of course. (Slate can't be anti-Obama.)



AND: Does Obama mean to give Hillary the finger here?



Based on the way he laughs when they get it, I'd have to say yes. Especially ironic, since he's pushing the line about how he's the one taking politics to a higher level.

Thomas Sowell puts Barack Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright into a larger context.

He writes:

In college, "I chose my friends carefully," he said in his first book, "Dreams From My Father."

These friends included "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets" -- in Obama's own words -- as well as the "more politically active black students." He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.

Obama didn't just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college -- members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.

... Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were -- and, like many converts, he went overboard....

The irony is that Obama's sudden rise politically to the level of being the leading contender for his party's presidential nomination has required him to project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who can heal divisiveness and bring us all together.

The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleon-like change, and entranced both white and black Democrats, is a tribute to the man's talent and a warning about his reliability.

Read the whole thing.

"Since some indeterminable hour between the final dousing of the pyre at The World Trade Center...."

"... and the breaking of what Sen. Barack Obama has aptly termed '9/11 fever,' it has been profoundly and disturbingly evident that we are at the center of one of history’s great ironies."

Does anyone serve up more horrendously muddled verbiage than Keith Olbermann? I mean if something is "profoundly and disturbingly evident" why is the hour "indeterminable"? Something is either clear or it's not. And must those dreadful metaphors also be mixed? A pyre and a fever are two different kinds of burning, so it's not clever to put them together, and the burning buildings of 9/11 are not an appropriate place to demonstrate cleverness, if in fact you were capable of it.

But, you say you've identified "one of history's great ironies"? (By the way, what are the great ironies of history? I've never seen that top 10 list.)

Only in this America of the early 21st century could it be true that the man who was president during the worst attack on our nation and the man who was the mayor of the city in which that attack principally unfolded would not only be absolved of any and all blame for the unreadiness of their own governments, but, moreover, would thereafter be branded heroes of those attacks.

Excuse me a minute. I just want to diagram that sentence. Or, class, the assignment is to rewrite that in English.

Oh, blah, I can't continue to reprint this blather. Let me summarize. He quotes Giuliani saying that America will be safer with a Republican President because the Democrats will take us into a defensive policy in the war on terror and that "we will have more losses and it will go on longer." Translating Rudy's pithy remarks, Olbermann manages to avoid verbosity. What Giuliani is really saying -- don't you know? -- is: "vote Democratic and die."

Olbermann's portentous zinger: "How ... dare ... you, sir?"

What I'd like to see is not all this ridiculous gasping about who is and who isn't a monster but a serious discussion about whether the presidential campaign is offering us a choice between an offensive and a defensive response to terrorism and, if it is, which we ought to prefer. But it seems we've all already formed emotional attachments to one side or the other. Or else we've tuned out politics for now. Whatever, I recommend tuning out Olbermann. What a gasbag.

ADDED: Kevin Drum has a better response to Giuliani's remarks and the lame comebacks from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama:

Neither one of them took the chance to do what Rudy did: explain in a few short sentences why the country would be safer with a Democrat in the Oval Office. Is it really that hard? Giuliani's position is clear: more war, more domestic surveillance, more torture, and fewer civil liberties. And while it's true that the liberal position on making America secure is a little more complicated than the schoolyard version of foreign affairs beloved of Bush-era Republicans, it's not that complicated. So instead of complaining about how mean Giuliani is, why can't Obama and Clinton just tell us what they'd do?

Whining just reinforces the message that Democrats are wimps. The real way to be "hard hitting" is to explain why Giuliani is wrong and what Democrats would do instead — and why the average Joe and Jane would be safer and better off without guys like Giuliani bumbling recklessly around the globe leaving a stronger al-Qaeda and a weaker America in their wake. Until they do, Rudy and the Republicans are going to win every round of this fight.

I say that's better, but I hear in Drum's prose a contempt for the voter. Aw, it shouldn't take much to tip "the average Joe and Jane" the other way. Republican's fight incompetently, so fighting only makes things worse. Get it, you dummies?

Is Barack Obama's first memoir "a blueprint for negative attacks"?

"Dreams From My Father" was written 11 years ago, after Obama was approached by a publisher interested in his success at Harvard Law School. It's "not the kind of book you would ever expect a politician to write,"one GOP consultant says. I think it's a good thing if he revealed himself as a real person back before everything had to become a political calculation. (Or was it a political calculation, even then, just an unusual and sophisticated one?)

Obama writes extensively about his struggle to come to terms with being a black man whose African father returned to Kenya when he was 2, leaving him to be raised by his white Kansas-born mother and grandparents in Hawaii. He describes an identity crisis arising from his realization that his life was shaped by both a loving white family and a world that saw in him the negative stereotypes frequently ascribed to young black men. He recounts a search of self that took him from high school in Hawaii to Columbia University, and then to the streets of Chicago as a community organizer.

"We were always playing on the white man's court . . . by the white man's rules," he writes. "If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher . . . wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had the power and you didn't. . . . The only thing you could choose was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage.

"And the final irony: should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors . . . they would have a name for that too. Paranoid. Militant."

Most of the talk thus far has been about the confessions of drug use -- not just marijuana, but cocaine. I don't see him losing a lot of votes because of that. But presumably, people will now pick over the book looking for other sorts of character flaws. Is he paranoid? Militant? Anyone making such insinuations -- not Hillary, surely! -- will have to worry about what they say about the one doing the insinuating.