"At a fund-raiser for the president at his Westport, Conn., estate Monday night, Harvey Weinstein spoke in a softly lit room shimmering with pink dahlias, gold Oscars, silvery celebrities and black American Express cards."

Wrote Maureen Dowd in August 2012, in a column I'm reading because in my previous post, about Dowd's current column, I observed that Dowd had been writing about the movie business for a long time and wondered whether she'd ever gone after Weinstein. She quoted somebody calling Weinstein a "master" at avoiding bad press by "giving to liberal causes."

So let's see what press Dowd gave Weinstein in the heat of the 2012 presidential election. That column — which begins with the sentence I've used as the post title — continues:

“You can make the case,” Weinstein said of Barack Obama, “that he’s the Paul Newman of American presidents.”...

Paul Newman, Dowd explains, was aloof. 

[T]he president does not think people should expect too much in return for paying $35,800 for an hour of his time, as they did at the Weinstein affair, or in return for other favors....

“[Obama] realized that he could stir crowds while also thinking to himself that it was all a game and posturing,” [said David Maraniss, author of “Barack Obama: The Story"]. “He is always removed and participating at the same time, self-conscious and without the visceral need or love of transactional politics that would characterize Bill Clinton or L.B.J. or even W., in a way.”...

“His [will] is cool and [Bill] Clinton’s is hot, but they burn at the same temperature inside,” [Maraniss] said. “So he does some of what he finds distasteful, but not all of it, and not all of it very well.”

By the way, 60 guests paid $35,800 for the dinner at Harvey's.

There's not a whiff of negativity about Weinstein in this old column, which is about Obama's cool lack of interest in being "a glad-handing pol." The phrase "a glad-handing pol" seems to relate more to going out among the common people. At Harvey's, Obama was ensconced with the beautiful elite. I have to go to a different NYT article for this:

Among the guests were Anne Hathaway, who played Catwoman in “The Dark Knight Rises,” the new Batman film; Jerry Springer, the talk show host; Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue magazine; Joanne Woodward, the actress and widow of Paul Newman; Aaron Sorkin, creator of television shows like “The Newsroom” and “The West Wing”; and Gov. Daniel [sic] P. Malloy of Connecticut.

Mr. Obama made sure to single out Ms. Hathaway, who was wearing “a silver dress with puffed sleeves gathered from the elbow to the shoulder, and a tight bodice,” according to a pool report by Dave Boyer of The Washington Times. “She’s spectacular,” Mr. Obama said....

ADDED: Other old Weinstein mentions by Dowd:

From  November 2015: "The Women of Hollywood Speak Out/Female executives and filmmakers are ready to run studios and direct blockbuster pictures. What will it take to dismantle the pervasive sexism that keeps them from doing it?"

In her black-and-cream miniskirt and black Balenciaga hightops, [Leslye] Headland was a magnetic presence with a throaty voice and a booming laugh. She had a Nicki Minaj ring tone, ‘‘Truffle Butter,’’ and several movie tattoos: ‘‘redrum’’ from ‘‘The Shining’’ on her lower back; a line from ‘‘War Games’’ — ‘‘The only winning move is to not play’’ — on her left forearm; ‘‘How would Lubitsch do it?’’ in script on her right. Harvey Weinstein, for whom Headland worked as a receptionist and assistant, calls her ‘‘wildly talented.’’

From December 1998, "Liberties; Icon and I Will Survive":

The President's head is on the block, and the First Lady has never looked more radiant. As her husband gets dragged through the mud by bone-headed Republicans, she glows. She looks as if she's traveling with her own pink baby spotlight.

Here she is on the cover of Vogue, looking Hallmark happy and Hollywood glamorous. Here she is making the flashbulbs pop, with Harvey Weinstein and Gwyneth Paltrow at the New York premiere of Miramax's ''Shakespeare in Love.''...

Last Thursday she repaid the generosity of Mr. Weinstein, the co-chairman of Miramax who is a big contributor to Clinton campaigns and the Clinton legal defense fund. As Alex Kuczynski reported in The Times, the First Lady went to Mr. Weinstein's premiere and spoke in praise of ''my friend Harvey.'' Sounding very Tina Brownish, Mrs. Clinton raved about ''the buzz'' around Miramax, and said the company ''has done a great service.''...

Purchase of the day.

From the April 3, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

When Pride Still Mattered: Lombardi [Paperback]
David Maraniss (Author)

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want, pay nothing extra, and make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And only if you tell us will we know it's you.

The Althouse Amazon portal: always on "Lombardi time" – 10 or 15 minutes early, so you're never late.

"The Drug War is about control."

"Obama likes control."

And here's the NYT reporting on the way the Obama administration is supposedly mulling over what to do about Colorado and Washington.

Some law enforcement officials, alarmed at the prospect that marijuana users in both states could get used to flouting federal law openly, are said to be pushing for a stern response. But such a response would raise political complications for President Obama because marijuana legalization is popular among liberal Democrats who just turned out to re-elect him.

It's all about Obama!

(Why didn't I have a tag "Obama and drugs" before? All that "choom" stuff and so on....)

ADDED: Meade riffs on Obama and hope and segues into "pocketful of hope... money for dope... money for rope..." and I find the old John Lennon song in my iTunes:

No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of Tricky Dicky
Is gonna Mother Hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of hope
Money for dope
Money for rope 

That makes me think about and "10 For 2: John Sinclair Freedom Rally" which took place in Ann Arbor in 1971 — where I was in town, listening to the live feed on the radio — and John Lennon himself showed up and that "inspired the creation of Ann Arbor’s annual pro-legalization Hash Bash rally, which continues to be held as of 2012."

40 years ago. Obama was 10. It was the year Obama returned from Indonesia to Honolulu to live with his grandparents and go to prep school. As David Maraniss tells it:

A self-selected group of boys at Punahou School who loved basketball and good times called themselves the Choom Gang. 180 Choom is a verb, meaning “to smoke marijuana.” As a member of the Choom Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends. The first was called “TA,” short for “total absorption.” To place this in the physical and political context of another young man who would grow up to be president, TA was the antithesis of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled. When you were with Barry and his pals, if you exhaled precious pakalolo (Hawaiian slang for marijuana, meaning “numbing tobacco”) instead of absorbing it fully into your lungs, you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around. “Wasting good bud smoke was not tolerated,” explained one member of the Choom Gang, Tom Topolinski, the Chinese-looking kid with a Polish name who answered to Topo.

Obama likes control!

"Obama, weaving around life’s potential barriers smoothly and largely alone, came to regard himself as not only lucky..."

"... but destined, a sensibility that could lead to overconfidence, if not hubris," writes David Maraniss, analyzing the cause and extent of Obama's problem debating Romney. Maraniss — who wrote a book about Obama — sees Obama as a man of contradictions, who "chose politics as his profession while harboring ambivalence about it."

He has played by the conventional rules yet at times betrays a disdain for the game, whether mocking the notion of sound bites or chastising the media for being slaves to a 24-hour news cycle while he thinks in the long term. 

This is in contrast to Bill Clinton, who "could immerse himself in the moment and excel at transactional politics."

Obama is more the participant-observer, self-consciously taking note of the surreal aspects of what he is doing. Clinton’s antennae were tuned to his surroundings; Obama’s are tuned to his interior being. Clinton, a brilliantly authentic phony, could assume any role the circumstances required. Obama yearns to play roles he admires. In the first debate, he was the constitutional law professor, listening, giving ground, offering complex caveats, soberly taking notes. None of that helped him.

Maybe a lawprof is not what you want in a politician. And yet, Bill Clinton was a lawprof. So was Hillary Clinton. And there are different types of lawprofs. They don't all listen, give ground, and offer complex caveats! Here's an old blog post of mine about how different Bill and Hillary were as law professors, with these quotes from Carl Bernstein's book about Hillary):

Hillary's style was confident, aggressive, take-charge, and much more structured than Bill's. "All business," a colleague said. Her questions to students were tough and demanding. Bill almost never put his students on the spot; rather, he maintained an easy dialogue with them. His conversational approach often gave students the run of the class, and he let them filibuster.

"If you were unprepared, she would rip you pretty good, but not in an unfair way," recalled Woody Bassett, who became good friends of both, and worked in many Clinton political campaigns. "She made you think. She challenged you. If she asked you a question about a case and you gave an answer, well then — here comes another question. Whereas in Bill Clinton's classes, it was much more laid-back." In class Hillary never mentioned her work on the impeachment inquiry."...

Bill was far more open about discussing political issues with his students, whether Nixon's impeachment or Roe v. Wade, on which he spent several weeks. The subject of his constitutional law course more naturally lent itself to political questions than Hillary's.

She taught — would you guess? — criminal law, criminal procedure, and trial advocacy.

He was regarded as the easiest grader in the law school. Hillary's exams were tough, and her grading commensurate with what she expected law students to know. There was little doubt that she was the better teacher, possessed with "unusual ability to absorb a huge amount of facts and boil them down to the bottom line," Bassett thought. Clinton was more likely to go at a subject in a circular way, looking at it from every angle and sometimes never coming to a conclusion. But usually his was the more interesting class, because of the passion and knowledge with which he addressed legal questions related to everyday events.

Neither of them seemed to be the Maraniss's lawprof stereotype: "listening, giving ground, offering complex caveats, soberly taking notes."

The Obama campaign used the excuse — blame Kerry — that I offered at 10:29 on the night of the debate.

That's Central time, so: within half an hour of the end of the debate. In fact, I flagged the Kerry problem 10 minutes before the debate began. From my live-blog:

7:50: In the practice debates, Obama had John Kerry pretending to be Mitt Romney, and Romney had Rob Portman pretending to be Barack Obama. I've got to think Romney had the better practice partner. Why would Kerry be any good at that?...

10:29: Everyone seems to be saying that Obama lost by a lot. I blame John Kerry. I'll bet he was a terrible practice partner.

The day after the debate, I quoted a passage from the David Maraniss book about Obama, about how he learned how to debate as a teenager arguing with his grandfather ("Gramps") — "who had tried without much success to assume the role of disciplinarian, laying down what the teenager considered to be 'an endless series of petty and arbitrary rules.'" As Obama himself remembered: "With a certain talent for rhetoric, as well as an absolute certainty about the merits of my own views, I found that I could generally win these arguments in the narrow sense of leaving my grandfather flustered, angry, and sounding unreasonable." I said:

And Romney's not Gramps, though I note that, in Obama's practice sessions for the debate, the role of Romney was played by John Kerry. And I think Kerry was Gramps.

2 days after the debate, I looked at Obama's post debate zinger —"When I got on the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney" — and I said:

It's as if Obama expected Mitt Romney to show up in the form that Obama supporters have been sculpting in the media! Perhaps that's how Obama's sparring partner in the debate prep portrayed Romney. Oh, how I'd love to get the secret video of Obama practicing debating Romney with John Kerry playing the role of Romney. I think it would explain a lot.

And then, 3 days after the debate, the campaign itself blamed Kerry!

They blame the President's team, first of all, for not preparing him to meet the challenge of an aggressive Mitt Romney.  They say that nobody in the room challenged him, including the guy that he was debating with, John Kerry, because, as they say, he wants to be Secretary of State so he's not going to get in the President's face. And Presidents are used to deference; they're not used to people challenging them like that."

Of course, it's not really Kerry's fault. It's Obama's fault. Presidents are "used to deference"?! It's up to the President to demand the stark truth from those around him. The choice of Kerry and allowing him to present easy practice sessions show terrible judgment. If Obama had such poor judgment about something that would put him at a disadvantage at a crucial event in which he knew he was about to be tested in public, think what that suggests about the advisers that surround him every day as he attempts to deal with the nation's problems in a private setting, where we don't get to scrutinize and evaluate him.

"I got Barry aside and said, 'Look, why don’t we just go for B’s here.'"

David Maraniss — in his book "Barack Obama" — quotes Obama's high-school debate partner, Jeff Cox.

"That way, no big deal. That was my solution. He said okay, whatever." As soon as the debate began, Cox found himself outfoxed. He went into it in traditional fashion, preparing facts to lay out, one argument after another, gleaned from books and Time and Newsweek.

And Barry got up there and he just had a few arguments that I hadn’t thought of.… I was always touching back to this many killed, guns are killing, and he was just bouncing all over the place, but what he did is he went up to that ten-thousand-foot level. I remember him talking about, “How do guns make gun owners feel?” I hadn’t thought of that. How am I going to respond? He was very good on his feet, thinking more strategically on what could benefit him. I was sitting there flabbergasted; I remember thinking this is too heavily a philosophical question for me. And the teacher loved it. Barry was very smooth, and I started stumbling around all over the place. I felt he formulated in his own mind while we were doing it a kind of angle or wedge that was different than the angle I had been going. I was literal— one, two, three, four— and he kind of did some audibles. He wasn’t pulling out a whole lot of facts, he just seemed to have structured a bunch of little islands that he could jump to....

By the time Cox faced off against him, Barry had already mastered the art of knocking a debate opponent off-balance. He had been practicing almost daily on Gramps, who had tried without much success to assume the role of disciplinarian, laying down what the teenager considered to be “an endless series of petty and arbitrary rules” about use of the car and chores around the apartment. Eventually Barry would regret the way he dealt with his grandfather, but at the time he took advantage of his debating skills: “With a certain talent for rhetoric, as well as an absolute certainty about the merits of my own views, I found that I could generally win these arguments in the narrow sense of leaving my grandfather flustered, angry, and sounding unreasonable.”

Unfortunately for Obama, Romney is not the kind of kid who'd make a deal to just go for B's. And Romney's not Gramps, though I note that, in Obama's practice sessions for the debate, the role of Romney was played by John Kerry. And I think Kerry was Gramps.

"I really like about Barack that he’s obviously kindling something in me — my voice to myself."

"He encourages it and w/ o knowing what it says, leaves room for it.… On Sunday I woke up, waiting for Barack to wake, writing a bit more — feeling severed from him through b’fast (lack of physical connection— it means so much more than lust, after all)… and then reading Neruda’s poetry— excellent translation — powerful words, the truth in existence so much prettier for the poetry— and reading it really transfigured my thoughts, emotions, mood— and I just lay, w/ my head on Barack’s lap and my eyes closed, w/ words and words and words lapping, lapping through my tongue and soul and I felt older, wiser, in harmony w/ things; the calm after the storm."

Excerpt from the diary of Genevieve Cook, February 20, 1984, reprinted in David Maraniss's book "Barack Obama: The Story," at page 471.

Is Barack Obama kindling in you your voice to yourself? He encourages it and leaves room for it. Now, you may feel severed from him, but perhaps after reading some poetry, your thoughts, emotions, and moods may be transfigured. Or do you feel older and wiser after all those words and words and words lapping, lapping through your tongue and soul?

"When my son was 5, he asked me if I thought his 1-year-old sister was 'president of all the babies in the world — I mean, like, secretly'..."

"... and I had to admit that I couldn’t prove she wasn’t," writes Eric McHenry, explaining why he isn't going to respond to every argument made by Jack Cashill, the man who obsesses over Barack Obama's poetry. (There are 3 Obama poems, published when he was in college.)

I love the linked piece. Cashill is so bizarre, Obama's poetry is so jejune, and McHenry's an elegant writer.

But let's get back to the babies. I'm fascinated by the notion that all the babies of the world would somehow have a secret alliance. How would they communicate? What are their nationalistic goals? Could someone please write a screenplay?

ADDED: Here's what the Maraniss bio of Obama says about that poem "Pop":

"Obama... was known in [his Occidental College dorm] for his wicked impression of Mick Jagger."

"He could do the walk, the strut, the face, and act out the dramatic scene of the Rolling Stones onstage at the Altamont Speedway outside Livermore, California, on December 6, 1969, as violence that would lead to murder broke out in the crowd below: 'Hey, hey people, sisters and brothers, brothers and sisters, come on now! That means everybody just cool out! They’re fightin’ a lot. Will you cool out, everybody?'"

Page 341 of "Barack Obama: The Story," by David Maraniss.

The line I remember from that scene is "Who's fighting and what for?" Here's a good on-line clip of the Speedway incident, taken from the excellent Maysles Brothers documentary "Gimme Shelter."

It's interesting to think of Barack Obama seeing himself in the Mick Jagger role. It's not just that Obama envisions himself as the rock star, but that he saw the partying dorm-mates as the rough crowd at the Speedway who needed instruction from the stage on how to cool out.

"It's funny - when I ran, everybody said, well he can give a good speech but can he actually manage the job?"

"And in my first two years, I think the notion was, 'Well, he's been juggling and managing a lot of stuff, but where's the story that tells us where he's going?' And I think that was a legitimate criticism."

President Obama, explaining his "biggest mistake" which was "thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right" and missing that "the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times."

The people who voted for him, including me, really did expect him to bring the country "a sense of unity and purpose and optimism," but I don't think a "story" is what we needed. He came to us with a story — his life story, told in his "Dreams" book, and somehow that led to people imagining him able to bring the country a new sense of unity and purpose and optimism. He chose, however, to do policy that simply wasn't unifying. It was highly partisan and divisive, and for the longest time it has felt as though he is simply running for reelection. So the "story" of Barack Obama, the President, is not a compelling story at all.

And now, he seems to be saying: I'm such a great speechmaker, so if only I'd speechified more I could have sold all my policies as a good story, like I sold myself in the first place as a good story. As if all he really needed was more words. He's so good with words.

Oh, that reminds me of something from the David Maraniss biography of Obama, which is, interestingly, called "Barack Obama: The Story" (pp. 299-300):

One of his English teachers at Punahou was Barbara Czurles-Nelson.... Barry was not the most talkative student in her class, she recalled. He would sit near the back of the room, relaxed, waiting for his opening in the conversation. One day they were dealing with a philosophical question about what people should most fear. The answers included loneliness, death, hell, and war. Then Barry straightened up. That was the sign that he was ready to participate, Nelson thought, when he was sure to sharpen the class discussion. “Words,” he said. “Words are the power to be feared most.… Whether directed personally or internationally, words can be weapons of destruction.”

Words! How fearsome! If only he could put them in the right order, into a story, this would all work out all right. Does he really believe that?

The David Maraniss bio of Obama is finally available.

After all the talk, you can now buy it: here. I just did. Finally, I can pull things out of it myself.

Meanwhile, here's another one of the advance stories: "9 Tall Tales From Barack Obama's Memoir." That's from BuzzFeed. It's easy to read and has pictures. Example of BuzzFeed's idea of a "tall tale":

5. Obama wrote that he broke up with his New York girlfriend in part because she was white. But his next girlfriend, an anthropologist in Chicago, was also white.

Is that a tall tale? You break up with someone who has a characteristic that troubles you, and then you find yourself drawn to someone else with the same characteristic. Isn't that a perfectly banal pattern for sexual relationships — e.g., the woman who leaves an abusive relationship and then gets into another abusive relationship?

6. Obama cuts out two white college roommates entirely.

A memoir was selective. Told the interesting parts/the parts that fit the template. That's not a tall tale. Obama's book isn't called "Everything About Me, So Far." It's called "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." It openly advertises its limited theme.

7. Obama wrote about his high school friends as an alienated, ne'er-do-well "club of disaffection." In fact, most members of the "Choom Gang" were "decent students and athletes" who went on to successful careers.

Hello? Back in those days, being smart + alienated was the norm. Check out some books and movies from that era.

9. In his memoir, Obama mentions he missed out on playing time in high school basketball because he coach preferred players who "play like white boys do." In fact, Obama had to work hard just to make the team, and race had nothing to do with it.

The willful misunderstanding there is obvious to me, and I don't even know much about basketball and the styles of playing it. But here's the relevant passage from Obama's book. Obama's high school friend "Ray" is talking first:

“Well what? Listen, why don’t you get more playing time on the basketball team, huh? At least two guys ahead of you ain’t nothing, and you know it, and they know it. I seen you tear ’em up on the playground, no contest. Why wasn’t I starting on the football squad this season, no matter how many passes the other guy dropped? Tell me we wouldn’t be treated different if we was white. Or Japanese. Or Hawaiian. Or fucking Eskimo.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“So what are you saying?”

“All right, here’s what I’m saying. I’m saying, yeah, it’s harder to get dates because there aren’t any black girls around here. But that don’t make the girls that are here all racist. Maybe they just want somebody that looks like their daddy, or their brother, or whatever, and we ain’t it. I’m saying yeah, I might not get the breaks on the team that some guys get, but they play like white boys do, and that’s the style the coach likes to play, and they’re winning the way they play. I don’t play that way.

“As for your greasy-mouthed self,” I added, reaching for the last of his fries, “I’m saying the coaches may not like you ’cause you’re a smart-assed black man, but it might help if you stopped eating all them fries you eat, making you look six months pregnant. That’s what I’m saying.” “Man, I don’t know why you making excuses for these folks.” Ray got up and crumpled his trash into a tight ball. “Let’s get out of here. Your shit’s getting way too complicated for me.”

In context, you can see that Obama is doing the opposite of racial grievance.

Okay, so I'm officially sick of the bullshit cherry-picking from the David Maraniss bio. I'm glad I finally have the original source to look at on my own. (And I know I'm also part of the problem because I rewarded BuzzFeed with a link. One can try to play the game of blogging in an abstemious, overly pure way, but I don't play that way.)

"Allegedly stoned and drunk one night at Occidental, Obama and a friend stopped to talk to an attractive girl and..."

"... 'Barry launched into a riff on nudity, offering his theory that the human race would be better off if people did not wear clothes. This declaration was made with the urgency of someone ready to strip then and there. ... It seemed apparent that Barry was trying to seduce the woman right in front of' his friend who had a crush on the girl."

"Father's death made Obama realise he could do more with his life than smoke pot Michelle tells Jon Stewart."

A Daily Mail headline. Details:

On the Daily Show, Stewart joked that the stories about the president as a young man resembled the 'script of a Cheech and Chong movie.'

While the First Lady didn't directly address the claims in Maraniss' book, she did say that her husband underwent a change during his college years.

Mrs Obama responded by saying: 'By the time he was in college, like so many young people, he realised that he could do more with his life.'

'He had a mother that was always saying you're so gifted, you're so talented, slap him on the head, "get yourself together."'

Watch the clip at the link. After she gets that far and Stewart tries to push her farther, she says "I'm not taking the bait," and Stewart says "Don't worry. It's organic."

By the way: "slap him on the head" seems to take domestic violence as a joke.