The return of the prose style of Barack Obama, from an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, published in The New Yorker under the title, "A President Looks Back on His Toughest Fight
The story behind the Obama Administration’s most enduring—and most contested—legacy: reforming American health care."
I am emphatically not a fan of Obamaprose: "with the light fading into streaks of purple and gold, Michelle smiling and squeezing my hand as Bo bounded in and out of the bushes with the girls giving chase." Please don't do that. The light is aways in "streaks." Fading into streaks. No, it wasn't. The girls couldn't just chase the dog. They had to "give chase."
Now, I'm positive that this style of writing will thrill a certain sort of reader, and the people who eat up prose like that probably buy a lot of books.
Hey, remember when I argued with Michelle Goldberg and took the position that Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" wasn't really that bad compared to "Dreams From My Father"? (Remember Sarah Palin?!)
And by the way, Obama wasn't really a dog person. The dog was a prop. The dog is still a prop... in the purple, fading, streaky sunlight.
पोस्ट्स
१२२ टिप्पण्या:
"Obama wasn't really a dog person."
But then, he wasn't really a person. Just a persona.
Phony all the way down.
Ann said ... "And by the way, Obama wasn't really a dog person. The dog was a prop. The dog is still a prop"
Dog, marriage, claim to be a moderate ... what else?
Little did the girls know, Bo just licked his poop chute after a hearty wholesome poo in the rose garden.
Bo helped lower the oceans and raise our premiums.
Memories light the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored memories of the way we were
Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another for the way we were
I think the dog was probably a prop, but pets have a way of worming themselves into your heart. If you get your first dog at age 50 you're probably not really a dog person. Trump isn't a dog guy, and he's not going to fake it.
And yeah, Obama's prose leaves a bit to be desired. He's bound to have had mommy and daddy issues, so give him a break.
Assuming it wasn't ghost written, that seems like something a 13 year old aspiring author might come up with. If it was ghost written, then the ghost writer should be launched from a catapult for being too cliche and florid.
Obama wasn't really a dog person. The dog was a prop
Yeah, he never struck me as a dog person either.
He is not drawing much of a crowd on the stump for Joe. His appeal was always a bit selective, I suppose.
A book with prose like that demands a cover like this:
Bodice Ripper
The cover gets them to buy, the prose gets them to read it all the way through. And the dog, Bo, definitely a prop. Did anyone ever see Obama walking the dog with a plastic bag of dog shit in his other hand? I didn't think so.
It was during those moments—with the light fading into streaks of purple and gold, that I realized Obama’s book was surfeit with boring, boring droning on and on purple prose.
"...reforming American healthcare".
Which, by the way, the Obama administration botched. Forget about the end result. Look at the process.
The Obama administration left the heavy lifting of writing the bill primarily to Pelosi's office, but with major input from some Senate Democrats. The White House itself did not craft the bill and then turn it over to Congressional Democrats for changes.
There was no attempt to make any changes to obtain ANY Republican buy-in, which could have happened had the administration cared to make it happen. A bill that brought such sweeping changes to the American people should have had some of bi-partisan support, such as what FDR got for Social Security.
The Obama administration completely botched the roll-out of the website that was the public face of the new program. When you read the details of the website project, it's just amazing how incompetently the project was run from the get-go. It's also amazing how, to minimize their public embarrassment, the Obama administration threw federal procurement regulations in the trash can, breaking laws that would get most contractors or administrations hauled into court. But, of course, this was the administration of The Lightbringer, and the press wouldn't touch this story. If the Trumpies had botched the roll-out of their central policy in such a fashion we'd never be hearing the end of it.
A prop Bo may have been, but he was a very sweet prop. Bo was my favorite Obama; Sunny was my second favorite. (Teddy Kennedy's Portuguese Water Dog was named Splash; if he'd been a girl, would she have been named Mary Jo?)
Wow, I did not watch the 2009 video at the time. Unpleasant.
Wonder if the dog ran away from the girls because he was afraid that they shared her father's taste in exotic meat?
He was a prop that he named after himself. Bo = Barak Obama
I've long suspected that a committee of Hollywood/television writers is behind all the heart-tugginess that we see today from the left.
A slightly different mix of them constructed the orange man bad narrative.
Then, CNN/MSNBC personalities boosted the credibility of that bunch of tall tales.
Here we are now
Entertain us
Barry Barry
Not quite literary
How does your evening fade?
With purple and gold
And my little prop Bo
"Streaking", my word, to convey
Will this book cover his advance?
Point of order: if you regard your dog as a true companion, instead of an entree, you're not going to just give them away the second you don't have to fake empathy anymore.
Obama is such a fake. It'd be nice if he lost all his properties after a Trump victory, but eh.
Sixty five million here, sixty five million there. Pretty soon you are talking about real money. Obama delivered with "Common Core." $650 million. Even Obama seems to be happy with 10%. Maybe that is where Joe got the idea.
I don't know if Althouse is familiar with the arguments underlying the theory that Obama did not write Dreams from My Father--or at least, that he had such enormous amounts of help that the book isn't truly his.
Jack Cashill believes that Bill Ayers essentially wrote DFMF. His main argument is that Ayers is a good writer with lyrical talent and some striking habits such as using many nautical metaphors, whereas Obama is a pedestrian plodding kind of writer. Today's excerpt of Obama's writing is an example of Obama's known, plodding style.
One point Cashill made stuck with me: Cashill has done some oil-painting and admits he's not particularly talented. A friend who is an accomplished artist saw one of Cashill's portraits and asked who painted it. Cashill proudly told his friend that Cashill had painted it himself. The artist-friend looked at the portrait and said, "You had a lot of help, especially around the eyes." And that was exactly true.
Once you read a very good writer such as Bill Ayers, and then read a typical Obama passage, the artistic "feel" and talent/lack of talent is obvious in this same way.
It's always possible that you're NOT reading Obama's prose. Just a thought.
"the people who eat up prose like that probably buy a lot of books."
Alas, what they're buying may just be the same shmaltzy book as written by different authors. And you're clearly right about Obama -- the dog is a prop, just as the crappy prose is the latest version of the gauzy and soft-focus man-for-all-seasons stuff that is his default mode. He's ever and always The One.
I saw Mike Pence's daughter plugging a book on C-Span. She wrote about the travails of the campaign. Her dog up and died, and Mike Pence's daughter didn't have time to properly grieve for the passing. Honestly, Pence's daughter was sweet and endearing, but, nonetheless, I had a brief gag me with a spoon moment. Courage, Camille.... It's okay to feel maudlin sentiments, but there's no excuse for writing books about them and inflecting such moments on others. with Obama's book the pain will will be compounded. We'll not only get to read excerpts of the maudlin sentiments but maudlin praise celebrating the maudlin sentiments. A tsunami of dreck. At least with Pence's daughter, there weren't front page book reviews by assorted scholars and literary critics extolling the beauty of the prose and the profundity of the thought such as we will soon see. There's no safe shelter from Obama's book. My God, think about his appearance on The View. The horror, the horror.
Obama has never written a book. Nor did he publish a thing as the 'Editor' of the Harvard Law Review. Ghost writers are a great thing for an aspiring and/or former President to have.
The toughest fight, as he calls it, was a matter of handing out favors to some Senators, lying to other Senators, and using a never before used congressional process. They stripped an existing Senate bill and filled it with the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act. But they did not yet have a viable House bill to reconcile with it. So Harry Reid and Pelosi cut a deal. The House would pass the Senate bill without any changes if the Senate agreed to pass a separate bill by the House that made changes to the Senate version of Obamacare. The second bill was the Reconciliation Act which the House passed, but the Senate still had to do. But Sen. Kennedy died, and Scott Brown, a Republican unexpectedly won his seat. So the Dems would not get their 60 votes needed to pass the bill and they did what Dems do when they don't get their way: They changed the Senate rules. They stated they could use the Senate reconciliation rules (which only require 51 votes). This is named the same as the House bill, but the reconciliation rules had to do with passing budget item approvals, not passing huge legislation such as the ACA.
They literally made up rules as they went along. They coerced a number of Senators with lies. They bribed others. And they changed the Senate rules, allowing a 51 vote majority to pass major legislation instead of a 60 vote supermajority that had always been required. AND....they did this all on Christmas Eve, while the majority of the American public disapproved of this bill, but were busy with their families on the holiday eve.
People forget all of this. They also forget how badly it was rolled out, how most everyone lost their current plans within that first year, as well as their doctors in many cases. And how the cost per person and per family skyrocketed. And while Trump and team have removed some of the penalties involved with Obamacare, we have not seen pricing or choices that we had prior to the passing of that bill. It's still more expensive, with fewer choices than ever.
His toughest fight was ugly, wrong, and is still costing all of us. Go ahead. Buy his book. Give him more money.
>>Althouse:
"I am emphatically not a fan of Obamaprose"<<
Don't say that; you'll hurt Bill Ayers' feelings.
Obamas sent me a Christmas card with Bo on it. How I got on their Christmas card list remains a mystery...
Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" wasn't really that bad compared to "Dreams From My Father"
I just searched for, but couldn't find, an old "man on the street" piece from back in the day where Obama supporters were shown a couple lines from Dreams of my Father and told it was from Going Rogue and they hated it. All sorts of high-sounding explanations of why it was bad prose. Left unproven (because unprovable), but no doubt true, is that they would have sung high praises of it if they knew it was Obama.
So right about the style, Ann. It's devoted to garnering, yes, garnering sympathy for the so-heroic and so-human Obama. Bo is a distraction from the real unsympathetic story of the "most enduring [only lasted a few years]--and most contested [successfully]--legacy." Got to keep readers distracted so they don't remember Ben Rhodes and the $2500 in savings, right?
Last night I dreamt I went to the White House again.
Utterly banal. Anyone could have written that. But it will be Nobel-worthy.
Lots of things in Obama's life are props, not just Bo. I do feel sorry for him. He was not impoverished or disadvantaged as a kid, but his parents were really bad at being parents. He seems like he became a prop for both of them. He got really cynical in a way that is quite dangerous in a politician.
Reading that Obama quote I could only think of Oscar Wilde:
“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”
That quote (Obama's, not Wilde's) would get a C- or worse from any competent HS techer of English Composition--if there still are any. I assume between Obama and his editors and ghosts, it reads EXACTLY how they think it will appeal to his audience--and that, in itself, is a bit scary, since his audience considers itself the best and maybe only intelligent people in the country.
I was always puzzled and bemused that anyone considered Obama eloquent. If he didn't have a teleprompter in front of him, his speech was littered with ums, ers, and ahs.
And even with the prompter, his penchant for say "tah" instead of "to" made me grind my teeth.
Obama wasn't really a dog person. The dog was a prop. The dog is still a prop...
One can't help but get the impression that EVERYTHING in his life is a prop. Everything.
He's had to work hard to avoid making the style difference with Dreams too obvious.
Purple streaks, purple prose.
Can it be that it was all so simple then,
Or has time rewritten every line?
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we?
Could we?
The heart and soul of every LLR-lefty waxes nostalgic at the mere thought of this dreamy, magnificent, brilliant, light-bringer lighted time.
A new Camelot as it were.
All things were possible then. Oceans receding. Storms ceasing. Peace breaking out everywhere. A Brotherhood and Sisterhood and xxxxxhood of Man/Womyn/(insert other 17,659 genders here).
But then horrible, terrible beings rose up and smashed this utopian, yet seemingly accessible dreamscape of Hope and Change. These horrific creatures are called, supposedly, according to the anthropologists, "conservatives" and "populists" and "crossover voters".
Strange backwards muggles who live in a darkened land with darkened thoughts which can only be flown over, never really visited.
It is said that if you step but one step into this intellectually barren landscape where the New York Times has not yet replaced the Bible and credentials from the most prestigious of "expert" institutions are not valued and where the foreign concepts of "freedom" and "individuality" and "merit", what ever those are, are prized above all, that you could be sucked in with a force as overwhelming as a Joy Behar lecture as if you had crossed an event horizon from the universe of Reason and Culture and Civilization and the potential of getting Chinese food delivered at 3am, into an abyss where Greta Thunberg is unknown.....never to return.
(Shudder)
Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry for Bo goes nowhere after his arrival. Apparently for a while there was a female companion, Sunny, who didn't last (fate unknown after biting someone on the face) and some time after that a nameless male successor, but by that time the press had lost interest in trying to prove that the Obamas were dog people so their current circumstances are not easy to determine. Props indeed.
Influenced by Danielle Steel? He shoulda stuck with terrorist collaborator Bill Ayers.
Some like their schmalz with streaks of purple.
These attempts to drag the unconscious body of Joe Biden over the line with all these irrelevant injections of bullshit into the word cloud makes him look even worse to an intelligent voter, but that's not who it's aimed at, which means they think you are not too bright. They think the rest of us are deplorable, but they think potential Biden voters are stupid.
Fabio in blackface was used for the cover.
Thread music for Jon:
Here we are now
Entertain us
Amazing- that video of Nirvana on Youtube has over a billion views, or in Biden numbering a quadrillion.
At a penny per view, that would be $10 million dollars.
Blogger Ralph L said...
He's had to work hard to avoid making the style difference with Dreams too obvious.
Back in 2008 someone took a paragraph of "Dreams" and showed it to people (students as I recall) as a paragraph from Sarah Palin's book. You can imagine the ridicule.
"The dog was a prop"
Obama was a prop for the socialist, globalist left.
I wonder when Bill Ayers had time to write this?
Nice vid of Biden speaking yesterday He really screws the pooch. Not just edited flubs, but consistently f'd up. Still wondering if he stuttered five years ago.
His grandfather seems to have inspired Dylan's line, or, his writers include a fan.
Ramona-I’ve heard you say many times
That you’re better than no one
And no one is better than you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQN0stFPySU&feature=emb_logo
The view across the South Lawn is iconic now, so I suppose there's no changing it, but I do think our Presidential Palace could do with some higher, more solid walls, for security reasons. Leave the gates with ironwork so tourists can get their selfies, but enclose the rest. I also think rather than a big green sward with some trees to screen off the side areas for privacy like we have right now, the White House gardens could be nicely segmented up into a series of semi-enclosed strolling gardens, such as you see at Dumbarton Oaks or Hillwood, two mansions with very fine gardens in the DC area. Because the White House is on level ground you wouldn't quite get the same dramatic effects, but artful landscaping can fill even a small garden with considerable interest. The garden at Dumbarton Oaks is about the same size as the South Lawn, judging from Google Maps. You could leave the central lawn mostly in place, just fill in the sides with other gardens.
Of course, none of our recent Presidents seem particularly interested in garden architecture so it would be a waste of money, but still. It seems like a waste of space as it is.
Drago:
That was beautiful. *sniff*
I can't say what dog love lies in another's heart.
How could he allude to the "If you want a friend, get a dog” line without chasing it down. It’s lazy. Doesn’t have have researchers? A minute with a search engine will tell you that it came from a play “Give ‘em Hell, Harry” and Harry Truman never said it to anybody’s knowledge. How can a president write without giving a hat tip to another beloved Democratic president when he has the chance?
When you bring stuff like this in, it brings in connotations, at least for educated readers, and you should be aware of what you are adding to your writing. Otherwise it’s like cooking something and you throw in a bay leaf, for example, with no idea what a bay leaf will do to it and you don’t care. It kind of points to a sloppy mind, or a lazy one. Possibly he’s not that bright. This stuff should have been educated out of him at Columbia, or that fine prep school he attended in Hawaii, or maybe just through reading. Maybe they gave him such a huge advance that they had no money for an editor.
I bet you would never find a paragraph that cringeworthily amateurish in Danielle Steele.
Balfegor: think "clear fields of fire". Given the threat level from the left of late the current design could be considered prescient.
Last night I dreamt
That somebody loved me
No hope, no harm
Just another false alarm
Strange backwards muggles who live in a darkened land with darkened thoughts which can only be flown over, never really visited.
10/27/20, 1:15 PM
"Muggles" is when Harry Potter swan-dived clear into White Wolf Vampire levels of contempt for humanity in general. Actually, the weird part is that the vampire slur for humans, "kine," likens them more to cattle- which makes sense under the circumstances. Wizards need a slur only because that society's intense prejudice- which is class-based, not race-based, we swearsies.
It's why I've taken inordinate glee in watching JKR be denounced by all the psychotic leftists she once counted as customers. That and Cursed Child.
‘Incurious’ is the word I was looking for to describe Obama.
No Bullshit tag?!? That paragraph is a really deserving winner.
@balfegor One does not want interrupt one's fields of fire with architectural doodads.
Althouse--That Blogging Heads with Michelle Goldberg is one of my all-time favorites. The mischief in your eyes as the whole thing unrolls is not to be missed.
Well done.
Palin did disappear, didn't she? Not enough substance. But she in her own way was a trailblazer for Trump.
I am never going to forget Peggy Noonan's condescending sneers about Palin and her life. Noonan revealed that her "Peg o' My Heart" persona is as phony as can be. That Americans admire people who came up the hard way and achieve regardless of their credentials is a fact lost on Noonan, who now has ascended into the Manhattan cognoscenti and doesn't have time to salute the little nobody from Wasilla who became governor of Alaska on her own, but went to four different colleges.
And by the way, Obama wasn't really a dog person.
I'm not so sure. Maybe it depends what else is being served.
Lots of things in Obama's life are props
His parents.
His maternal grandparents.
I mean, if you can sell them out everything else comes much easier.
More fittingly, Obama's book should have begun with "It was a dark and stormy night...".
If only Bo could write a book.
THAT'S the one I want to read...
The dog was an insurance policy in case food ran short.
At least Obama is completing his part of the deal. He got paid, and now he has produced what he got paid for. Those who choose to purchase his book are free to do so.
I was never going to vote for Obama or whomever the Democrats nominated for President. Nonetheless, my reading Obama's Dreams from My Father showed me I had substantive disagreements with Obama.
"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets."
1. I knew enough Iron Curtain refugees in my hometown who had ample reasons to not seek out Marxist professors or Marxist anything. In a 9th grade Introduction to Politics course, I read A Day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch. That convinced me that Communism was evil. My term paper on Soviet agriculture convinced me that Communism was also incompetent- it couldn't deliver the goods. Only a damned fool would seek out a Marxist professor. In addition, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan during Obama's freshman year. I guess that Frank Marshall Davis had a rather strong influence on young Barry/Barack Obama.
2. "To avoid being mistaken for a sellout" reeks of someone abandoning his freedom to think in deference to belonging to the cool crowd. Virtue signalling instead of deciding on your own what is right.
Obama sounds like a snob (or, more likely, his writing coach sounds like a snob). But is it okay to call a Black person a snob? Is this reverse snobbery?
What isn’t a prop in 44’s world?
Say what you want about Bo, he had it easy compared to Buddy, the Clinton's stage pet.
I don't remember which one of her books it was, but in one of them Palin devotes some space to Leonard Read's classic "I, Pencil." Probably more wisdom in those few paragraphs then Red Diaper Barry's entire published ouevre.
Here is Bo's version:
"But, of all the terrors that first year in the White House would deliver, none quite compared to the arrival of Barack, a gangly, two-legged black bundle of political blank-slateness with a greying head of hair and ever-present teleprompter. Malia and Sasha, who’d been lobbying for a puppy since before the campaign, squealed with delight upon seeing me for the first time, letting me lick the ice cream off their ears and faces that had been placed purposely to ensure I could be seen interacting with them. With Barack, I got what someone once described as the only reliable friend a politician can have in Washington - a man in desperate need of a photo op. Whether I needed it or not, his aides would drag me down the hallway to his office and demand I be taken on some meandering after-dinner walk around the South Lawn. It was during those moments—with the pre-positioned photographer's lights stationed to capture us at exactly 7:14 or whatever time the light was supposed to fade into streaks easily manipulated in PhotoShop, Michelle trying to pull me along but straining those very arms which were so much less powerful than people assumed, until she gave up and let me bound in and out of the bushes with the girls giving chase so that I wouldn't get away, or end my life diving under any one of the black Suburbans patrolling the driveway at just the right speed to crush a dog's skull—that I felt no one understood the hell I lived - as abnormal and surreal and stage-managed as any dog outside of Lassie has ever known."
Another composite composition en route.
I'd say that this exerpt shows that Obama doesn't have the best taste on the planet.
I always equate that type writing to the actor who gave the advice of never let them see you act. My advice, never let them see you write. I see a lot of that overreach. I hope I'm not guilty of it, it grates on my nerves like fingernails on a blackboard. If I can use that old fashioned term I grew up with. I was never in a classroom with a chalkboard.
(Remember Sarah Palin?!)
I’ve never forgotten her. A truly remarkable woman who didn’t deserve the hatred and contempt dished out at her by feminists for the sin of bringing a Downs child to full term.
“Obama’s prose.” Naive Althouse thinks Obama doesn’t have his stuff ghost-written.
Gee, I wonder if Barak's read it yet.
Using adult dogs in politics is one thing, but stooping so low as to use puppies in politics is deplorable.
He isn’t much of a girl or Michelle person either.
You know who's really not a dog person . . . .
This book will be for people who think of the Obama family as their best friends.
at least his dog was a real dog.
... His 'girlfriend' was a composite.
As for the fate of "Sunny", remember the line
"Better is a dog on the roof of a car
... than on the roof of your mouth "
Man, he's arrogant. And a LIAR. He lied at least 15 times in this little "unity" (Bullshit ) speech.
Obama is the Hallmark of fine writing.
Oh, he's very much a dog person...
try “Barry’s on teh Dogwalk”
you make your dining selection from the famous puppy tank just inside the entryway.
specialty of house
teh sheepdog with mint jelly
simply delicious!
Puppies on a Log: Extremely large stalk of celery… peanut butter… just add puppies and voilà!
“The tender terrier tots will leave you scratching your belly, your taste buds tingling, and make you want to roll-over for more!”
– former President Barack 0bama
mesquite-seared Basenji in bed of rice, covered with rich, creamy spaniel sauce with just a hint of rosemary
Obama: “I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth”
No room. Already choking down a dog collar.
At least it wasn't a Secret Service agent in a McGruff the Crime Dog costume.
That would still be better than the Joe Biden Fingers Freeballin McHairsniffer assignment.
none other than stanley fish, attested to the narrative of going rogue, they really tried to drive her from public life, for speaking truth to power,
It's already clear to me that history will judge Obama's Presidency as inconsequential. Health care reform is the most obvious claim to a big accomplishment, but the only part to have an impact was the expansion of Medicaid. Here are the numbers: Between 2012 and 2019 Americans without health insurance declined by 14.8 million, Medicaid enrollment increased by 16.2 million.
I never read Clinton's memoirs (968 pages) and I assume Obama will turn out the same kind of almost unreadable, 1,000 page, door-stopper. Its astounding that Presidents do less - and write about it more- than ever before.
As for Palin, she was given "The Trump treatment" before Trump was. The combination of Press hatred and mockery, endless Democrat attacks, RINO backstabs, and Lawfare, broke her. She's going to make a comeback though, and should be back in the news in 2022 when she runs against Lisa Murky. I'm looking forward to the new Salter book, to see what Bullshit excuse McCain gave for not inviting her to the funeral.
Kevin: Well done!
Very good, Kevin @ 2:43 PM.
ot:
More Biden family grift for the msm to ignore.
EXCLUSIVE: Hunter Biden Audio Confesses Partnership With China ‘Spy Chief’… Joe Biden Named as Criminal Case Witness
with audio of Hunter Biden.
That was great Kevin.
I've always been a dog person, never cats, that's why G-d invented mouse traps. Have had them (dogs and mouse traps) all my life, at one point, we had 14 beagles - no need for an alarm clock. Just lost our Wheaton recently, but my daughter got a new puppy, though she's moved out. My wife is interested in a new dog, but she's retiring in April, and I hope that the travel industry is back in swing so we can do some traveling before being tied down with a pet. That we will get a new dog is a no brainer, just the timing. We'll probably go to the shelter, and if they aren't fascists with home visits and background checks we're good. Otherwise, we're half an hour from Lancaster PA's dog sellers.
Bo (didn't put the B-O together actually) is obviously a prop, like the Clinton dog, or was it a cat) who got run over and smooshed after they moved to NY?
It’s good that he added that detail that Bo had front paws.
The dog was a prop. The dog is still a prop... in the purple, fading, streaky sunlight.
That dog is a lucky prop, lucky to still be alive in teh Ken-L Ration Nation.
I've worked in book publishing for forty years, as an editor. If that's not the prose of a ghostwriter, it's the prose of some hapless editor scrambling after hours to get an excerpt to the New Yorker before election day.
salter is the creepy weasel that wrote that roman a clef, o, the huntress was more loyal then that rat deserved, of course he walked out on his first wife, after she stood for him during his long captivity,
Bill Clinton was good at retail politics - going to McDonald's to chat with the folks and maybe snag a half-eaten burger off their trays. Clinton wasn't that great a speaker - either from prepared text or extemporaneously. He tended to ramble. But he did the in-person thing well.
Obama didn't seem comfortable with one-on-one interaction with people. His specialty was more reading speeches somebody wrote for him.
When he had to be focused, and when his staff was good at their jobs, he could be focused. Now that he's trying to do everything off the cuff, he's uninspiring.
Biden can't focus like that. I don't know if it's his natural way or if it's old age, but he rambles too much. I also don't know how much of what he drags into his speeches is his and how much is his staff's. I wonder how much of what he says that doesn't go over well is actually stuff that the Biden camp think is great.
Blogger readering said...
You know who's really not a dog person
Readering thinks he's got a big gotcha question. Trump is a germophobe and health nut. No, he doesn't like dogs. The conversation was about liars and phonies, like Obama and Clinton.
Trump is Obama's legacy.
So, fellow commenters, not to brag about us or anything, but don't you sometimes get the feeling that collectively we cover the angles on the hot-button issues, and even the lukewarm-button issues, better and more creatively than any reporter or pundit or MSM-outlet? As illustrated by our treatment of what "Obama" emitted.
The biggest prop he used was his blackness, which never really surfaced until politics became the objective.
readering: "You know who's really not a dog person . . . ."
Quick Rule of Thumb: The guy who doesn't eat dog is a better dog person than the one who does.
Obama is such a nancy-boy that he even lets his wife pick his ghost writers! What a puke he must be, to allow such tripe to be published under his name. And Althouse voted for him--twice. Strange.
On the other hand, the flood insurance on that Vineyard place has to be killer, what with the global warming and all.
"He is not drawing much of a crowd on the stump for Joe. His appeal was always a bit selective, I suppose."
You mean the bathhouse crowd. Go ahead and say it. Two words: Reggie Love.
Barack Obama sat down and word-processed the following (maybe)...
"It was during those moments—with the light fading into streaks of purple and gold, Michelle smiling and squeezing my hand as Bo bounded in and out of the bushes with the girls giving chase—that I felt normal and whole and as lucky as any man has a right to expect."
Oh, what Harlequinesque dreck. The Metro President's prose has all the appeal of cold oatmeal, made perfect by his self-referencing ending. He felt "normal." As any "man" might expect. With his dog "bound[ing] in and out of the bushes." Surprised he didn't effuse about such the experience of the flora and fauna being.
Written for the Latte Libs among the Sisters of Suburbia.
You know which 2 really don't like my comments ....
"Father" NO; "Sperm Donor" YES.
I've always thought it was a bit weird that Obama gave his dog the same name as his Veep's elder son. Yes, I know Bo and Beau are spelled differently, but they sound exactly the same. I wonder what Joe thought about that pair of homophones, back when he was still capable of rational thought.
I hadn't focused on the "purple and gold." Shades (hues?) of the Destruction of Sennacherib?
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
" . . . a huggable, four-legged black bundle of fur with a snowy-white chest and front paws . . . "
What species of creature is this? Presumably a mammal ("bundle of fur"), but does a "four-legged bundle" not have back paws, too? The reader needs more information here.
Was the creature's chest "snowy-white"? Was it perhaps "snow-white"? Maybe "white as snow"? Note, however, that snow does not always remain white, as when it has lain on the ground for weeks and has faded to a dull gray with tire-tread impressions. Was the color of the creature's chest in fact a dull gray with tire-tread impressions? Please clarify.
Should that be "Black"? And maybe "White"?
If AA is going to be neutral, cruel or otherwise, she should not tag the Lincoln Project post with Trump Derangement Syndrome without tagging this one Obama Derangement syndrome. Check the comments prompted by her mocking of Obama's memoir extract in the New Yorker.
Readering, Obama Derangement Syndrome is what Althouse and other uncritical Obama fans suffer from. If Barry's choice of ghost-writers and indifference to their work product were the only faults the man displayed during and after his Administration, the degree of mockery here would be over the top. But among other highlights Obama groveled to dictators, sold out our allies (e.g. the Poles), gave aid and comfort to our enemies (the Iran payoff), armed Mexican drug cartels while refusing to enforce the people's immigration laws, and (with an assist from Eric Holder) set race relations in this country back 50 years.
Mere scorn is too good for Obama, given his perfidy.
Obviously, Obama gets help on all the books published under his name. But given that he's been so quiet and out of the public eye for so long, he may not have much else to do but work on the book -- with his staff and ghosts to be sure, but I wouldn't assume that there weren't some hastily scribbled legal pads written in his own hand, or maybe a draft on his hard drive.
As for Dreams all of the "Wow! He wrote it all by himself!" and "Bah! He didn't write any of it himself!" obscures that, like almost all politician's books, it was the work of different hands. That's all the more likely since he had trouble fulfilling his original book contract. One of those hands may have been Bill Ayers, but I'm skeptical that Bill Ayers was some great master of modern prose or that he wrote the whole thing himself.
Tom Wicker wrote a book about Nixon called One of Us. I didn't read it and don't know if anybody did but the title was a subject of discussion on another site. Somebody said it was Wicker's admission that Nixon was a big government liberal after all. I think most people who managed to get through the title and back cover realized that it was an admission that, after all the vilification of Nixon, he was a representative American of his times, not so different even from Tom Wicker himself.
We expect politicians to be heroes and saints or villains and monsters, but in a lot of ways they aren't so different from the rest of us. They are representative of what the country is like now, and certainly of how today's elites in various fields behave. There's a thick layer of privilege to scrape away, but the fact that presidents aren't poets or geniuses or saviors or angels shouldn't surprise us. They may not be monsters and demons, either.
(eaglebeak)
One of Us is not a bio of Nixon, it's a long musing on Nixon, who he was and where he came from, written in a rather personal, sometimes even empathetic, way--which was pretty surprising, given that Wicker was a huge NYT liberal.
Perhaps Wicker wanted to highlight his commonality with Nixon in that Wicker was a boy from the very small town of Hamlet, NC (pop 6,000-plus in 2010), and Nixon was a poor boy from the small town of Yorba Linda, CA (small, but 10 times larger than Hamlet). Nixon was always very sensitive to class distinctions, to Ivy League snobbery, etc. Maybe Wicker secretly felt the same way.
A dog person would say "bundle of love" or "fluffball." Bundle of fur?
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