"It is especially amusing to hear progressives, the principal creators of the watery Caesarism of today’s presidency, sorrowfully describing Trump’s ballroom..."

"... as discordant with the White House’s proper modesty. They should worry less about the president’s residential immodesty and more about his anti-constitutional immodesty.

Writes George Will, in "The choreographed fakery of American politics: East Wing edition/Trump’s residential immodesty is nothing compared with his anti-constitutional immodesty" (WaPo).

I wondered if anyone had written "watery Caesarism" before. It sounds like a bad salad. A real salad, not a word salad. Don't put the dressing on until you're about to eat it. Anyway, "watery Caesarism" did turn up on a few old web pages, but — are you surprised? — they're all written by George Will!

1992: "Trouble is, most presidents are mediocre.

"Every other recent president has said that he saw his role as transcending partisanship at least some of the time, to serve as leader of all Americans..."

"... even those who disagreed with him. George H.W. Bush talked of ushering in a 'kinder and gentler nation.' Mr. Clinton vowed to be the 'repairer of the breach.' The younger Mr. Bush spoke of being 'a uniter, not a divider.' Barack Obama rejected the idea of a red America and blue America, saying there was only 'the United States of America.' Joseph R. Biden Jr. called for ending 'this uncivil war.' None of them succeeded at achieving such lofty aspirations, and each of them to different degrees played the politics of division at times. Politics, after all, is about division — debating big ideas vigorously until one side wins an election or carries the vote in Congress. But none of them practiced the politics of division as ferociously and consistently as Mr. Trump...."

From "In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity Is Not Trump’s Mission/President Trump does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all Americans" by Peter Baker, in the NYT.

Who is taking an accurate measure of the consistency and ferocity of the divisiveness of the various Presidents?

My prompt to ChatGPT: "What are the most ferociously divisive things Presidents have said in all of American history? Give me a top 10, with just the quotes, not the explanations."

The list [NOTE: I did not verify the accuracy of these quotes. What follows is with ChatGPT gave me and the entire thing could be hallucination. Proceed with care!]

"Supreme Court Lets Trump Lift Deportation Protections for Venezuelans/A federal judge had blocked the administration’s plan to remove the temporary protected status of more than 300,000 immigrants."

The NYT reports.

The court has been inundated with applications arising from President Trump’s blitz of executive orders, many of them seeking to pause or limit trial court rulings blocking the administration’s aggressive agenda, notably in immigration.... The Temporary Protected Status program, enacted by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush, allows migrants from nations that have experienced national disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary instabilities to live and work legally in the United States. Mr. Trump has tried to end protections under the program as he seeks to make good on his campaign promise to deport millions of immigrants. His efforts aimed to terminate the protections for nearly 350,000 people in early April, and for hundreds of thousands more later this year.

"In states as disparate as Wisconsin and New Mexico, ads have labeled a Black candidate as 'different' and 'dangerous' and darkened a white man’s hands as they portrayed him as a criminal...."

"In Wisconsin, where Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is Black, is the Democratic nominee for Senate, a National Republican Senatorial Committee ad targeting him ends by juxtaposing his face with those of three Democratic House members, all of them women of color, and the words 'different' and 'dangerous.' In a mailer sent to several state House districts in New Mexico, the state Republican Party darkened the hands of a barber shown giving a white child a haircut, next to the question, 'Do you want a sex offender cutting your child’s hair?'... Appeals to white fears and resentments are an old strategy in American elections, etched into the country’s political consciousness, with ads like George Bush’s ad using the Black convict Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis in 1988, and Jesse Helms’s 1990 commercial showing a white man’s hands to denounce his Black opponent’s support for 'quotas.'" 

From "With Ads, Imagery and Words, Republicans Inject Race Into Campaigns/Running ads portraying Black candidates as soft on crime — or as 'different' or 'dangerous' — Republicans have shed quiet defenses of such tactics for unabashed defiance" (NYT).

The manipulation of the color of hands is a very specific problem, and I don't like seeing the name of my state mixed up in that accusation. I don't like "In states as disparate as Wisconsin and New Mexico, ads have... darkened a white man’s hands as they portrayed him as a criminal." That happened in New Mexico but not in Wisconsin.

Yes, there has been been relentless advertising against Mandela Barnes here in Wisconsin, but I haven't seen any photoshopping of the color of hands or other body parts. What I'm seeing — and it's practically the only advertising I'm seeing — is the connection of Mandela Barnes to crime and to policies advocated by the most left-wing Democrats. Yes, you can argue that is inherently racial, and the NYT article also does that, but it's a far cry from this awfulness from New Mexico:

"What we're trying to say...." Just say it! Otherwise it sounds as though you're not really saying it but referring to something written down somewhere.

Jean-Pierre: "What we're trying to say is that the economy is in a better place than it has been historically." pic.twitter.com/KIO61OnGNN

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 7, 2022

I was going to say that reminded me of George H.W. Bush's "Message: I care," but then I found that old clip and watched it...

  

... and even though that still makes me laugh, by contrast to Karine Jean-Pierre's performance, it felt kind of authentic. What's similar is the sense that he was referring to talking points that he wasn't supposed to say out loud. It sees that he'd been given the note that he ought to convey the message "I care," and instead of showing his caring, he stated the contents of the note. That's what Jean-Pierre did. It seems that she couldn't directly say the economy is in something like a good place. She knew that's what she was supposed to say. And then what she said was revealing that background scenario: They've figured out what they should try to say. That gives the whole game away!

"The Democrats lost an election they never expected to lose. They... lost to a reality TV show host when Hillary Clinton had all the backing of the establishment in the world."

"And instead of asking, what is it about our ideology that ruled the country for eight years, that drove people away from us into Donald Trump's arms, they instead decided they were going to blame everybody else. The Democrats simply replaced Trump with the same ideology they governed with for 8 years under Obama that caused people to run away from them as fast as they could. And now that people are doing that again, instead of asking ‘why is that happening’ they're getting poised to blame the electorate for being stupid -- for thinking the economy's bad when it's actually good." 

Said Glenn Greenwald, quoted at Real Clear Politics.

I remember when the incumbent President lost to a Democrat who said "It's the economy, stupid."

Now, apparently, the message is: If you think it's the economy, you're stupid.

By the way, who was getting called stupid in the 1992 Clinton slogan "It's the economy, stupid"?

It is often quoted from a televised quip by [Bill Clinton's strategist James] Carville as "It’s the economy, stupid."... His phrase was directed at the campaign's workers and intended as one of three messages for them to focus on. The others were "Change vs. more of the same" and "Don't forget health care."

Was he calling the campaign workers "stupid"? It seems as though he was compelling them to focus on the economy by internalizing the taunt "Stupid!" — to be triggered if they ever stray into any other topic. It might have been heard as an insult to the President George H.W. Bush. He's so out of touch, he doesn't know the people are hurting. He's stupid. It can't be that they were calling us, the People, stupid. That wouldn't work. 

Anyway, right now, the Democrats aren't blatantly labeling us stupid. That's Greenwald's rhetoric. He's saying the Democrats are telling the People they are stupid if they think the economy is bad. So, I would add, that means the Democrats are taking the George H.W. Bush position and are vulnerable to the attack that brought down Bush: "It's the economy, stupid." 

***

In giving this post my "stupid" tag, I see an old tag I'd forgotten about: "the stupid party." I need to publish this post so I can click on it to refresh my memory of what that was about. I think it has to do with the way each party characterizes the other as the "stupid" one. Or maybe it was about how the 2 parties vie for the honor of being the "stupid" one.

"The family brand was built in Texas, where Yankee patrician George H.W. Bush moved from the East Coast to West Texas as a young man, made his money in the oil patch and..."

"... then was elected to Congress from Houston in the late 1960s. But for the past decade or so, the Bush brand has been in decline. A defeat for George P. Bush in the attorney general’s race would put an exclamation point on that erosion."

From "George P. Bush charts a Trumpian path as he tries to extend the family dynasty in Texas/The family brand has taken a hit in conservative Texas. As he seeks the nomination for attorney general, Bush says he runs ‘as my own man’" (WaPo).

"But Biden, so far, has been impregnable. The voice is too bland and devoid of obvious quirks..."

"... and beyond the occasional 'C’mon, man,' his conversational manner too muted and self-effacing, to give the parodists much to work with. Trump supporters and Fox News pundits would undoubtedly attribute this to the media’s liberal bias. And to be sure, Trump was viewed by the (mostly liberal) satirists not just as an irresistible comic target but also as a dire threat to the nation. Biden’s pleasantly boring presidency has been a welcome return to normality — but hardly great material for parody."

I picked that quote from WaPo's "Comedians are struggling to parody Biden/Let’s hope this doesn’t last" because the word "impregnable" caught my eye. 

I realize it's not meant as a pregnancy metaphor and we're supposed to think more in terms of a fortress. It's not normal to say that sterile women are "impregnable." The original meaning of the word is (from the OED): "Of a fortress or stronghold: That cannot be taken by arms; incapable of being reduced by force; capable of holding out against all attacks." Then there's the figurative meaning: "That cannot be overcome or vanquished; invincible, unconquerable, proof against attack." 

So the assertion here is that Biden is so neutral and featureless that an impersonator has nowhere to go. He's like a giant wall with no footholds. What can you do?! He's normal, so pleasantly boring. This is why I don't watch "Saturday Night Live" anymore. They're too lazy! Trump was ridiculously easy. I guess they loved not being challenged.

How about observing Biden and finding what is distinct and capable of mockery? I think the problem is really that they don't want to expose his flaws, that they're committed to the idea that he's normal and pleasant. But they ought to see this as a fantastic opportunity. The best presidential impersonation in this history of "SNL" was Dana Carvey's George H.W. Bush, and H.W. had the same problem of superficial ordinariness.

"I had been in the Oval Office a hundred times as vice president or more... But I had never been up in the residence."

"And one of the things — I don't know about you all, but I was raised in a way that you didn't look for anybody to wait on you. And it's — we're — I find myself extremely self-conscious. There are wonderful people that work at the White House. But someone is standing there and making sure I — hands me my suit coat, or..."

From the transcript of Biden's CNN Town Hall last night.

Anderson Cooper expressed surprise that Biden had never been in the residence part of the White House? Obama never had him over?

Biden continues. I'll add a page break because this is very rambly:

"The man formerly known as 'Junior,' who later became 'Bush 43,' was amazingly helpful, dishing the sort of inside-baseball detail and real-time dialogue that reporters dream about."

"He was totally fearless in analyzing the campaign; after all, he answered to only one official, his father, who’d recently introduced us at a White House reception and encouraged him to cooperate. And none of the anonymous reporting would be public until after the polls had closed. After an unusually productive interview, I gratefully thanked him for his candor. 'Now, let me ask YOU a question,' he said with a smirk. 'When this thing comes out I’ll probably be asked about some of this stuff. I’ll have to say it’s total bullshit. Are you gonna have a problem with that?' I assured him that wouldn’t be bothersome. Sources often deny inconvenient truths on the record that they’ve leaked on background."

Writes Tom DeFrank in "'I’ll have to say it’s total bull***t': How political sources play the anonymity game/George W. Bush dished on his father's campaign, with the understanding that he'd later have to deny it. Such arrangements have long been part and parcel not just of journalism, but of politics" (National Journal).

The occasion for DeFrank's story is, of course, Jeffrey Goldberg's recent suckers-and-losers article in The Atlantic. DeFrank ends his article with: "The White House response to this story has been so turbocharged not because of anonymous sources, but because it rings true, and they know it could damage a key component of his base."

It could! I tend to think it "rings true" to the people who already hate Trump, and not to his base. Or to the extent that it rings true to anyone in his base, it doesn't damage him, because they feel they understand the way Trump talks, with an edgy sense of humor and they think that if he said it, it was within a context of truly caring about the people in the military — because look at how he allowed them to win the war against ISIS, how he's ended conflict, avoided new conflict, built up the military, and improved access to medical care.

By the way, I love the new admiration for George W. Bush. Remember when he was Hitler?

"Mr. Biden is far better known than Mr. Dukakis was and he has shown a resilience to caricature that Mr. Dukakis did not have."

"Mr. Trump is viewed unfavorably by a big swath of voters. His lack of credibility with many Americans has undercut his ability to deliver an attack. The nation is more pessimistic than it was when Mr. Dukakis faced Mr. Bush, who as Ronald Reagan’s vice president was effectively running as an incumbent.... 'This is going to be tricky for them: Biden is a pretty well-known quantity,' said Susan Estrich, who was Mr. Dukakis’ campaign manager. 'The way you usually burst balloons is paint the other guy as a risk.' Mr. Dukakis, proud and disdainful of politics, refused to believe these kind of attacks would hurt them, and did not heed the advice of his staff that he fight back. He allowed Mr. Bush to define him before Labor Day.... His opponents even raised questions about Mr. Dukakis’s mental fitness, decades before Mr. Biden faced the same. Conservative groups were circulating rumors, with no substantiation, that Mr. Dukakis was hiding the fact that he had been treated for depression. As the summer came to an end, Mr. Reagan was asked if Mr. Dukakis should release his medical records. 'Look, I’m not going to pick on an invalid,' he said. Mr. Reagan later said this was a failed joke, but by design or not, it succeeded in thrusting the rumor to the center of public attention. Mr. Dukakis called a news conference to say he had never struggled with mental illness."

From "A Glimmer of Hope for Trump? How Bush Mounted a Comeback in 1988/For Biden, a cautionary tale. For Trump, a search for his own Willie Horton" (NYT).

Why did Biden say the African American community is not diverse?

Here's the full statement we've been puzzling over:

"What you all know that most people don't know, unlike the African American community with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community, with incredibly different attitudes about different things," Biden said. "You go to Florida, you find a very different attitude about immigration in certain places than you do when you're in Arizona. So it's a very different, a very diverse community."

Quoted in "Biden tries to clarify remarks suggesting lack of diversity in the Black community/The former VP said he recognizes African Americans are not a monolith — "not by identity, not on issues, not at all" (NBC News). The "clarification" is not a clarification at all, just a reversal:

"In no way did I mean to suggest the African American community is a monolith — not by identity, not on issues, not at all," Biden said in a thread of tweets. "Throughout my career I've witnessed the diversity of thought, background, and sentiment within the African American community."

I think what happened is that Biden, in cognitive decline, is losing the ability to maintain the boundary between what is said behind the scenes with his advisers and what is appropriate for speech to the general public.

An honest clarification would be something like: We're trying to win an election, and that means patching together blocs of voters, and realistically, it works to consider black voters as one big group, and it doesn't work to do that with Hispanic voters. But that's something for us to take into account as we craft our public statements, not something that belongs in the public statements.

It's a bit like George H.W. Bush running for reelection in 1992 and saying "Message: I care." It seemed to be the idea he was supposed to keep in mind, not something to say out loud. He got mixed up!

"He had this little list of rules that he lived by. They're all really good ones like, Don't talk all the time, Listen to your mentors and friends and learn from them."

"I actually have them memorized, which is kind of weird. Nobody likes an overbearing big shot, which sounds so much like his words... Help a friend when they're hurting."

Said Jenna Bush — her eyes welling with tears (according to The Daily Mail).

IN THE COMMENTS: Wince said:

"Nobody likes an overbearing big shot."

And, try as you might, nobody likes a wimpy, ineffectual establishment Republican.

Well, not until you're out of office or dead, and then only to use you as the new standard-bearer to attack and cow your successor Republicans.

AND: MadisonMan said:

"Nobody likes an overbearing big shot."

The Press gets to decide who fits that description.

Meade responded:

It's almost as if the Press is, itself, an overbearing big shot.

Remember when you were a child and you thought it would work to announce the "I'm rubber, you're glue" rule?

Apparently, it's not too late to recapture the joys of childmind:

Anyone who supports a racist or a racist strategy is a racist themselves. 2020 is a moment or reckoning for America. Vote for @realDonaldTrump and you are a racist. Don’t hide it like a coward. Wear that racist badge proudly and see how it feels.

— Joe Lockhart (@joelockhart) July 27, 2019

(Joe Lockhart was Bill Clinton's Press Secretary.)

ADDED: Why doesn't Lockhart know that you don't show your talking points outright? This is like when George H.W. Bush said "Message: I care."

"Overwhelmed by pain and loneliness, [Barbara Bush] contemplated suicide. She would pull over to the side of the road until the impulse..."

"... to plow into a tree or drive into the path of an oncoming car had passed. 'I felt terrible. I would pull over and park so I wouldn't go hit a tree... I really wasn't brave enough to do that, but that's why I pulled over, so I wouldn't do that, or I wouldn't run into another car... I almost wonder why he didn't leave me.'..."

"The Matriarch Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty," quoted in The Daily Mail, "'I would pull over and park so I wouldn't go hit a tree.' Barbara Bush revealed how she fell into a deep depression and considered suicide while her husband George carried on decade-long affair with younger aide, explosive new bio reveals."

'Just seven years younger than Barbara and not a striking beauty, [Jennifer Fitzgerald] was flirty and solicitous and focused completely on him. Their surreptitious romance would last for more than a dozen years, inexplicable to those around him and impossible for anyone to manage', writes the author....

Somebody... or everybody... is lying.

"President Trump claimed last week that 'some' former presidents privately confided to him that they support his mission to build a border wall. As of Monday, every living president has said otherwise" (CBS News).

ADDED: A comment by sdharms makes me see how it could be that no one is lying. The comment is "so? HRC talked to Eleanor Roosevelt and no one had a problem with that." It could be that none of the living presidents have confided to Trump that they support building the wall, but some of the dead presidents have communicated with him. It's possible that George H.W. Bush, while still alive, spoke to Trump about the wall, but Trump said "some," so it must be more than one, and so something supernatural is needed for it to be true that no one is lying.



OH, WAIT: I'm working my way further into the CBS article, because I wanted to see exactly what Trump said and to think about whether there's weaseling over the question of what it means to "support his mission to build a border wall." The quote you see there is CBS's paraphrase of whatever it was that Trump said. Trump might mean that he's spoken to former Presidents who support some sort of physical barrier at the border, and the former Presidents who want distance from Trump are denying support because they don't support exactly the kind of wall that Trump has been talking about. But as I read the article, I was astounded — because I'd relied on "every living president has said otherwise" — to find this:

Mr. Obama is the only living president who has not explicitly denied having this conversation, and his office did not return a request for comment from CBS News. But Mr. Obama has repeatedly spoken out against Trump administration immigration policies and made clear since the 2016 campaign that he does not support a proposed wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Politico also pointed out that Mr. Obama and his successor have not had any extensive conversation since the 2017 inauguration.

"The burial of former President George Herbert Walker Bush on the grounds of his presidential library and museum at Texas A&M University on Thursday raises a question."

"Is it possible for former President Barack Obama to be laid to rest at his presidential center in Chicago?"

The Chicago Sun Times comes up with that question.

For now, the answer is no, according to a Bill McCaffrey, a spokesman for the City of Chicago Law Department. Burials in Chicago can only take place in cemeteries, according to city ordinances. The 19.3 acres in Jackson Park to be the site of the Obama Presidential Center is not a legal cemetery.

Noted.

George W. Bush gives the eulogy for his father.

"Put simply, Americans miss [H.W.] Bush because we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well."

Writes Ross Douthat in the NYT.

[In The Atlantic, Franklin] Foer suggests this nostalgia is mostly bunk, since the WASPs were so often bigots (he quotes Henry Adams’s fears of a “furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the ghetto”), since their cultivation of noblesse oblige was really all about “preserving [a] place at the high table of American life,” and since so many of their virtues were superficial, a matter of dressing nicely while practicing imperialism, or writing lovely thank-you notes while they outsourced the dirty work of politics to race-baiting operatives....

However, one of the lessons of the age of meritocracy is that building a more democratic and inclusive ruling class is harder than it looks, and even perhaps a contradiction in terms.... [I]f some of the elder Bush’s mourners wish we still had a WASP establishment, their desire probably reflects a belated realization that certain of the old establishment’s vices were inherent to any elite, that meritocracy creates its own forms of exclusion — and that the WASPs had virtues that their successors have failed to inherit or revive.

Those virtues included a spirit of noblesse oblige and personal austerity and piety that went beyond the thank-you notes and boat shoes and prep school chapel going — a spirit that trained the most privileged children for service, not just success, that sent men like Bush into combat alongside the sons of farmers and mechanics in the same way that it sent missionaries and diplomats abroad in the service of their churches and their country....

A photo.

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As much as our family is going to miss this dog, we’re comforted to know he’ll bring the same joy to his new home, Walter Reed, that he brought to 41.

A post shared by George W. Bush (@georgewbush) on Dec 2, 2018 at 6:55pm PST